Cooking and Heating in Northern Vietnam

One of the interesting aspects of traveling, working, or living in different lands is the opportunity to see and observe how mundane activities are handled by different cultures.

A common activity for all cultures is cooking food and heating the home.

In America, many people take great pride in the technology and opulence exhibited in their kitchens for cooking their food.

The ability to cook food in electric ovens, convection ovens, gas stoves, bottled gas appliances, or whatever the latest technology is a luxury that is not shared with most of the people in the outside world.

Here in Isaan many people, especially falang households, have bottled LPG cook tops. The bottles range from 7 Kg (15 pound) to 10 Kg cylinders and are stored indoors. We have a 10 Kg bottle underneath the kitchen sink just as we had in Pattaya. Some western style kitchens have one or two electric burners for a stove top. Very few Thai people or for that matter falang have ovens. We have an electric oven which we seldom use.

Isaan people in the villages may have a single bottled gas burner but more typically they cook their food over an open wood fire. To me a more appropriate terminology would be "stick" fire rather than "wood" fire. The stoves are small, approximately 2 gallon sized metal cylinders lined with refractory material. About 6 to 10 small sticks, 1/2 inch to 3/4" diameter by 12 inches to 18 inches long, are burned inside the container. The insulated cylindrical container concentrates and retains the heat of the burning sticks. It is more efficient and more economical than open fires.

Along side of the road, "restaurants" grill their chicken and pork over charcoal fires just like Americans do.

When we lived in northern Vietnam, the people had a different means for cooking and heating their homes. In Quang Ninh Province, there are many coal mines. Just like in Appalachia, the people are very poor. Everyday on my way to and from work, I saw people gathering coal off of the roads to us in their homes. Their homes were one room brick structures without running water or indoor plumbing. People would wash along side of the road where springs came out of the hillside. The men would strip down to their boxer shorts and wash themselves. Women would wash themselves underneath their wrap around shifts The community bathing area is also where the clothes were washed and drinking water gathered in plastic recycled vegetable oil containers.

Northern Vietnam gets a great amount of rain in addition to the water that is put on the dirt road to keep SOME of the coal dust down. This creates large puddles of slippery and slimy coal - dirt - water slop. People spend a great deal of time diking and containing these puddles. There is a reason for all this attention. Coal and dirt, more specifically clay, are utilize for cooking and heating.

In Northern Vietnam, especially the coal producing regions, the people cook and heat with coal briquettes. The use of bees nest coal briquettes came to Vietnam from China. The coal briquettes are a combination of coal fines, clay, and water. The 1 Kg (2-1/4 pound) to 1.3 Kg (2-1/2 pound) cylinders of compressed material have a series of small diameter holes running through them. The series of holes in the cylinder assist in the combustion of the coal fines and along with the moisture content help moderate the temperature of the fire.

A single cylinder is placed in a metal container that is lined with refractory cement. The cylinder is initially set on fire using a small amount of wood. Once the cylinder is set on fire it burns continuously without any way to stop or control the heat. Once all the coal has been consumed, a shell of brown semi stiff clay remains to be discarded. Sides of houses, alleyways, and road sides are littered with the remnants of coal briquettes.

The burning briquettes are also used to heat the small houses. Because the homes do not have storm windows, or even glass on the windows and have loose fitting doors, the dangers of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are somewhat reduced.

The production of coal briquettes is a cottage industry. The people along the coal transportation routes gather the coal fines that fall off of the trucks. The puddles that occur along and in the road are "farmed" to produce the mix to form the bees nest briquettes.

While visiting Quan Lan Island, I watched and photographed young boys molding the mixture into briquettes. Prior to my arrival, a truck had dumped about 1 cubic meters (9 cubic yards - a little over a cement truck load) of premixed coal-clay-water on the street in front of their house. This is SE Asia and the differentiation between private property and public property is very loosely defined and seldom enforced. It is a common sight to see sidewalks blocked and streets blocked or partially blocked by defacto restaurants, building materials, canopies for celebrations, stages for entertainment, or parked motorcycles. Things are much different in the western lands of the "free".

I watched for a good amount of time as the boys converted the large amount of stiff coal mud into bees nest briquettes - one briquette at a time. I must have observed them for 45 minutes and they had made no noticeable dent into the pile.

They gathered the stiff coal mixture in their hands and dumped it into a homemade molding machine. It took about two or three handfuls, depending upon the size of the boy, of mixture to fill the mold. The molding "machine" was made out of rebar, pipe, and steel plate.

A handful of dry sawdust is sprinkled around the inside of the mold to break the bond between the eventual briquette and mold walls. The coal mixture is then set into the cylindrical mold top section, a perforated plate cover was swung over the top and secured. A second boy manning a long wood lever then pushed the lever down. The action of the lever going down causes the bottom section of the machine, a plate with a series of long slender rods, to compress the coal mixture into a bees nest briquette. The upper mold is opened up and the completed briquette is carefully removed and placed on a piece of wood in the street to set. When the wood is filled with completed briquettes, two boys carefully pick it up and more the assemblage to a flat area to offload the briquettes for curing in the sun.

Throughout northern Vietnam, you can see people handling these briquettes - gathering the fines, forming the briquettes, transporting them, selling them, using the briquettes and disposing of the spent ones.

Transportation of the briquettes, is just as interesting as photographing the making of them. Some briquettes are transported by motorbike. Two metal frames are mounted on each side of the rear tire of the motorbike. At the bottom of each frame is a 3 foot by 3 foot wood floor. Briquettes are set and stacked to about 3 feet high on each side of the rear wheel. Because the product is made out of coal fines, the motorbike as well as the bike driver are covered in black dust. As awkward as the combination looks, the drivers skillfully weave about the crowded and rutted roads selling and delivering their important cargo.

Some vendors are too poor to have a motorbike so they haul the briquettes by bicycle. Just about as many briquettes can be hauled by bicycle as by motorbike but slower. The Vietnamese are masters in the art of hauling things by bicycle and motorbike. I have seen small refrigerators being transported on the back of motorbikes. The Vietnamese can carry as much on the back of their bicycle as most American choose to carry in the back of their pickup truck.

In the coastal region where we lived, there were many boats that brought the briquettes out to the islands and floating communities where people live. This is a photo of a man with his boat with briquettes to be shipped out into the bay.