A Carrot Salad With Zing
And The Magic of Fish Sauce
How is your January going? Mine started with various stressful things and it’s always such a grey, long month with taxes at the end of it. The upside is that the small comforts of the kitchen become more comforting than ever at this time of year. Among other things, I’ve been taking joy in: jars of green dill and parsley, like edible bouquets; scrambled eggs cooked using Ben Lippett’s method from How I Cook, starting with cold cubes of butter mixed in with the eggs; a Swedish cake scented with cardamom, a recipe in development which I will share with you soon; perfectly sticky sushi rice; many kinds of soup; pies with extra flaky pastry; juicy tangerines; and dashes of fish sauce used here, there and everywhere.
Every so often, I rediscover fish sauce – AKA Nước mắm in Vietnamese – and wonder how I ever cook a savoury meal without it. It’s potent stuff, yes, and a little goes a long way. But oh my word, what a long way it goes in adding depth, body and umami satisfaction as well as saltiness. In her THE FLAVOUR THESAURUS (one of the all-time most joyous food reference books), Niki Segnit writes that ‘adding fish sauce to coconut milk is like giving your stew or curry a central nervous system’.
If lemon juice offers a lift, fish sauce provides an anchor. Used in tiny quantities, it grounds the rest of a dish and makes it seem more substantial. I love adding it to anything from soups and stews to roasted vegetables and salads. It’s also wonderful added to almost any chicken dish. Helen Goh uses fish sauce to excellent effect in the marinade for her recipe for ‘Roast Chicken with Auntie Pauline’s Marinade’ in OTTOLENGHI COMFORT.
The recipe to follow is a tweaked and enhanced version of one of the carrot salads in my book THE SECRET OF COOKING which I’ve been eating a lot lately. It adds instant life and zing to almost any meal and so long as you have fish sauce in the cupboard, you can rustle it up from not much more than a bag of carrots and a few peanuts and herbs.
Sometimes, I think that fish sauce is one of the reasons I am not a vegetarian. Having said which, the excellent Andrea Nguyen (who writes here as ‘Pass The Fish Sauce’) has apparently reverse-engineered a vegetarian equivalent using seaweed and pineapple juice. Andrea talks about it here and the recipe is in her book EVER-GREEN VIETNAMESE. I haven’t tried it yet but am keen to do so, not least because I just can’t imagine how those flavours would work together. But I trust Andrea when she says (in an interview with Evan Kleiman on KCRW) that ‘Canned pineapple juice has this kind of fermented tang. And once you combine it with seaweed, it presents itself as a briny fermented sauce from the sea, almost like a sea sauce’.
Fish sauce is especially on my mind right now because I was lucky enough to go to a special dinner themed around the food of Ancient Rome last week at Bocca di Lupo in Soho, one of the best Italian restaurants and somewhere I associate with deeply happy times (partly because over the road is their sister ice cream shop, Gelupo, which does heavenly gelato).
