Its popularity might have declined over the years in Vietnam, but to the Vietnamese expats, mứt Tết remains one of the few links home to resurrect our new spring festival atmosphere on foreign lands. As far as I know these candied fruits are unique to the Vietnamese New Year (Tết), just like the tteokguk and the yakwa to the Korean Seolnal. They are holiday gifts to friends and family, offerings at the altars to ancestors and deities, little snacks for children, tea confections for adults, and vegan treats for those who refrain from eating meat at the year’s beginning.
Mứt can be divided into two types: wet and dry. Visit any beef jerky (khô bò) and salted plums (xí muội) stores in Vietnamese shopping malls in the Tet season, you’d see a swarm of mứt in glass jars, the wet kinds wrapped in crunchy paper and the dry kind laying bare. The two most common wet mứt are tamarind (me) and soursop (mãng cầu). The former is kept in its scrawny form, with a few rope-like fibrous strings along the fruit’s length, which is to be discarded when eating, of course.
Tamarind mứt should be amber brown, chewy, and a little more sour than sweet. Tamarind is notorious for its medicinal effect, so be careful not to consume too many sticks at once. A similar chewy wet mứt is the soursop, but it’s always milkish white, doesn’t retain the fruit’s shape, and people tend to put too much sugar in the churning process.