17 DAY EGGS Fresh farm eggs chili sauce fresh basil leaves When a basket of eggs arrives hold each one up to a bright light to check for fertilization. Sell the unfertilized eggs in the local market for eight cents apiece. Eggs that are broken only on one end can be sold at half price. Badly mangled eggs can be cracked into a plastic bag and sold for about a penny apiece. Incubate the fertilized eggs until they are a day short of hatching. Hard boil. Serve piping hot with side dishes of chili sauce and fresh basil leaves. Try not to think too hard when you eat the crunchy parts.

Nuoc Mam

20 kilos of small salted sardines large ceramic vat miles of uninhabited land Salt fish and place in vat. Lock tightly in bomb-proof chamber and take a long vacation in a faraway place. Return in the dead of night. Fish should have fermented and separated, leaving a clear amber liquid floating on top and a thick, pasty sludge on the bottom (the neighbors will also have left more-or-less permanently). Decant clear liquid and sell as nuoc mam. The sludge (which tastes exactly like the green stuff scraped off the bottom of an old bucket) can be spooned into small bottles, dyed pink and sent to the Philippines, where it sold as bagoong, or fish paste.

Nuoc mam is fermented fish sauce. It has a salty, exotic, je-ne-sais-quoi taste of the inscrutable East. Unlike most visitors to Vietnam, when I put it on my food it wasn't because I had mistaken the bottle for soy sauce. I actually liked it.

Then one day back in America I was transporting a bunch of Asian condiments from my brother's kitchen to my own and accidentally spilled a quart of nuoc mam on the passenger seat of my car. That was the beginning of a year-long odyssey, a titanic, no-holds-barred pitched battle involving baking soda, carpet cleaner, tomato sauce, vinegar and virtually every scented product in the household aisle of the supermarket. At one point I actually considered just driving my car into an Adirondak lake and leaving it to poison the fish.

I can't say I eat much Nuoc Mam anymore.

The Lonely Planet says Nuoc Mam is made from fermenting highly salted fish in ceramic vats for four to twelve months. On the right is the recipe I picked up from an ex-postal worker on a bus in the Central Highlands. Be forewarned: I am convinced that no one looks into a vat of fermenting fish sauce and lives to speak about it.

EATING ETIQUETTE:
Do not stick your chopsticks upright in your bowl. This is a Buddhist death symbol.

Slurp your soup and raise your rice bowl to your mouth. Any other way of eating fluffy rice with chopsticks will eventually lead to starvation.

Most Vietnamese meals consist of a rice with a meat/vegetable flavoring. These toppings come from communal bowls so you get to try a little bit of everything. Hosts also honor by selecting the most succulent pieces from the table and laying them in your bowl. I occasionally had reason to regret their generosity...

VIETNAMESE SPRING ROLLS Once, when I was sitting on the front of a train I realized that the tracks are a favorite place to lay the rice paper out to dry. Unfortunately the train's latrines empty directly onto the gravel embankment and the stench of raw sewage is noticeable even while your moving along at 20 mph. On the other hand, the chance that the spring rolls just served to you were dried on a train track is a million to one... "Our hostess brought out a sheath of pliable, cardboard-like disks and everyone fell silent to do justice to the meal. The rice paper was dipped into a mixture of fish sauce and chili, filled with noodles and fish and leafy greens, rolled like a cigarette and sealed with a generous dollop of saliva. My guide demonstrated and handed me the result. I could smell a trail of cigarette smoke along the sealed edge as I took a bite." Excerpt from Hitchhiking Vietnam

WHAT YOU WON'T FIND:
Lots of stuff, but dairy products are probably the most notably absent. I once made the mistake of trying to find some...

Coffee is another exquisite French cultural import and the Vietnamese have improved upon it with a few flourishes of their own.

It begins with an inch of thick black coffee extracted drop by drop through a battered aluminum filter that squats on top of the glass. This is eventually replaced by an inverted can which oozes a spaghetti-like strand of condensed milk onto the coffee. Two heaping teaspoons of sugar melts into the milk and the layered mixture is ready for ice. A heavy block is cracked with a homemade hammer and rinsed in a bucket of canal water.

Delicious.

MARKETS