A Northern Vietnamese meal for hot days: crab soup with jute leaves and loofah, boiled pork with shrimp paste dip, fried tofu and pickled eggplant

Today I am sharing a Northern Vietnamese meal for hot days, for four people. On a muggy day nobody wants rich food or a big flame. This meal has a bowl of crab soup with jute leaves and loofah, a plate of boiled pork with a shrimp paste dip, fried tofu, boiled sweet potato greens and some pickled eggplant. You finish it feeling light.

What is on the table today

• Crab soup with jute leaves and loofah: a silky, cooling soup that many people from Hanoi think of as the taste of summer.
• Boiled pork belly with shrimp paste dip: the first main dish, sweetly clean pork dipped in shrimp paste beaten with lime and chilli.
• Fried tofu: the second main dish, golden and crisp outside, dipped in the same paste.
• Boiled sweet potato greens: a green plate, dipped in fish sauce with garlic and chilli.
• Pickled eggplant: a sour, crunchy side that cuts through the meal.

Why this meal works

In hot weather people eat less fat and want more liquid. The slippery, cooling crab and jute soup does that, as a soup and almost a vegetable dish at once. The pork and the tofu are plain and share a single dipping bowl of shrimp paste, so the meal stays simple but full of flavour. The pickled eggplant adds sourness and crunch, the sweet potato greens add green. You hardly stand over a big flame at all.

Shopping for four

• 300 g pork belly, 4 blocks of tofu.
• 300 g ground field crab, or crab already strained.
• 300 g jute leaves (mallow), 2 fragrant loofah.
• 400 g sweet potato greens.
• 200 g pickled small eggplants.
• 3 tablespoons of shrimp paste (mắm tép), limes, chilli, garlic, shallots, fish sauce, sugar, oil. About 300 g of rice.

Cooking order for about 50 minutes

1. Minute 0: wash the rice and cook it. Put the pork into just-boiling water and simmer on low heat.
2. Minute 15: lift out the cooked pork, let it cool a little, then slice. Beat the shrimp paste with lime, sugar and chilli.
3. Minute 20: fry the tofu and drain.
4. Minute 30: make the crab broth for the soup, described below.
5. Minute 40: add the jute and loofah to the soup and cook 3 more minutes.
6. Minute 45: boil the sweet potato greens. Turn off the heat and set the table.

Crab soup with jute leaves and loofah

1. Mix the crab with about 800 ml of water, stir until it dissolves and strain through a sieve to keep the liquid.
2. Put the crab liquid on the stove over low heat. Stop stirring. As it warms, the crab protein sets and rises in rafts.
3. When the rafts have floated up, season with fish sauce, a little salt and fragrant fried shallots.
4. Add the picked jute leaves and cook 2 to 3 minutes, then peeled, cut loofah for another 3 minutes until just soft.

The skill in this soup is not to stir once the crab is on the heat. Stirring breaks the rafts into crumbs and clouds the broth. The jute and loofah go in last so the leaves stay green and the loofah keeps its scent.

The other dishes, briefly

Pork: put it in cold water with a little salt and shallot, bring to a boil, lower the heat and simmer about 15 minutes; it is cooked when a chopstick leaves no pink liquid. Shrimp paste: mix with lime, sugar, garlic and chilli and beat until frothy. Sweet potato greens: boil 2 to 3 minutes with the lid off. Tofu: pat dry before frying.

When you are too busy to cook, this is still one of the easiest meals to prepare, since every dish can be done in about 50 minutes.

Read the braised fish meal