Revelation

I became transfixed by a woman making strange white steamed things on a hotplate outside a café in Hanoi and stumbled in to eat dinner. My only doubt was the large bowl of chopped gristle sitting on the counter-top amongst other ingredients. Pro-culinary risk as I am, I remain somewhat averse to gristle. There was no menu in English but pinned to the wall was a review of another café which makes what I now know are called banh cuon, rice flour pancakes. Using my best sign language, I ordered a plateful, hopefully sans gristle.

Calling these pancakes is a bit of a misnomer, I think, as there are no eggs or butter involves and hence nothing cakey to write home about. Banh cuon are more like flat noodles made from fresh rice-flour batter, enriched, I discovered, with ground alabaster. They are filled with minced pork cooked with cinnamon and star anise and onion, topped with holy basil, Vietnamese mint (surprise!) deep-fried, and served with a sharp sour dipping sauce and chilli. Delightful. Clouds filled with ambrosia.

These strike me as a superior version of one of the staples of yum cha, the big steamed rice noodle rolls filled with prawns or minced veggies. Along with prawn gowgees and mango pancakes, these are the default foundation of the yum cha Pike, beloved for their reliably stodgy slipperiness. A fine point of reference, but one convincingly trumped by banh cuon.