Vietnamese island guards a national treasure: fish sauce
The pungent, fermented nuoc mam sauce from Phu Quoc is a staple of the country's cuisine.
By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 20, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
PHU QUOC, VIETNAM - Nguyen Thi Tinh draws a sample of her 2006 vintage from a wooden vat, inhales deeply, and dips her finger into the golden-brown liquid. The verdict? A sharp nose. Nice warm hues. And the taste is, well, sour, salty, and unmistakably fishy.
What cognac is to France, so the pungent, fermented fish sauce in Ms. Tinh's vats is to Vietnam: A national treasure that shouldn't be produced anywhere else. And everyone agrees that the best fish sauce, or nuoc mam, comes from the island of Phu Quoc. The islanders use only top-grade black anchovies, natural inputs, and traditional storage methods to make their sauce, as they have done for a century or more.
Wherever you travel in Vietnam, you're never too far from a bottle of fish sauce. It's a protein-rich staple of the cuisine, and a constant companion to any savory dish. Other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Cambodia produce their own sauces, but nobody does it quite like the Vietnamese.
"Every morsel that people put in their mouths is either cooked in fish sauce or dipped in it," says Ashok Mittal, vice- president of Unilever Vietnam's food division, which sells fish sauce from Phu Quoc under its German subsidiary, Knorr.
But Phu Quoc is changing, and so is the fish-sauce industry. Until the 1980s, when Vietnam began to tinker with its socialist economy, producers sold their sauce to the government at a fixed price. Private traders then took over. As demand increased, more families entered the business. Today, there are more than 80 producers on the island.
Producers began to complain, though, that traders on the mainland were diluting their premium product with low-grade fish sauce and passing off the result as Phu Quoc sauce. Eventually, Vietnam's government took notice. In 2001, it ruled that only sauce produced and bottled on Phu Quoc could use the island's name, giving it the kind of territorial copyright that European wines and cheeses enjoy.
Enter Mr. Mittal's Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-brand company. Unilever built a $1 million bottling plant on Phu Quoc in 2002 and began selling Knorr-branded fish sauce in Vietnam. The move upset some traditionalists who asked why a multinational was marketing a national treasure, but producers saw a way to get better returns from their sauce.
RSS feed
