Herbie visits Vietnam
Recently we left Herbie’s in the capable hands of our wonderful staff, and took off to Vietnam where we visited the cassia forests in the north-west of the country. We had made contact with a cassia trader in Hanoi, who generously put his driver, two English-speaking staff and cassia-buying expert (his wife) at our disposal for a trip inland. Although the drive took about five hours, involving lunch, dinner, overnight stay and breakfast before the final hour’s driving to a village by the Red River, the distance covered was not all that great, and could have been covered on Australian roads in about two hours! At the point where the car could go no further, we transferred to the pillions of four hired trail bikes, where we clung for dear life to our drivers as they rode down a steep, slippery embankment to the bank of the river. A flat-bottomed steel barge ferried us across, after which there was a ten-kilometer ride up and down steep hills and past incredibly beautiful peaceful scenes of lakes and rice paddies, finally bringing us to the tiny village where the cassia farmers live.
After an hour or so sipping green tea and making translated conversation with these charming and hospitable folk, we took to the bikes again to go out to the forests. The cassia trees are harvested when they are just under eight years old, by which time they are about twelve metres high. The tree is basically ring-barked to remove large curls of bark about the length and diameter of an adult fore-arm. The tree is felled, and every branch and twig is stripped of its bark. Because the entire tree is harvested, (the timber being used for building), it’s important that replanting is done constantly, and we were surprised to see people waddling along on their haunches, collecting seeds from the forest floor. They explained that seeds that have been eaten by birds, “processed” in the bird and returned to the ground, have a more successful germination rate.
It would be lovely if we could say that the very air was redolent with the scent of cassia, however the smell of smoke (both tobacco and fire) and our drivers’ hair oil drowned out all else! It is easy to see how people get confused about cassia and cinnamon, because even the cassia growers refer it as cinnamon. The difference between the two is firstly that cinnamon and cassia trees, though related, are different trees. Secondly, the aroma of cinnamon is delicate, sweet and subtle, and it’s virtually impossible to use too much in your cooking. Cassia, on the other hand, is quite hot if you chew on a piece of bark, and its sweet fragrance is more aromatic and more immediate in its effect – use too much (as in cinnamon chewing gum in the States) and there is a distinctly hot, slightly unpleasant, overtone. Cassia is known as cinnamon in North America, and it is also referred to as “Baker’s cinnamon” because of its popularity in sweet pastries, donuts and buns. Thirdly, the best cinnamon is a very thin underneath layer of bark from a quite young piece of branch, while cassia is the complete thickness of bark from the fully-grown tree.
Back home and away from those wonderful Vietnamese beefy, noodle-filled bowls of broth, we thought we fancied some potatoes fried with Panch Phora – a family favourite. Imagine our dismay to find that we were out of Panch Phora! (Like plumbers with dripping taps, we constantly find ourselves out of spices at home.) We resorted to the Rasam Mix and found that we had made an absolutely perfect dry potato curry. The potatoes were peeled, chopped and par-boiled, then dried in kitchen towel. Oil was heated in the pan, a good shake of Rasam Mix – about a tablespoon for four potatoes – then the potatoes were added and stirred around until they were coated and cooked through. Delicious!