Vietnamese Fried Spring Rolls

Their names sound like Sue and Two (spelled Suu and Thu). They're sisters from Ho Chi Minh City who live forty minutes from my house in Freeport, Maine, and cook Vietnamese together all the time. Thanks to my friend's friend for setting up this phenomenal cooking lesson. Knowing how to make fried spring rolls is obviously a great pleasure. But you know what else I found out? How an American man and a Vietnamese woman could fall in love in the crannies between warfare. I've always wondered about that. Haven't you? Click the links on the right to enter this crispy, hot, delicious lesson on cooking, love, and life.

See How to Do It

Vietnamese Fried Spring Rolls

The concept is simple: make the filling, roll, and deep fry...

shredded carrots, plus par-cooked rice noodles

plus half an onion, small dice

plus ground pork

plus two eggs, reserving one in a small dish for your "glue"

mix with your hands.

Peel some of these papers from the mass in the package,

and lay them out on a plate so you can get at them more easily

Then roll your first roll! Make a log shaped mound of filling toward the bottom corner.

Fold that corner over, covering the mound, and roll.

Fold the sides in neatly like this

Roll through to the end, and put a dab of egg yolk on the corner so it sticks closed.

Do all your rolling, and then fry.

She used chopsticks to put the rolls in and out of the oil. I suggest tongs for folks for whom chopsticks are a second utensil.

Thank you, dear Suu and Thu for this wondeful lesson!

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2010

photos: Lindsay Sterling

The Story

How to Make Fried Spring Rolls

And get through life giggling

By Lindsay Sterling

When you get Vietnamese spring roll lessons from Suu Le Martin, you learn they’re basically ground pork, really thin rice noodles, carrot, salt, sugar, pepper, onion, and egg, wrapped up in special paper and deep fried. But by the time you’re chomping into the crispy, hot, handheld treat, you understand she also did something else: she took sheer human love, wrapped it in courage and glued it all together with a scramble of prayers.

In 1966 Suu Le was a 16-year-old bar waitress in Saigon. She was beautiful, the perfection of her skin belying the brutality of her young life and the war around her. When she was ten, her parents beat her because the earnings from her night job in the rice field were too paltry. She earned 50 cents per month. Then her teacher at school beat her for not finishing her homework. Her family of eight lived in a one-room house with no kitchen, so she and her sister covered the floor in papers and cooked there. They made duck soup, fried rice, spring rolls and wontons crouched in the position of toddlers. They didn’t have a sink so they used bowls of water. Suu quit school to get a second job. Once when the bombs and bullets got so bad, she was running in the chaos, and her mother yanked her by her waist-long black hair into a nearby church. The family hid there for three weeks. For light, they had a single candle. For food, they had one hard, hard baguette to share. There was no water, so from time to time, Suu ran for it carrying the long shoulder stick and two buckets hanging from strings. When her father died of cancer when she was 14, she prayed, “My mom, six girls and a boy, how we gonna survive?”

One of her customers at the restaurant was in the United States Air Force. He was really handsome. His order, “Coca Cola, please,” took her by surprise. The other guys ordered the hard stuff or French beer. For a while the two flirted wordlessly. She spoke no English, and he, no Vietnamese. Then one day, “He bought me a Tree Musky.” That’s a Three Musketeers. “I eat that candy and boy I love the guy.” She giggles and laughs. It was a schoolgirl crush, without the school. She was 16. He was 22. When he didn’t come back, her friends cajoled her: American G.I.? That’s bullshit, forget about him!

She must have waved in their faces, three months later, the letter that came. It was from HIM! With a neighbor’s help, she read it and wrote back. They wrote for three years. He sent $60 a month for her to take English lessons. She got them, and a high school diploma. After his tours in San Francisco, Japan and Guam, Andrew interrupted the war for a moment when he knocked on the door of the one-room house in Saigon and entered it with a with a diamond ring. Would she pack her bags and come with him to America? She was terrified. He was terrified. They went to the embassy. “I pray,” she recalls, “Help me go to another world. Help me change my life. I pray me and my husband be together forever. I pray to Buddha, Elephant, Jesus. I pray to everybody then maybe one will hear.” Suu and Andrew are still married, and live among us. She sponsored the rest of her family to live here. She has worked cleaning Navy destroyers at Bath Iron Works for 29 years. When teaching spring roll lessons today, she and her sister use the countertop, but, a relative whispers, when they’re really cooking they use the floor.

One of the first photos of Suu and Andrew.

On the back, a short letter...

that started their life together.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2010

photos: Suu Le Martin

Print the Recipe

Vietnamese Fried Spring Rolls

As Suu Lee Martin, from Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, taught Lindsay Sterling in Freeport, ME, July 2010

Makes about 48 appetizers

Small handful rice sticks (thread size noodles made out of rice)

1.5 lb ground pork

1 onion, minced

6 carrots, peeled and shredded (or 1 lb bag of pre-shredded)

2 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

3 Tbsp sugar

3 eggs

1-2 packages Spring Roll Pastry* papers

1. Put small pot of water on to boil. Cut rice sticks into three-inch segments. Put in boiling water for less than one minute, and strain. Put into large stainless steel mixing bowl: par-cooked rice sticks, ground pork, onion, carrots, salt, pepper, sugar. Get a small side dish ready. Crack two eggs into the mix. The third egg put the whites into the mixture, and the yolk in your separate small side dish. This is your glue that will hold the springroll wrappers together.

2. Get a dinner plate out and peel the first few papers from the pack, spreading them out onto the plate so they’re easy to grab. Get a large plate or platter ready – something that will hold 48 springrolls! Your first few will be slow, but try to get faster as the rolling gets more familiar, otherwise you’ll be doing this all day! Better yet, find a sister to make half of them next to you. Here's the method: on the countertop in front of you, place one square spring roll pastry sheet with a corner pointing at you. Place about 1 ½ Tbsp of the filling just above that bottom corner. Use your fingers to mold the filling into a log shape, staying within the boundary of the edge of the sheet. Fold the bottom corner up covering the log tightly. Then continue to roll the log over the rest of the sheet, pressing down gently to keep the paper tight. After the widest part of the square, fold the sides in so the remaining paper edges are perpendicular to the log. Glue the final corner of the paper onto the roll with a dab of egg yolk on your finger.

3. Fill the largest deep saute pan you have one inch deep with vegetable, canola, or peanut oil. Bring oil up to high heat. Line a platter for the finished spring rolls with paper towels and put next to the saute pan. Put your first spring roll in. If the heat is right, it should make a loud sizzing sound, wow! and you should see vigorous bubbling (frying). If you don’t see that, take your spring roll out and wait for the oil to heat up some more. When the oil is hot, you can fry many as you can fit loosely in the pan. She used chopsticks to maneuver the rolls in and out of the oil. I’m using tongs. Spring rolls are done when they're light brown on the outside and the meat inside is cooked. Cut your first one open to make sure you got the temp right. If the outside is burning and the center is raw, the oil is too hot. If they're soggy with oil and not browning, your oil is not hot enough.

*Spring Roll Pastry. This is in the frozen section of most Asian markets, not yet in major grocery stores. She used Spring Home brand, made in Singapore. The ingredients on the package were wheat flour, water, coconut oil, salt. In Portland, try Haknuman, on Forest Ave. near Baxter Woods, Mittaheap World Market on Washington Ave. across from Tu Casa. I haven't been to Hong Kong market yet (on Congress below the Maine Med hill), but I bet they'd have them. When I get my act together, I'll put online ordering links.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2010