Vietnamese Food Any Day: Simple Recipes for True, Fresh Flavors

350 Pages·2019·10.88 MB·English

by  Andrea Nguyen

Text copyright © 2019 by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen.
Photographs copyright © 2019 by Aubrie Pick.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New
York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered
trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nguyen,
Andrea Quynhgiao, author.
Title: Vietnamese food any day : simple recipes for true, fresh flavors /
Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen ; photography by Aubrie Pick.
Description: California : Ten Speed Press, 2019. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017922 |
Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, Vietnamese. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.
Classification: LCC TX724.5.V5 N477 2019 | DDC 641.59597—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017922
Hardcover ISBN 9780399580352
Ebook ISBN 9780399580369
Food styling by Karen Shinto Prop styling by Claire Mack
v5.3.2
prh
CONTENTS
SEEDS OF MY SUPERMARKET OBSESSION
STRATEGIC SHOPPING FOR INGREDIENTS
1 Basic recipes and know-how
2 Snacks
3 Soups
4 Chicken and seafood
5 Pork and beef
6 Eggs, tofu, and tempeh
7 Salads and vegetable sides
8 Rice and noodles
9 Sweets and coffee
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX

SEEDS OF MY SUPERMARKET
OBSESSION
Around the corner from my childhood home in Saigon was an open-air
market. It stretched along a narrow road for a full block, emptying out onto
a busy thoroughfare. Our lanky cook, whom we respectfully addressed as
Older Sister Thien, regularly took me there. I was her food-shopping pal.
The market was huge and noisy, with vendors hawking dry goods, vibrant
produce, freshly butchered meats, and live seafood. Some vendors sat high
on platforms while others were close to the ground. They’d often beckon to
me in order to pat a chubby child, a rarity in early 1970s Vietnam. They’d
check in and joke with Older Sister Thien while I stood nearby feeling
awkward with nothing to do. To busy myself, I studied the beautifully
arranged tropical fruits and vegetables, which looked like jewels meant to
attract and charm customers. Fish splashing around in tubs were always
extra-exciting. People carefully selecting ingredients and negotiating their
transactions with the vendors intrigued me. Those market visits seeded my
interests in food, cooking, and grocery shopping.
Fast forward to May 1975 and the first time my family checked out an
American supermarket. We were new refugee arrivals who’d just fled
Vietnam’s political upheaval. My parents were relieved, yet wary about how
they’d build new lives. I gleefully marched down the meat aisle and did
something that I’d always wanted to do back at the market by our house—
touch and poke every package within my short arm’s reach. Aghast and
embarrassed, my mom scowled and restrained me with a firm grip. I
stopped. Disciplining me distracted her from perusing the supermarket’s
offerings and trying to figure out how she could make the most from
ingredients at hand. It was months before we got a car to make the three-
hour-roundtrip drive to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, where we’d load up on
familiar Asian staples.
The Albertsons supermarket was a walkable distance from the apartment
we rented and became our neighborhood store. Shopping there meant
certain compromises on ingredients. Fish sauce wasn’t carried at
mainstream American markets in the ’70s, and we initially relied upon La
Choy soy sauce. From bags of Texas long-grain rice, cheap chicken backs,
onion, ginger, and celery, we simmered fragrant stock, saved the rendered
fat, and picked off the meat in order to fashion pots of glorious chicken
and celery rice (see this page). Bittersweet caramel sauce (see this page), a
Viet staple for simmering ingredients such as chunks of fatty pork to a
super-savory finish, was easy to make with granulated sugar. We were
happy to find plenty of lettuce, cilantro, and mint to eat with grilled and
fried morsels.
Working the phone lines and sharing tips with other refugees, my mom co-
opted non-Viet ingredients for Viet dishes. For example, Mochiko sweet
rice flour produced by Koda Farms, a Japanese American family in Central
California, yielded outrageously good Vietnamese sticky rice cakes and soft,
chewy filled dumplings. For decades, she substituted Swans Down cake
flour for rice flour to make bánh cuốn steamed rice rolls. Like many good
cooks, my mom adapted her cooking for her current situation. In the
process, she and other Vietnamese immigrants helped evolve and advance
their food traditions. Incorporating American work-arounds while not
compromising Vietnamese integrity created foodways that helped to define
the Vietnamese American experience.
Our eating life improved once we were able to stock up on fish sauce, rice
noodles, and rice paper at Chinese markets, and eventually at Little Saigon
grocers in Westminster and Garden Grove, towns located about thirty-five