A 5-course snake feast in Vietnam
Lance Richardson
San Francisco Chronicle
They say that when the king's daughter went sailing on the Nguyet Duc River (now the Duong), a snakelike leviathan capsized her boat by conjuring giant waves. It was the 10th century A.D., and many Vietnamese people worked rice fields along the river just as they do today. One young man, seeing the serpent, dropped his tools and dived into the water to defeat it.
Variations of the legend have him saving the princess or simply retrieving her body; all, however, have a grateful King Ly Thai Tong showering him with riches. The man refused it all: He wanted nothing more than land near modern-day Hanoi to found a village for his people.
To reach Le Mat, colloquially known as "snake village," my friend and I climb onto the back of a motorbike and direct the driver northeast, out of the Old Quarter toward the fringes of the city.
Le Mat holds a festival to celebrate the legend of its founder each March, though the importance of snakes is an everyday reality here. Snake wrangling has been passed down through centuries and generations; snakes are bred in Le Mat, used in medication, alcohol, tonics - even as an aphrodisiac.
We pull up in an alleyway and enter Trong Khach, where a small lagoon is surrounded by open sitting rooms made from bamboo. A woman seats us on reed mats, then steps aside for a man who clutches a writhing snake in his fists.
"Now we kill the snake," he says, pausing for approval. Snakes are eaten in Le Mat, too.
People around the world consume different animals: The Swiss eat horses, Mexicans eat grasshoppers, Koreans eat silkworms. While there's a reprehensible black market thriving in Southeast Asia, cobras and grass snakes are purpose-bred in Quoc Phuong Farm, or south of Le Mat in the forests of Binh Dinh. These particular animals are not endangered - though, to prevent endangered species inadvertently falling into the mix, a visitor should only frequent higher-profile restaurants like Trong Khach.
Because snakes are not culled from the wild, so-called moral objections are actually cultural ones (unless a person is a staunch vegetarian). The Western fondness for beef horrifies the Hindu population of India, after all.
The method of execution remains a point of contention, however. Several blogs show travelers luxuriating in the gory details, posing for blood-splattered photographs. We leave the deed to the experts, who wield their knives with minimum theatrics and work fast and efficiently. While I take no pleasure in watching a snake's heart sliced out, it has a curious psychological effect, just as filleting a fish straight from the ocean does. Being intimately acquainted with the grisly process of preparation means a subsequent meal is loaded with significance. You are shocked into appreciation of an animal as food source.
The woman presents us with four shot glasses filled with rice wine. Two are stained red with blood dripped from the snake and curdled with a spoon; the other two are green with bile squeezed from the liver. Though the snake heart is said to enhance virility in men, I draw my line in the sand when the woman offers it up. The tiny organ is passed across the table to my companion and she downs it in a moment, comparing the slick consistency to a freshly shucked oyster. Then we drink the glasses of blood and the glasses of bile; the taste of both is disconcertingly familiar.
Most of a meal in Le Mat is made up of five courses of snake prepared in various ways. It comes as gruel for starter, shredded white flesh mixed up with mushrooms in a warm broth. Then we have it sautéed with lemongrass and chile, needle-like bones making for a painful second course. It comes deep-fried in balls, and wrapped up in spring rolls with a heady dose of ginger and soy. It comes on glutinous rice, with long sections of chewable ribs that look like mouth guards. The meat is sparse and thin, resembling chicken in its bland sweetness - some cliches exist for a reason, apparently.
After finishing at Trong Khach we step out of the restaurant into a bustling carnival, where children play games for plush toys and adults share pho in sociable clusters around the central square of the village.
The festival honoring the founder has not yet started, but things are still settling down from Tet celebrations. We must look like a startled pair, wandering between the sideshows. The snake feast has left us feeling distinctly ambivalent. As an exotic ritual, the meal is intoxicating; I enjoy it in spite of initial wariness.
Yet meat has become so divorced from its origins in America that to watch an animal slaughtered at your table is to be graphically reminded of the costs of certain choices. Eating snake in Le Mat makes you reflect on your own culture - but, in the end, isn't that one of the reasons we travel?
