Southern Vietnamese

Southern Vietnamese cooking, centered on Ho Chi Minh City and the fertile Mekong delta, is the country's sweetest and most exuberant — cooks reach for sugar, coconut milk, and a big bundle of herbs, and the tropical south supplies an abundance of fruit, seafood, and fresh greens. The everyday icon is banh mi, a French-legacy baguette split and filled with pate, cold cuts, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, chili, and cilantro. Banh xeo is a large, crackly turmeric-yellow rice-flour crepe folded over pork, shrimp, and bean sprouts, torn up and wrapped in lettuce with herbs before dipping. Com tam, "broken rice," is a Saigon plate of grilled lemongrass pork over fractured rice grains with a fried egg and scallion oil, and ca kho to is catfish braised in a clay pot with caramelized sugar and fish sauce until dark and sticky. Coconut water and palm sugar quietly sweeten much of the cooking, a clear contrast to the sharper, saltier food of the north.