Flowers are not only loved for their colors and fragrance. Around the country’s Mekong Delta region, they’re also used for their tastes.
Many dishes show a creative and flexible fauna-flora combination.
In many southern rural areas, a dish is simply made by boiling pumpkin flowers. People would choose flowers that have not blossomed completely and remove the hard fibers around the flower cup.
It is often served with fermented seafood cooked with half lean and half fat meat. The dish is also popular in the central region’s Quang Nam Province.
A more complicated dish is made by stuffing the flowers with ground pork already added with seasonings. Then the flowers are steamed and cut into pieces before being put on a dish.
Shallot
According to Chinese medicine, shallot contains high quantity of antibiotics. So dishes made with the plant can also treat severe coughing.
Young shallot flowers make a delicious dish when stirred with shrimps and soya curds.
So dua (Sesbania grandiflora)
The plant gives either white or relatively pink flowers that can be boiled. The flower stir-fried with shrimp and meat is considered a nutritious dish while sour soup of so dua flowers and sheatfish is a region’s specialty.
Thien ly (Telosma cordata)
The creeper, also known as Tonkin jasmine or Chinese violet, gives yellow flowers with a little green. Young flowers are cooked in soup, or stir-fried with shrimp or meat.
The flowers only blossom at night, delivering strong fragrance.
In the central region, people also cook soup with the flower and mussels.
Banana
Among the edible flowers, banana’s might be the most popular and made the most dishes. It can be eaten raw, boiled, mixed with seafood or cooked in soup. The flowers of pip banana are more favored as they’re soft, white and doesn’t taste acrid.
In rural areas, people would pick a young flower from their garden, smash it a little bit and eat it raw with soybean jam, or fermented seafood.
Those who want a thicker dish can mix it with pieces of boiled chicken, or shrimps, or pork skin. The mixture will be supplemented with fennels and special mixture of fish sauce.
Sour soup of chicken and pip banana flower is a famous southern dish while the flower cooked with ells is among the best companion of wine.
Meanwhile vegans can make banana flower fried with flour cover one of their options.
Dien dien (Sesbania sesban)
The plant grows in salinated or alum-contaminated water. The yellow flowers are eaten raw with fermented seafood. When there’s a lot of them, the flower is fermented to be used in a long time or sold in the market.
Flowers are one of the best part of a tree. Eating flowers means eating the pollens, which have been proved to contain a lot of vitamins, minerals and hormones necessary for human body.
