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it out there. Vietnamese in the U.S. are a very new immigrant group. Many people who are running the Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S. don't have the cultural understanding they need to present their cuisine to English speakers. We don't have a common vocabulary so that people will get it. Sometimes I'll see something on a menu and the restaurateur is working really hard to offer it to non-Vietnamese diners, but it seems very awkward. For example, the English translation for one dish is "sizzling crepes"—they're chewy, crispy rice crepes from Southern Vietnam called banh xeo. You can't translate the actual Vietnamese name literally into English because it sounds idiotic. In Vietnamese, the word is the sound that the batter makes when it hits the pan. But then, I go to some restaurants and they translate it as "moon crepes". When I go to a Vietnamese restaurant that doesn't have any Vietnamese language on it, I grill the staff because I don't understand what it is!
What's so great about the Internet with blogs and sites is that I feel like we can leapfrog. We don't have to be stuck in the ruts of bad food for too long. I can educate people and inform them how to tease out the flavors so they understand what tasty Vietnamese food is, that it's a matter of understanding the ingredients, the tastes. We need to have a dialogue about it, and I think the Internet allows us to have that interface. Cuisines mature very differently, and I think modern technology allows for you to leapfrog—you're not stuck in solitude, stuck in this rut of being isolated.
NAC: Who or what has been the biggest influence on your cooking?
NGUYEN: I had a very interesting childhood that was built around food! There were five kids. Now, I'm the only one that does anything related to food, and I think being the youngest, I was able to observe a lot.
My family left Vietnam in 1975, and were sent to the refugee camp at Camp Pendleton. We were eventually sponsored by an American that my father did business with, and we moved to San Clemente, California, where I grew up. There were never that many Vietnamese people; many people settled north of there in Little Saigon, in South Orange County. We would go up to Little Saigon and get food.
My parents had really high standards for what good food is. In Vietnam, you step outside your door, and people are prepared to offer you all kinds of services. You can go out for little snacks, like pho noodle soup; it was really fun and easy. When we got to the U.S., we couldn't step out the door for anything! We made it home. My mom had her handwritten recipes, had Vietnamese cookbooks. My parents would also look around at the local library or join book of the month club – they would order all these books and then cancel subscriptions! We were amassing this knowledge and then preparing all kinds of things at home.
I became a cookbook junkie when I was young. Kids would be reading books and I'd be going to the library and taking out cookbooks. One of them was "The Whole World Cookbook", and it was something we acquired from one of the book of the month clubs. It was a multiracial, multi-ethnic cookbook. I remember when I was a kid I had to name my favorite foods for school, and I looked through this book, thinking that I would love certain foods, but I never had tasted them. I would try to imagine what they would taste like! My family would cook from this book.
NAC: What did you cook together?
NGUYEN: The first thing I learned to cook from my mother was rice. That was the first thing that she let me cook for the family. She was strict in many regards, but there was a reason behind it all. She would make me wash the rice ten times, and make me count aloud so I couldn't skip. She wanted to demonstrate to me that it was important that the rice was clean. She would really guide me through this process so that I would understand it. Then, when I graduated from that, I could help her make Vietnamese fried chicken [which was a family favorite]. Eventually she let me make the batter. She would let me experiment. The whole concept of repetition was important.
She liked to make me repeat making wontons. I wasn't very athletic as a kid and my parents couldn't afford to send me off to extracurricular activities, so after-school activities would be making wontons. You learn how to do it efficiently and nicely. I would just be doing it pretty much all the time by myself. I liked it.
Sometimes my parents would make deviled crab. They would get local rock crabs -- on those crabs the upper shell is only about 5 inches wide. They're small. My mother would make me pick the meat out of all of those. She would go to this little floating wooden shack to buy them, and we would take them home and she would throw them into a steamer. My mom is a very beautiful, elegant woman, and all the while she'd be wearing jade bracelets.
Nowadays, we're so removed from our food source. I think we need to once in awhile experience that kind of thing so that we appreciate what's on the table, and what it takes to put good food on the table. You have to hone those skills. I spent a lot of solitary time contemplating this stuff, because there were a lot of wontons to make and crabs to pick!
NAC: Did these experiences of cooking with your family inspire your new cookbook?
NGUYEN: I've been wanting to write this book since I was 10! I was reading and collecting Vietnamese cookbooks, but that food did not look like the food that my family prepared. Often times, the books were co-authorships between a Vietnamese person and a fluent English speaker, or often from an East-coast perspective. Rarely would you see mention of people from Southern Vietnam. Or I would see the long list of ingredients in a recipe and think, "I'm tired! I don't want to make that!" I wanted to construct the book so people could understand what Vietnamese home cooking is. The majority of my readers are non Vietnamese and I wanted to present Vietnamese food in a comprehensive way so they understood how simple it is, but that it can evolve into much more complicated dishes.
The book has twelve chapters, and the beginning of each chapter is titled in a way so people can understand the cultural framework behind the food. It pulls you in very easily, it gets your foot in the door. [For example, the chapter] "Noodles Morning, Noon, and Night" allows me to discuss how noodles are used throughout the day. The book has movement through it. I give people the range to play with and understand how the recipes come together. I'm not just writing cute little recipe intros, I really am out to make educational points to people. I wouldn't be satisfied if I had just written a breezy intro to Vietnamese cooking.
As a writer for the book, I wanted to present food that people eat at home. The foods that we ate at home are really classic preparations, really simple things. A lot of Americans who are being introduced to Vietnamese food don't understand how important those dishes are to Vietnamese cooking. There's one dish, chicken with ginger—it's traditionally really fresh pork that would be used to make a meat paste, but my mother found chicken to be a good substitute. She would cut up chickens, use certain parts for the paste, and then save the carcasses for stock, but she would whack the end joint off of the chicken drumstick and simmer them in caramel stock. When I prepare that, I use boneless skinless chicken thighs. It's not fussy.
I still make those dishes from my childhood. I'm happy that those recipes resonate with other Vietnamese people too. What's presented in American Vietnamese restaurants is what we would consider to be specialty foods. Yes, you can make pho at home, but some of these more simple things that I took from my mom are just as important to me.
NAC: What's an important lesson that you teach to your students that you can share with our readers?
NGUYEN: [Vietnamese food is] a strange amalgam of all different cultural influences—French, Chinese, Indian, and now, American. So it's constantly evolving. There are few rules and many guidelines. When you compare it to other Asian cuisines that tend to be much more strict, it's important to understand the foundations of how flavors are used. You have to understand how flavors come together. You don't just drink fish sauce straight from the bottle!
[As a cook] you want to create food that fits your palate. I always teach people how to make basic dipping sauces, but I teach them how to make the individual components, that they then taste along the way. If they don't understand how things come together, they've got problems! This comes from my years of getting frustrated myself. I wanted an approach that would help people. I provide people with guidelines. I'm your friend in the kitchen but I don’t want to hover over you like my mother hovered over me. Nobody responds well to that!
I always want people to know that there are no hard and fast rules, but you do have to understand the parameters. I want to show people that it doesn't requires that many ingredients to prepare good food. When you go to Vietnam, you notice that the food is very straightforward. They don't have the luxury of embellishing their food with lots of layers. It's not dolled up in any way. The craftsmanship involved is really bringing together a few simple ingredients and putting the Vietnamese imprint on them.
Also, it's just food! Don't take it too seriously! I've ruined so many pots of rice in my life before I was able to make it consistently. I've had many ups and downs with my rice pot, and you will too.
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