Banana blossom Salad of the Cham community

Cham people own a variety of salads as: mango and dried fish salad (Liba pa-ok), bamboo sprout and roasted peanut salad (Liba rabung), tiny shrimp and miracle tree salad (Liba hadang), especially salamander and sour-soup creeper leaf salad (Liba ajah). Cham people can process many different dishes from salamander, a kind of reptile living underneath sand in tropical area.

Among the number of salads handed down to posterity, banana blossom salad, or “Liaba jamog patei” relatively reflects the Cham’s specialty. The recipe of making this salad is as follows: From the available ingredients, carefully clean the open-out banana flower, cut it into quarters, then boil them. After these quarters became cooked enough, take these out of the boiling water and wait until they get cool. As squeeze the water out from the banana flower, mix all the ingredients with a little spice, namely sugar, tamarind or lemon together depending on diners’ taste. Finally, crushed roasted peanut is indispensable for processing a delicious salad. To make the dish more eye-catching and fragrant, decorate the dish with a little cinnamon leaves cut into square-shaped.

Over the past few decades, the Cham salads have been much modernized with new materials such as: chicken salad, cucumber, lotus root, and so forth. Liba jamog patei (banana blossom salad) served with baked sesame rice-paper and rice wine is incredibly yummy. It is truly a new appetizer for the Cham parties.

My Thien (Source: Binh Thuan Newspaper)