Free The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Page B

the company, and I think that counted for something. I may not have been at ease, but by exudingenthusiasm, sometimes honest, sometimes feigned, I put my hosts at ease, enough that they were willing to confide in me. And this is why in the ensuing years giardia would drive me so insane. By killing my appetite entirely, it left me unable even to fake being myself, to connect with the people and places I’d traveled so far to see.
    It’s such a tiny thing, isn’t it? Ms. Thanh and her family served something unusual (for me), I calmly ate it (or tried to), and we got on with the process of getting to know one another. Yet eating the unfamiliar challenges people in ways they often aren’t ready for. As Andrew Zimmern often points out on his show, what’s normal to eat in one place is a cultural affront elsewhere. Violating food taboos hits us at deep levels—this is what we mean by disgust, not some innate biological response. By overcoming disgust, I tried to show I was making an effort—perhaps a pitiful, transparent effort, but an effort nonetheless—at fitting in to a new culture.
    Still, it took another few months before I really began to fit in to the Vietnamese eating world. That was when I moved from my sixth-floor room at the Lucy Hotel to another on the fifth floor. The new room was larger and air-conditioned, with a weird bas-relief mural of ants climbing on vines across one wall, but I took it for the simple reason that it had a patio, lined with terra-cotta tiles, dotted with plants, and ideal for alfresco lunches.
    But what to bring home for lunch? Ham-and-brie sandwiches from the French bakery? Or Thai ground pork with holy basil, served over rice with a fried egg on top? On a stroll around my neighborhood one day, I spotted a man grilling pork chops outside a co’m bình dân , an institution whose name translates as “the people’s food,” a very communist ideal. Co’m bình dân are everywhere in Vietnam. For less than a dollar, you can have a plate of rice and a serving of, say, pork belly braised in fish sauce and sugar, rau mu’ó’ng (water spinach) stir-fried with garlic, or a soup of bitter melon stuffed with pork and mushrooms. Co’m bình dân were pretty much fueling Vietnam’s economic boom.
    But they’d never appealed to me. Maybe these little storefronts, with their folding tables, plastic chairs, and worn silverwear, looked too grotty, especially given my ongoing battles with giardiasis. Maybe the premade dishes, sitting in the humid open air, turned me off. Maybe I needed to read a proper menu—to perceive my meals first linguistically, and only then with my palate. Indeed, some of my earliest restaurant memories are of menus, of scanning them with my parents for amusing typos, of matching transliterated phrases to ingredients. The words were essential gateways; without them, my tongue was useless.
    Or maybe I was just afraid. My palate could handle a challenge, my psyche—fragile from failure—couldn’t.
    When I smelled the su’ò’n nu’ó’ng , or pork chops, however, everything changed. Marinated in garlic, sugar, fish sauce, and shallots, they gave off an intense aroma of fat and caramelization, one I couldn’t turn away from. So I ordered takeout— su’ò’n nu’ó’ng on a mound of rice, with rau mu’ó’ng and sliced cucumbers—and carried the styrofoam box to my fifth-floor oasis. There I ate a perfect, and perfectly simple, meal in utter bliss.
    The co’m bình dân around the corner became my standby, a go-to spot for good, unpretentious food to bring home. Usually, I’d get the su’ò’n nu’ó’ng , but sometimes I’d change it up. The shop also had squid, stuffed with pork and braised until soft, as well as crispy-fried fish. And you could get a fried egg on anything.
    Eating on my patio