The Su Su Story

Cross-legged on a flat cushion on the floor of a hidden-away Sapa restaurant, Darling Man asked me if I’d like to try a special vegetable from northern Vietnam.

It was a few years ago, when we were still a new couple, exploring Ho Chi Minh City on my nights off from the newspaper.

A few months earlier I’d had a wonderful hiking holiday in Sapa, trekking with two kick-arse Black H’Mong women through little villages in Vietnam’s mountainous north-east. And so when Darling Man read about a new restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City specialising in Sapa cuisine, he asked me if I’d like to try it.

I hadn’t been impressed with the culinary offerings of Sapa because the places accessible to me were obviously geared towards tourists. The local food I’d eaten while trekking was great, but very simple. I was worried I’d missed out on something. (A bit of a recurring theme for me, actually.)

Hiking in Sapa with my kick-arse Black H’Mong guides.

And now here was Darling Man, talking about su su, a vegetable from Sapa that I definitely had not tried while I was there. His stilted explanation made it seem very mysterious. It was green, he said, grew well in cooler areas and it was full of nutrients, a very healthy vegetable. And it was hard to find in Ho Chi Minh City.

We ordered a dish of su su and some other Sapa specialties that have since faded from my memory.

The su su arrived on a little plate, little green match sticks. I navigated a few pieces into my mouth with chopsticks … and nearly choked with laughter.

I turned to Darling Man and told him I knew this vegetable, it WASN’T a special vegetable from Sapa, it was a very common and unloved vegetable from my childhood — choko.

In post-war Australia, just about everyone in Queensland had a chookpen* in the back yard. And growing over the chookpen was a choko vine.

The Baby Boomer generation grew up eating chokos and so did we, the long-suffering children of Baby Boomers.

Chokos were usually peeled, chopped into big chunks and boiled until soft. It was usually served as one of the veg options in the standard meat-and-three-veg dinners that Baby Boomer mums specialised in. Sometimes it was also used to pad out apple crumble.

A su su in a market in Ho Chi Minh City.

No one liked choko. Not even the mothers who served them up. They were just a cheap way to insert vegetables into hungry families.

And so, seated on the floor of that now-defunct Sapa restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, I discovered choko is known as su su in Vietnam. (It’s also known as chayote in South America, Pipinola in Hawaii and sayote in the Philippines.) And the Vietnamese way of cooking it is far superior to the Australian boil-it-til-it’s-dead method.

The first time Darling Man went to Australia he just had to show my mum how to cook choko properly. His stir-fried choko in chicken powder and fish sauce was declared the best choko ever by my mum. (The key, according to Darling Man, is to stir-fry it quickly so it retains some crunch.)

Mum demanded a choko-cooking lesson from Darling Man, then proceeded to complain long and loud about the use of chicken powder, a devil-worshipping carcinogen that is apparently banned from her house (or some such complaint).

Still, she says she’s looking forward to Darling Man’s cooking next time we’re in Australia. Devil-worshipping chicken powder and all.

*an American would probably call a chookpen a chicken coop.

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.