Ca Loc Nuong Trui (Whole Snakehead Grilled in a Straw Fire)

Variations

• Over charcoal or a gas grill: with no straw to hand, leave the scales on and cook over the fiercest direct heat you have until the skin is black and hard. You lose most of the smoke and keep the structure — the layer that burns is not the layer you eat. Under an oven broiler, 20cm down for 20-25 minutes.
• A sugarcane stake instead of bamboo: it chars and lends a little of its sugar to the flesh, and is common in the south.
• Salt and chilli instead of nuoc cham: coarse salt pounded with green chilli and lime, for when you want the fish itself in front.
• Tilapia or catfish: any freshwater fish of about this size works if snakehead is hard to find. The coarser the scales, the more easily the skin lifts.

Tips

• There is no fire to wait for. Grilling is emphatic about charcoal — "Everything above starts from a fire that is already burning steadily." — and nyama choma calls skipping that wait the commonest failure there is: "The commonest failure is putting meat over coals that are still flaming: the outside chars while the inside stays raw, and there is no recovering from it." A straw fire has no such stage. The flames are the whole of it and an armful is gone in two or three minutes, so the entire cook happens in the window every charcoal dish is written to get past.
• Which is why the scales stay on. The same guide handles the case where the charred surface is thrown away and states the rule plainly: "a luminous fire only costs you something on a surface you are going to eat." Here the surface the flames reach is a layer being discarded, so the luminous fire costs nothing. It is the structure baba ganoush describes for its aubergine — "The blackened skin is a wrapper, not a surface, and it is thrown away entire" — with one difference: nobody put this wrapper on. The fish arrives wearing it.
• What the distance rule is measuring changes with it. The guide sets it out: with a barrier in the way the question becomes "how much heat has to get through a barrier** — and that depends on whether what is under the barrier has to cook at all." Here the answer is yes, and the barrier is one layer of scale, so the short violent heat of burning straw is well matched. A long gentle fire dries the flesh before the scales ever set.
• The guts come out afterwards, not before. Split open, the fish lets hot air into the cavity and dries from both sides at once. Left shut, the inside steams in its own water — and cleaning it is easier once it is cooked anyway.
• The same rice straw does an entirely different job elsewhere. Hongeo-hoe uses rice straw not as fuel but as a source of bacteria: "Lay rice straw in the bottom of a crock or a box, put the fish on it and cover it with more straw." The same material is a starter culture at room temperature in one dish and a three-minute fuel in this one.
• Stand it up. Laid flat, the straw burns from underneath and the top half is smothered in ash. Upright, the fire wraps the whole fish as it climbs, and the fat and water run down the body towards the tail instead of feeding a flare underneath it.
• Do not read doneness off the scales. They go black inside a minute, with the flesh still raw behind them. Pressing along the back is the only test, and slightly under is the right side to miss on — it carries on cooking while you scrape.
• Rolling it at the table is half the dish. The format is goi cuon's, and the smoked flesh is built for the astringency of green banana and the sourness of star fruit. Eaten on its own the fish is monotonous.