He might have been kind and gentle, but he wasn't timid. It was a view of Hội An that I thought was unique." "You'd see 10, maybe more, sitting around Mr Thiểu.
"I used to see teenagers gathered there having their medicine ," said Dean. Thiểu is revered by locals as a kind and gentle man who conjures up memories of childhood for many. "But my father taught me to always overcome the difficulties in life." The smoke from firewood stung my eyes and made me cry," he said. "I often had to get up at 03:00 every morning to help my father to make the fire. When Bảo was a child, making the dish was a family activity.
It's very heavy and very difficult to carry. When I came to this house to marry my husband, I tried to pick up the xí mà. "He carried it around the city from 05:00 to 19:00, 10km a day. "My father- and mother-in-law got up at 03:00 to make it," said An. He started making and selling the dish in the 1950s, brandishing a bamboo yoke across his shoulders with two huge, heavy pots of xí mà. According to An's husband, Bảo Ngô, the secret to his long life is his daily dose of xí mà.īảo explained that Thiểu, who was born in 1915 to a family of silk weavers in a village 30km outside Hội An, learned the fiercely guarded recipe from a Chinese shopkeeper he used to work for in town. On 1 January 2022, Thiểu celebrated his 107th birthday. While some refer to it as black sesame soup, its texture is thicker, more pudding-like. Eaten warm with a spoon, it's slightly sweet with a silky texture and a gentle, nutty sweetness.
Xí mà is a morning snack made of pulverised sesame seeds blended with sweet potato starch and kudzu root starch (a local vine), extracted centella juice (a popular health plant in Vietnam) and sargasso juice (a brown type of seaweed) along with Traditional Chinese Medicine herbs and water. But the black sesame pudding xí mà is a favourite of the residents who live here – and the Ngô family's version is considered by many to be the best in the city. The ancient Vietnamese city of Hoi An has a number of famous dishes that attract domestic and foreign tourists, such as the ubiquitous noodle-and-pork dish cao lầu or bánh mì from Bánh Mì Phượng (the perennially packed go-to thanks to Anthony Bourdain's 2009 episode of No Reservations). As a chaotic symphony of wildly honking motorbikes zooms by, she remains laser-focused, expertly siphoning the black paste into a small plastic bag, tying it with an elastic band and handing it to the customer, then spends the morning doing it over and over again. Her hand disappears under the steam and quickly emerges with a heaping portion of xí mà.
Here, she settles on a red plastic stool, lights the fire and waits for the vat full of an inky, charcoal-coloured mixture to come to temperature.īefore long, a regular stream of locals appears, waiting for their daily fix. She walks for 10 minutes from the family home, wheeling a steel cart of supplies to the family's street-side stall just outside Old Town. Every morning, rain or shine, An Ngô or one of her two sisters-in-law rises at 03:00 to begin preparing one of Hoi An's most beloved snacks.