The Crispy Vietnamese Chả Giò That Welcomes Us Home

Tết, the Lunar New Year, is the biggest holiday on the calendar. It’s the Vietnamese equivalent of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year, all rolled into one festival stretching roughly two weeks. In Vietnam, every family celebrates Tết with lots of food consumed in multiple rounds of feasting. The one favorite dish everyone looks forward to is chả giò. 

My mother makes the world’s best chả giò, a version of fried spring rolls, from an heirloom recipe handed down many generations. This is our food of happiness. This dish can be found at weddings, birthdays, homecomings, and various celebrations. At times, we have even made it in the depth of despair, with the hope that it might lift our spirit and hail better days ahead. 

Chả giò was at our family’s reunion meal after my father was released from the Việt Cộng reeducation camp. It was my maternal grandmother’s first meal after her release from the French-Viet colonial prison for running an underground medical supply tunnel. It was also my maternal great-grandaunt’s requested last meal when she lay down on her deathbed and announced that she was ready to depart to the other shore. And it was the farewell meal my family ate in Phan Thiết before escaping Communist Vietnam on a leaky fishing boat. 

When we first came to America, Mom fried up trays of chả giò for a potluck held by the ladies of the First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana. They didn’t know what it was. One of them noted that it looked like a skinny version of the fat “egg roll stuffed with cabbage and flecks of pork,” served with a red gooey sweet sauce found at the local Chinese restaurant. Of course, our chả giò had nothing in common with the American-Chinese version except for the shape. Mom’s “egg roll” was a showstopper at the potluck. The church ladies loved it so much they requested her recipe for their official church cookbook, a lovely spiral-bound volume published in 1978. Thus, Mom’s chả giò became possibly the first Vietnamese “egg roll” recipe to be published in America.

In our new homeland, certain ingredients were hard to find, so chả giò became a rare treat. Chinese wheat flour wrappers were substituted for rice papers, which were harder to find. As the years passed, our connections to the old country gradually faded away. We ate more Western food and less of the food from the land of our birth. Mom was aware of this. Every time she made chả giò, Mom would announce it several days ahead to get the family excited and give us something to look forward to. Sometimes, Mom made chả giò as a way to mend fences with Father after they had a big fight. When I went off to college, she gave me a foil-wrapped bundle of chả giò. She did the same for my other siblings when it was their turn. Chả giò was also the first thing she’d make for us when we came home. I can’t recall a single Tết feast or a major celebration dinner that didn’t include chả giò. 

The aromas of chả giò never fail to send my thoughts flying back to our early years in America. I could see my mother in our suburban hovel preparing this expensive dish for her big brood of children. On a poor immigrant’s budget, she bought the inexpensive small crabs and sat at the table for an hour, meticulously picking out every bit of meat. When the special day came, she timed the preparation so it would be ready precisely at mealtime. She stood at the stove, frying up chả giò and handing them immediately to us, hot and crispy, so we could enjoy them at their best. When everyone had eaten, she would fry the last few chả giò for herself. 

Cooking has always been my mother’s creative outlet and her way of communication. Biting into those crunchy rolls, redolent with pork and a hint of the sea, have never failed to give me a fuzzy warmth at my core. Chả giò is our family’s food of happiness, and it’s also my mother’s expression of love.