Vietnamese cuisine is full of culinary mixing and mashing. For instance, pho resulted from cultures rubbing shoulders in Hanoi long ago. The history of pho, Vietnam's national noodle soup, offers insight into colonialism and migration.
There's another dish, thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên (beef stir-fry with French fries), that many people enjoy but few ask about its origins. Doesn't it seem weird that a Chinese dish on Viet soil would include crispy fries?
I looked up the dish in Làm Bếp Giỏi, a 1940s classic Vietnamese language cookbook. There was no mention of thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên in the Vietnamese or French recipe sections.
Then I asked my mother, who was born in northern Vietnam in 1934. She said it was a popular dish but has changed over time. She described what sounded like a quirky Viet take on French steak frites.
Mom noted that western potatoes (khoai tây) was a luxury ingredient compared to local sweet potatoes (khoai ta), which may have found their way to Vietnam from Central and South America via Polynesia. Beef that was tender enough to render into a steak was also expensive and hard to find. People basically bought tough cuts.
Old-fashioned Viet beef with crispy fried potatoes
If a Viet cook had some money, they would buy a few western potatoes, sliced them and then fry them up in peanut oil or pork fat. The beef was cut or pounded to tenderize, then marinated it with aromatics like lots of garlic and pepper, plus oil and salt. Then you'd fry the steak, slice it up and present it on top of the fried potatoes.
Because there wasn't that much beef (you were lucky to afford 300g of meat for a family meal), a deft cook would bulk up the dish by stir-frying lots of onion and mixing the onion into the sliced beef. The Viet version of steak frites was luxe and there wasn't usually much of it so people shared the dish and ate it with lots of rice.
After we settled in America, my mom switched to a simple beef and onion stir-fry piled atop homemade French fries. (We had panfried beef steaks regularly so why repeat?) The stir-fry was more streamlined and easier to prepare for the family. We still ate thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên with rice. But there was an actual stir-fry involved. And, that's what happened in Vietnam, too. If you Google thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên, you'll see pictures of stir-fried beef and vegetable atop crispy fries, such as this one from Ngoi Sao and VN Express:
Sometimes food ideas float around in the zeitgeist but cooks and eaters don't stop to ask where something came from.
Could Viet thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên be related to Peruvian lomo saltado and chifa cooking?
Super popular Peruvian lomo saltado — a beef stir-fry mixed with French fries (or the stir-fry is served with the fries on the side) was born from the confluence of Chinese cooking in Peru. Potatoes originated in Peru, where there’s a rich culture of doing a lot with the starchy tuber.
Chinese contract workers, mostly from Hong Kong and Guangdong, arrived in Peru starting in the mid 19th century to work on sugarcane plantations. According to the Migration Policy Institute, between 1850 and 1874, about 100,000 Chinese workers, mostly men from southern China began new lives in Peru.
Prior to that, in the 1600s, there was a small group of Asians in Peru. Many came as Asian slaves who’d been shipped via the Spanish Philippines to Mexico and elsewhere. Whether they were from Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or China, they were referred to as “Chino” (Chinese).
Interracial marriages occurred. Tensions over immigrate flared in the early 20th century during tight economic times. In the 1960s and 70s, a number of Chinese Peruvians emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere.
Despite all that, a Chinese Peruvian cuisine developed to meld Cantonese with native Peruvian ingredients. That cooking style, called chifa, eventually spread to neighboring Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile. While you can get chifa cooking in Florida and elsewhere, here’s something from the website of a Machu Picchu restaurant called Full House:
In Lima alone, there are over 6000 Chifa restaurants, testament to its immense popularity. But it’s not just about food; this cuisine represents cultural assimilation and harmony. It’s about embracing diversity, learning, and adapting.
Perhaps the Vietnamese dish was seeded by Asian emigres from Peru?
It’s unclear. I've yet to find information on this. But what's interesting is that in California's Little Saigon, the restaurant Vox serves a few Viet takes on Peruvian food. The reasoning here was that Vox owners thought that Peruvian food would be novel to Viet people.
As for me, despited my frying French fries since the early 1980s for our family's thịt bò xào khoai tây chiên, I rarely do the from-scratch double fry these days. I still adore the dish and get creative with it. For instance, I recently made a new vegan version with frozen fries for my newsletter subscribers. Here's a video of how it comes together:
The healthy-ish dish takes about 30 minutes! Check out the recipe on my newsletter, Pass the Fish Sauce.
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