JoJo's Grandma's Phuc Choup (Cooked Vegetable Salad)

"She wore traditional black skirts that Tai Dam women wear... She prepped with her hands instead of utensils, which she said made the food taste better."

I didn’t expect I would disappear for a whole month! When I wasn’t Umi noodling, I let myself focus entirely on my book project, Group Living and Other Recipes. My excitement to work on it took me by surprise, even though I’ve been building towards this for so long. Thank you for your patience. I haven’t forgotten the newsletter, and I have some very silly content coming soon.

I am aware of a sharp tension in the air—between the uplift of beautiful summer weather and the heavy fear of approaching months of drought (and the Native communities and farmers facing it/facing off now); the catharsis of finally having time with friends, hugging, laughing in each other’s faces, and the heartbreak of knowing COVID is still devastating people in other countries of the world. I wouldn’t call it guilt, which is yet a different feeling. It’s more like an awareness of how flimsy the good feelings can be, and in that sense, a bit of desperation mixed with gluttony—like eating an ice cream cone as it melts. More than normal, I think each of us is weighing our lives and mental health this year against last. My needs are different, but I am glad for the discoveries I made last year that helped me psychologically cope. In the next few newsletters, I’m going to share the media that gave me a feeling of calm and levity this time last year. Here’s a teaser.

In the meantime, I’m excited to share another story from our April 3rd Inheritance Stories workshop, this time from JoJo Baccam. (If you haven’t read Alix Jo Ryan’s story, Heidi and Ardy’s Potato Soup, please check it out!) Over the past month, Oregon Humanities worked with me to design and put together a cookbook of the Inheritance Stories we collected during the workshop I led—about the recipes we’ve learned from people in our lives that we keep alive. If you’d like to read all of our stories, please download the pdf, available here. As always, thank you for reading!

My name is JoJo Baccam. I grew up in a small rural town in Iowa called Mt. Pleasant. I now live in the Buckman neighborhood in an apartment. I’m a very artistic person (I have a BFA in studio art), and people say I’m energetic and warm. I work as a graphic designer in the organic food industry. I love to cook and garden, foraging and trying to identify plants, hiking, riding my bike, drawing. I feel very lucky to be in a place where I can do all of those things, with milder temperatures compared to the extremes in Iowa! 

Phuc Choup means boiled vegetables, and it is a vegetable salad composed of different boiled vegetables that grow with the seasons. I learned it from my parents who learned it from their parents. My parents are Tai Dam. We are a very small ethnic group indigenous to Northern Vietnam similar to Laotians and Thais cultures. Tai Dam people really like to listen and learn from the land, forage, and grow our own vegetables. My grandma is from Laos; she is also Tai Dam. She and my family immigrated to the US 45-ish years ago. There is a huge Tai Dam community in Iowa because the governor sponsored small groups of Tai Dam refugees to come to the US in the 1970s. 

My grandmother is a very warm person and super welcoming. Every time she saw her grandchildren she wanted to feed them. She was always in the kitchen cooking or outside sunning on the porch. She would babysit me and my sisters. We would play in the backyard, catch frogs, and she encouraged everything we wanted to do as children. I have a really big family with many cousins. It’s a boisterous atmosphere, and she would try to keep up with everyone. She wore traditional black skirts that Tai Dam women wear, and when I was a child, I followed her around, tugging and playing around her skirts. 

She prepped with her hands instead of utensils, which she said made the food taste better. I see her assembling everything in a large metal bowl. She would be pounding the root vegetables with her mortar and pestle, making thumping noises and using her hands to toss the salad. It smells very fresh and the kitchen feels very warm. It’s a very small space, so I would be near to her. 

Phuc Choup is a common side dish in Tai Dam culture. The table setup would be a protein (roasted or salt baked fish), lots of vegetable dishes (and this would be the vegetable dish in this setup), soup, sticky rice, and jeow (spicy dipping sauce). We always ate together as a group with the whole spread. When I had it for the first time I probably had it without the spicy ingredient because I was very young, maybe five or six years old. I can smell the aroma of the galangal root and ginger, very warm. We would be passing it back and forth to each other as we ate in a family-style way. There would be a lot of chopsticks hitting plates, spoons hitting bowls, people passing food around. We were probably talking about what we did that day, commenting on how spicy the jeow was, how we need more water. The sticky rice is held in a basket, and you eat it with your hands. My dad would reach in the basket and form mounds of rice to give to the kids, and I would hear, “more rice, please” as we finished our handfuls. 

When I eat it, there are a lot of different textures. The green beans are blanched just enough to be crunchy. The bok choy is sort of wilted, fleshy in texture, with underlying sweetness. The cauliflower is also crunchy. Now as I’ve gotten older, I include lots of Thai chiles, and it's very spicy. 

I first made this for myself pretty recently, probably a year ago. No one around here knew how to make it. I didn’t think it would turn out, but once the ingredients started coming together in my own metal bowl, it tasted like home, and I was proud of myself for accomplishing that. Moving here, whenever I crave something, I have to make it on my own. I’m in the process of making my own cookbook of my traditional recipes, and I’m glad to have this dish in there. 

This recipe is very malleable. There is no set list of vegetables. I adapt based on the random assortment of vegetables that I want to eat that day. When my grandma made it she would use maple seeds, like the tiny helicopters. She would boil the young ones and put them into the salad. In elementary school I would play with those things. Instead of using Szechuan peppercorns, my dad usually puts prickly ash that he forages. I use regular black peppercorns, but it’s missing the citrus flavor that comes from the prickly ash. My adaptations are using what is available to me. 

To make Phuc Choup, wash vegetables: zucchini, asparagus, green beans, cauliflower, bok choy. Chop vegetables into bite-sized pieces. Blanch vegetables. Remove from water. Add to a bigger bowl. Thinly slice ginger and galangal and place them into mortar and pestle with peppercorns. Pound into a paste and add to the mix. Add salt to taste. Garnish with minced cilantro and green onions.