Neem leaves salad: A speciality of An Giang province

Ingredients of the dish include young neem leaves, pork bacon, shrimp, choke fish, cucumber, fresh mango and fresh aromatic herbs.

To prepare for the dish, the cook cleans the neem leaves and parboils them to reduce their bitterness, while boiling bacon and cutting it into threads, peeling the shrimp, grilling dried choke fish and shredding it into pieces, then the mango and cucumber are cut into lines.

All these ingredients are then mixed well before pouring sauce made of garlic, chilli and sugar, and stirring them.

To make the sauce, the cook puts tamarind fruit into a pot, pours 200ml of water in, lightly boils it for five minutes, and filters it to get its juice. The tamarind juice mixes with quality fish sauce, two teaspoons of sugar, minced garlic and chilli.

The sauce has a light sour taste from tamarind, hot from chilli, and sweet and salt from fish sauce and sugar.

The buttery fat of the meat, the savoury taste of shrimp and dried fish, and the sourness of mango, mixed with the bitterness of neem leaves, have created a strange feeling that is found hard to describe, particularly its rich aroma that no one can compare.