Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen: Simple Recipes from My Many Mothers by Kim Thuy (Penguin Random House Canada)

“I depend on food to express as best I can my unconditional love.” novelist Kim Thuy says in her introduction to this cookbook. Although she herself is an accomplished cook who gave up a career as a lawyer to open a restaurant in Montreal, Thuy gives full credit to her mother and her “aunt-mothers” for the recipes that fill the pages of Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. They are the women who taught her that food is love, “a tool for expressing our emotions.”

While most cookbooks introduce a particular cuisine and culture, Thuy’s introduces her family, beginning with her husband and two sons for whom she makes three separate meals every day between 3 and 8 o’clock, and then presenting her culinary lodestars, her mother and her five aunts.

Portraits of these stunning women introduce each section of the cookbook, beginning with The Fundamentals and ending with Desserts and Snacks. Their strong, beautiful faces and their brief introductory stories give this book an extraordinary dimension: the mother who “very easily gained a degree in aeronautical technology during our first years in Canada,” the aunt “who waited for her husband for ten years,” the aunt who kept her composure during a difficult divorce by silently conjugating French verbs, the rebellious aunt who found success in the United States, the aunt who lacks the ability to live alone but who has mastered “the art of conversation better than any of her sisters,” the aunt who is “the eternal beauty.” Thuy herself appears only at the very end, a dazzlingly radiant and “infinitely impatient” eater of desserts, with a self-description of ”Me, I tell stories.”

It’s difficult to take attention away from these women but the lessons they teach their readers are equal to that task. No detail is ignored nor previous knowledge assumed--cook rice noodles in cold water and turn off the heat as soon as the water boils; when cooking fish with turmeric, use “three times as much dill as fish;” serve heaping platters of vegetables, raw and cooked, with almost every meal; use a spray bottle filled with warm water to moisten and soften soften rice paper wrappers. And don’t forget the fish sauce, without which “most Vietnamese couldn’t cook, couldn’t EXIST,” or the fresh herbs that “leave a memory of their perfume long afterward…like a lover’s kiss.”

A bounty of soups, including one that’s made more rapidly than packaged instant ramen, one-dish meals of stir-fries and noodle bowls, vegetables that become the stars of any dining table, the hazardous and irresistible delights of fried food and the savory pleasures of grilled snacks, “slow-cooked” meals that rarely take more than an hour before they’re on the table; desserts that almost always feature fruit as the main ingredient--all of these are presented in tempting and uncomplicated recipes that range from summer food to hearty warming dishes for cold weather.

And of course there are the stories. In the middle of a war, while still living in Vietnam, Thuy’s father often made a dangerous four-hour drive to have coffee with his grandfather, coffee that was made from the beans eaten by foxes and excreted whole from their bellies. Thuy’s Saigon childhood was filled with the music of bells, announcing vendors who nestled scoops of ice cream within a small brioche--a gourmet’s version of an ice cream sandwich. She tells how her mother made dumplings in a refugee camp, rolling out the dough on the rusty metal cover of a water barrel and how in the camp her entire family once shared a bag filled with a cold and sweet soft drink, passing it from hand to hand so that each of the thirteen people had three tastes from the single straw inserted in the closed bag.

When Thuy’s first novel, Ru, received Canada’s Scotia Bank Giller Prize, the Giller jury praised her for “reinventing the immigrant story.” She quickly corrected them, saying she writes refugee literature. “Refugee and immigrant are different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future…in a refugee camp you live outside of time.”

Her novels all convey that state of timelessness in its truest dizzying sense, a dream-like quality that gives her stories the opaque and distant feeling of  being “stateless, part of nothing.” Although Thuy’s fiction draws heavily upon her escape from Vietnam on a hardscrabble boat, her nights of sleeping in a cobbled-together shelter in a refugee camp, her time as a lawyer in Hanoi, her days as a restaurateur, and her mothering of an autistic child, she weaves her life into narratives that avoid sentiment or emotion, books that feel almost flattened in their straightforward and compressed plots. 

It’s within this book, through the faces and the food of her mothers, that she reveals bright flashes of who she is and where she comes from. Not quite a memoir, not only a cookbook, these secrets from a kitchen are nourishing on a number of different levels. They remind North American readers that we all are descended from refugees, people whose differences have  made our countries vibrant and our food choices delicious.~Janet Brown

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton & Company)

A couple of centuries ago, a British diplomat decided the Chinese were “foul feeders and eaters of garlic and other strong-scented vegetables.” Even nowadays, when nutritionists extol the Mediterranean Diet, the Okinawa Diet, and the eating habits practiced by long-lived peasants of the Caucasus Mountains, “Chinese food” is firmly linked in the Western mind with MSG, cornstarch, and fortune cookies. 

British writer Fuchsia Dunlop has spent much of her life debunking this misconception. A food anthropologist of sorts, she fell in love with the food of Sichuan when she was studying in Chengdu and went on to explore the varied cuisines of Chinese regional cooking.  While concentrating on the food of Sichuan (Land of Plenty) and Hunan (Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook), Dunlop has traveled widely throughout China--and wherever she’s been, she’s talked to people about the food they eat and how they cook it. The result of her odyssey is embodied in Every Grain of Rice, a book that’s as much a work of travel literature and a health manual as it is an encyclopedia of recipes and cooking techniques. 

Throughout Chinese history, people have been guided by the words of the philosopher Mencius, who advised “Do not disregard the farmer’s seasons and food will be more than enough,” two millennia before Michael Pollan ‘s famous maxim “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” During her travels, Dunlop, who comes from the land of boiled cabbage and mushy peas, is struck by the preponderance of vegetables in the dishes she eats, all of them made delicious by the flavors they’ve been given. From Beijing to Guangzhou and through the regions in between, meat and fish are used sparingly in everyday meals, almost as condiments that provide a side note of flavor. “It’s interesting,” Dunlop observes, “ to see how modern dietary advice often echoes the age-old precepts of the Chinese table: eat plenty of grains and vegetables and not much meat, reduce consumption of animal fats and eat very little sugar.” Spartan? Stringent? Time-consuming? Not at all. Dunlop describes food that takes “only fifteen minutes to make but is beautiful enough to launch ships,” “with flavors that still amaze me.” 

The secret lies in buying fresh ingredients, collecting an arsenal of flavors to construct a Chinese pantry, which Dunlop carefully explicates, and mastering a few simple techniques which she shows step-by-step in clear photographs. Then the fun begins. 

When was the last time you read a cookbook with an entire section devoted to leafy greens, another to garlic and chives? Have you ever prepared cucumbers or celery or radishes to take center stage in a hot dish? Or cooked with lily bulbs? Or used only two ounces of meat as part of a meal? Dunlop makes all of this enticing, easy, and healthful too--who knew?

As she finds food, she describes the beauty of the countryside: the piercing green of rice fields and bamboo groves in Zhejiang, the dizzying scent of osmanthus blossoms in Hangzhou where the blooms are gathered and used to sweeten meals, the mountainsides of Southern China where “every spare inch is sown with crops.” She tells how strangers happily share their recipes with her when she stops on the street to ask what they’re eating, with stories of the meals she ate while “hanging out with some artist friends and a bunch of local gangsters.” She delves into culinary history in a story of how pirates in centuries past decided who among a ship’s passengers was worth robbing by observing how their prospective victims ate fish. She’s clearly enchanted with the Chinese names for vegetables which turn kohlrabi into “jade turnip” and bean sprouts into “silver sprouts,” transform broccoli into “flower vegetables from the Southwest” and aptly call chard “ox leather greens.” And while she gives rice all the honor that is its due, she warns not to leave it out within four hours of it being cooked nor to keep it for more than three days after preparing it, even if it’s refrigerated. Food poisoning is a distinct possibility for those who ignore her advice.

Even potatoes, those mainstays of Western kitchens, take on a tempting new guise as stir-fried mashed potatoes with “snow vegetable” (preserved mustard greens), made in minutes from leftovers. For devotees of Westernized Chinese food such as the ubiquitous Kung Pao Chicken, Dunlop offers Gong Pao Chicken, the honest-to-god Sichuan original dish as it’s eaten in Chengdu--made with two chicken breasts and ingredients that bring tons of flavor.

Augmenting Dunlop’s recipes and stories are gorgeous photographs of almost every dish, taken by Chris Terry, each one guaranteed to send readers into their kitchens with a bunch of spinach or garlic scapes in hand. Bring on the Chinese Diet--and viva Fuchsia Dunlop!~Janet Brown

The Sushi Economy : Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham)

Sasha Issenberg takes us on a journey to learn the history and evolution of a culinary item that people once discarded or used as cat food. The Sushi Economy introduces us to the world of tuna from its humble beginning as a cheap and easy to make street snack in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, to its prominence in the culinary world as a must have and must eat item for the jet set. 

Issenberg makes it clear that this is not the first book about sushi. It is not a cookbook “filled with glamorous food photography and do-it-yourself instruction on how to reproduce those delectable morsels. These books tend to suggest that all one needs to make sushi are a sharpened knife, plastic-wrapped bamboo mat, traditional wooden spatula, and Japanese pantry staples such as short-grain rice, vinegar, and dried seaweed.”

Issenbert believes that to understand the world of sushi culture, one needs to read about what goes into the making of suchi. It has to be “a narrative about the development of twentieth-century global capitalism”. He further states, “A Book that wants to revel in the beauty and deliciousness of sushi must be a celebration of globalization. This is that book.”

Issenberg sets up the book in four separate sections. Part One deals with the freight economy and the logistics of moving bluefin tuna from the Atlantic to the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan. It describes in detail the birth of modern sushi. Before sushi became a familiar item around the world, it was considered worthless throughout the world, the only market for the red tuna was as pet food. 

Part Two covers the food economy and how many young and ambitious entrepreneurs went about setting up sushi restaurants around the world and about their efforts to receive the best cuts of tuna from the world’s oceans. 

Part Three deals with the fish economy. The job of catching tuna in the wild is sporadic and uneven. The fisherman is never sure if his or her catch is going to win the jackpot for him. In order to make it possible for diners around the world to enjoy fresh tuna year round, Issenberg investigates the development of fish ranching for Bluefin Tuna. 

Finally, in Part Four, Issenberg discusses the future of the Tuna industry. The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna and others are in danger of being overfished and the world’s supplies are dwindling at a rapid rate. To solve the problem and to find more sustainable solutions, an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna was formed. The organization is known by the moniker of ICCAT and is called “eye cat”. 

Unfortunately for ICCAT, the organization has a high hurdle to overcome. The group has set rules for signatory nations but has no way of enforcing them. “Tuna is, like air, a placeless common resource, so it suffers from what economists call the commons problem : An individual nation has no motivation to limit its catches alone, since everyone else will continue to benefit.”

“The national fisheries that should be implementing ICCAT rules end up doing little but protecting their own lawbreakers against foreign intruders.” An American environmentalist, Carl Safina, had this to say about ICCAT. He said that ICCAT “might as well stand for International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas”. 

This book will appeal to foodie and economists alike. It is an interesting look into the world of how the tuna business evolved. As Michiyo Murata said in a 2010 New York Times article, “Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a low-class food, and white fish were much preferred. ... Fish with red flesh tended to spoil quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration, the Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the citizens of Edo.”

As the child of a Japanese mother, I was exposed to sushi at an early age. However, I adopted the position of my American father who believed that raw fish was only good for fish bait or cat food. It wasn’t until I was older and perhaps wiser that I began to realize what I was missing. I will never forget my first taste of tuna, or magura as it’s now known. My mother jokingly offered me some believing I would never eat it. I surprised my mother and myself saying, sure, I will try it. I dipped the maguro sashimi in soy sauce with a bit of wasabi, and said to my mother, “It’s not bad. It’s pretty good” to which she responded, “NO!! Don’t say that, It’s too expensive!!” She certainly didn’t want to share any of her maguro with me!! ~Ernie Hoyt

Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (University of California Press)

Curry has become such an international dish that it’s hard to remember it originated in India. Yet when people think of Indian cuisine, this is the first menu choice that usually comes to mind. How did this dish become both the culinary symbol of a country and a popular meal across the globe? Japan, Thailand, Great Britain, the United States all have their own version of curry—Campbell’s Mushroom Soup with curry powder, anyone?

In Curried Cultures, a group of academic writers look at the history, proliferation, and perhaps the decline of curry, in a series of essays that painstakingly comb through every detail of the dish. 

When the princely states of the Subcontinent became Great Britain’s Jewel in the Crown, culinary matters sharply divided the colonized from the conquerors. The British occupiers, believing that the local diet led to weakness and poor health, clung fiercely to their slabs of animal flesh washed down with beer. The people of the Subcontinent prided themselves on vegetable dishes that were spiced with a sophisticated flavor that had yet to reach the West. Each side shuddered at the barbarity of the other; it took the common soldiery of England to find a meeting ground with their subcontinental counterparts through meals of curry. Although canteen cooks probably adopted curry because of its ease and economy, the dish became popular with British troops and traveled with them to Japan and other corners of the world.

Today in Great Britain curry shops are as numerous as fish and chip stands. “Going out for a curry” is a popular way to end a night of serious drinking. In the U.S., fast food curry houses are spreading across the country, becoming almost as ubiquitous as Chinese or Thai restaurants—and equally Americanized. The Indian princes of the Raj would be horrified by what America calls curry and most citizens of modern-day India would find it inedible.

Even within India, the concept of curry is changing fast. Traditional curry dishes take time and attention which is difficult to find in a high-tech, high-speed world. Even the least sophisticated curries, the ones found in the roadside hostelries called Udupi hotels, have changed in the drive for efficiency. In India and abroad, supermarket shelves are filled with small, flat, red and white boxes that are sold under the MTR label. They contain a foil envelope filled with curry that’s quickly reheated in boiling water.

These ready-to-eat meals are cheap, flavorful, and based upon an ancient culinary tradition. In a temple in southern India, five thousand pilgrims are fed daily with fifty different selections, including curry. Legend has it that this is where the famous Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) garnered their recipes, giving their restaurant customers silver utensils with which to eat the adopted temple curries. Nowadays a version of that food can be ordered online or bought in overseas grocery stores; boxes of MTR meals feed foreign consumers who have no idea of the history behind the packaging, as well as families in India who demand flavor as much as convenience in their fast food.

Although it’s an interesting look at the way global popularity changes traditional food, Curried Cultures suffers from this kind of sentence: “I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality.” Readers who hack their way through the jungles of jargon will find a lively history waiting for them—and probably a strong yearning for a plate of curry.

The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky (W.W. Norton & Company)

Even the least adventurous American eater owes a big debt of gratitude to China. Dan Jurafsky’s research shows that, if it weren’t for the Chinese, bottles of ketchup might never have gained dominance in U.S. kitchens. 

When Jurafsky’s daughter pointed out that “tomato ketchup” was redundant because that was the only kind of ketchup in existence, her father began delving into the origins of this omnipresent condiment. A Hong Kong friend provided the answer--”ketchup” is a word that comes in direct translation from Cantonese--ke means tomato and tchup is sauce. The mystery then became how did ketchup gain a Cantonese name?

The answer turned out to be fish sauce, the fermented fish liquid that’s the staple of many Southeast Asian cuisines. Inhabitants of Southern China depended on fish as their primary food source and learned that fermentation not only preserved their catch, the byproduct of the fermentation provided a tasty condiment. When the Han Chinese chased the “Yi barbarians,” more properly known at Khmer-Mon and Tai people, into Southeast Asia, fish sauce went with them. But the process of fermentation became popular in China where it led to soy sauce, spread to Japan in the form of sushi, and was seized upon by Western sailors when they found that Indonesian ke-tchup made their seaboard rations much more palatable. 

The earliest recipe for ketchup appeared in English in 1732, and was credited to a British trading post in Sumatra. When the sauce migrated to England, shallots, mushrooms, and walnuts gradually took precedence over the fermented fish, with a dash of anchovies giving a trace of its original flavor, (as is still found in ke-tchup’s descendant Lea  Perrins Worcestershire Sauce). In 1817 tomatoes took over and this is the version that traveled to America, where it became thicker, sweeter, and totally devoid of fish. (How the less appetizing name of “catsup” came about is still an unexplained mystery.)

Ketchup isn’t the only fermented Chinese invention to have invaded Western kitchens.  Although the creation of molasses is credited to India in 500 BCE, it took China to ferment it with rice and palm sugar, creating arrack, a liquor invented long before rum or gin. This was also seized upon by English sailors, probably with even more enthusiasm than they had for fish sauce. When arrack was mixed with citrus, sugar, spices, and water, the British Navy’s “punch” may have been the precursor to the cocktail--once again thanks to China.

Although China didn’t invent ice cream, if they hadn’t discovered gunpowder that dessert may never have come into being. Potassium nitrate or saltpeter was once called “Chinese snow” in Arabic because it was a major component of the gunpowder exported by China. Arabs were the ones to find that Chinese snow could chill water and centuries later it was used to create the first wine slushy in Italy. Sorbet soon followed.  

Jurafsky points out that the one food Americans adore and think of as being “Chinese” isn’t from China at all. Fortune cookies,  found in every old-school Chinese restaurant in the U.S., first appeared in Kyoto as little cookie-shaped crackers, each one holding a paper fortune. (A similar cookie is sold on the streets of Bangkok, but without the enclosed fortune.) Now almost 3 billion fortune cookies are made, sold, and eaten all around the world--but not in China, where sweets aren’t usually offered at the end of a meal.

The Language of Food dives deep into culinary matters--the vocabulary of menus and Yelp reviews, the importance of sound symbolism when it comes to giving a food a name, the way adjectives can reveal social class. But it’s in food history that the book excels, making us realize that without China, hamburgers might lack savor, there might be no such thing as Happy Hour,, Baskin-Robbins might never have become a household word, and some of us would be much thinner and far less happy.~Janet Brown

eatlip gift : COOK BOOK for COOKING PEOPLE by Yuri Nomura (Magazine House)

eatlip gift is a cookbook and photography book by food director Yuri Nomura with full color pictures taken by photographer Yurie Nagashima. Unlike most cookbooks, pictures of the food are given one or two full pages with the name of the dish and the page where you can find the recipes. The recipes are all provided at the end of the book, after the pictures. There are fifty-seven recipes in total. For each dish, Nomura also provides an amusing anecdote related to the food item. 

At the time of this writing, Yuri Nomura presided over the food creative team “Eatrip”. She went to London in 1998, after that she worked at various restaurants. In 2010, she gained a lot of experience as she was employed at the highly praised organic restaurant in Berkeley, California, Chez Panisse. Her main job now consists of working reception parties, catering, teaching cooking classes, writes a food-related column in a magazine, hosts a radio show, and does a lot of food direction for television and commercials. She also opened her own restaurant in Tokyo called [eatrip] in 2012.

Totte oki nikushiminaku tsukuru. Nomura says this is something her mother passed on to her when making food. It translates to “Make special foods without loathing.” Cook, eat, and share. This is the ideal that Nomura strives for. She has divided the book into four categories - timeless, sharing, seasons, and for you. 

In the timeless category you will find recipes for the French specialty coq-au-vin (chicken braised with wine, lardons, mushrooms, and the optional garlic), an Italian dish from Milan called osso buco (cross-cut veal shanks braised with white wine, vegetables, and broth), Russian favorites pirozhki (baked bun with a variety of fillings) and borscht (beet soup). Nomura being Japanese, she has also included recipes for chirashi-sushi (scattered sushi, as you can add any toppings to sushi rice) and gyusuji no shiro miso nikomi (stewed beef tendon by white miso).

In the sharing section, you will find recipes that would be great at parties such as cheese dip or cauliflower dip. Also featured are avocado with ricotta cheese, the Spanish favorite paella, shrimp salad with lemon dressing, fruit shortcakes, octopus tapas and more. 

Next are some seasonal dishes. As the book was published in 2010, the year of the tiger according to the Chinese zodiac, Nomura starts off with a recipe for a dish called kuri-kinton pudding. Kuri-kinton is a sweet chestnut paste with a yellowish color and says it represents the color of the tiger. Spring is the season for mimosa flowers to bloom in Japan and Nomura has a recipe for mimosa cake. She shares her recipe for corn pancakes which she remembers were made from the white corn harvested in the summer from her father’s vegetable garden. 

Finally, in the “for you” section, recipes for food and snacks to share with friends, co-workers, and more. There is a very traditional Japanese tradition called sashiire in which a person will bring snacks to a group of people, such as people working late at the office or they can be for entertainers, musicians and actors alike, who can snack on them in their dressing rooms. 

Photographer Yurie Nagashima brings all the dishes to life. Full color pictures in all their mouth-watering glory. The text for the recipes are in Japanese and the measurements for ingredients are all in the metric system but even if you don’t cook or can’t read Japanese, it is still a wonderful book to look through. Perhaps the pictures of the dishes will inspire you to create your own culinary delight. ~Ernie Hoyt

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (University of California Press)

Thai food has become a staple for American eaters, with Thai restaurants found in the most unlikely places throughout the U.S. Even more surprising are the number of Thai temples in America, but as Mark Padoongpatt points out, food and Buddhism are tied together in Thai culture. Thai immigrants want the guidance and community found in their temples but “Thai people must have Thai food.” 

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which replaced the draconian Exclusion Act, young Thai students came to attend U.S. universities. Soldiers who served in the Vietnam War came home with Thai wives who gained entry under the War Brides Act.  (By 1980, 40% of Thai women in America were the wives of veterans.) 

Los Angeles became a popular destination for Thai imigrants, who rapidly found that the food of that city wasn’t what they wanted to eat every day. Worse yet, they were unable to find the ingredients that are the crucial underpinning of Thai food. 

American women who had lived in Bangkok came home with recipes that they gathered into truly blood-curdling cookbooks, with dishes that substituted sour cream for coconut cream, anchovy paste for fish sauce,  and cayenne pepper for Thai chile. Thai people found a better solution, although a risky one. They smuggled ingredients back to the U.S. in their luggage, ones that were often confiscated by customs officials. The result of this culinary deprivation meant that by 1971, there was only one Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, and no Thai or Southeast Asian grocery store, until Pramote Tilakamonkul opened the Bangkok Market.

Realizing the precarious nature of smuggling food, whether in a suitcase or a container vessel,  Tilakamonkul turned to Mexico and its Free Trade Zones, along with its climate that fostered the cultivation of Thai ingredients, grown from Thai seeds. The Bangkok Market flourished and attracted Thai small businesses to its neighborhood, including a large number of Thai restaurants.

This coincided with America’s love of dining out, which went from being a special occasion to its transformation into a regular event in the ‘70s and ‘80’s. Once it was discovered by food writers, Thai cuisine became a sensation with its distinctive, sophisticated flavors and its healthful dishes. Thai restaurant owners brought Thai art and artifacts to set their businesses apart from those of other Asians and brought the civility of Thai culture into the front of the house, while employing young and attractive waitstaff who were predominately female. As the owner of an upscale Thai restaurant said, “Whether we like it or not, we represent Thailand culturally.”

When the first official Thai Buddhist temple, Wat Thai, was opened in 1979, its suburban neighbors were surprised at how jovial and social an entity it turned out to be. Thai people from all over the region came to participate in everything a Thai temple offers, including the traditional temple fairs which in America became frequent food festivals. The food sold at the fairs was cooked for Thai tastes, not adapted to American palates, and it became wildly popular with all residents of Los Angeles. Neighborhood parking was soon a contentious issue, as was littering and live music sent out from loudspeakers. This wasn’t the quiet and deferential mood that diners found in Thai restaurants and the neighborhood rebelled, with the result that the festivals no longer took place once a week. Instead that facet of Thai culture found a more congenial spot, in the area near the Bangkok Market, which has been given the official title of Thai Town.

Second-generation Thai American Mark Padoongpatt posits that Thai Americans are constrained and stereotyped by the American Empire’s placement of them as purveyors of food, “privileging Thai cuisine over Thai people.”  He points out the cultural appropriation practiced by David Thompson, whose encyclopedic volume, Thai Food, collected recipes from aristocratic Bangkok sources and launched Thompson’s mini-empire of Thai restaurants, and by Andy Ricker, who did the same thing with Northern Thai food and spread his chain of Pok Pok restaurants from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. He excoriates the bamboo ceiling that has driven Thai Americans into making their fortunes in kitchens and the naivete of Americans who take the image constructed by those restaurateurs and apply it to every Thai person they meet. He blames the adaption of Thai food into a bland and sweet bastardization upon the culinary colonization that the American palate has forced on an unfamiliar cuisine. His argument is passionate and wide-ranging, raising issues that have been ignored for much too long~Janet Brown

Xi’an Famous Foods by Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou, photographs by Jenny Huang (Abrams Books)

“There’s a tall, old white dude with a film crew. Do you know who he is?” David Shi, the owner of Xi’an Famous Foods in Queens, is probably one of the few people in New York City in 2011 who would have to ask that question. His son Jason Wang gives him the answer. The old white dude is Anthony Bourdain and the film crew with him is going to propel this small restaurant in a Flushing shopping mall into a culinary destination with worldwide fame.

Shi brought his family to the U.S. from China when his son was only seven but the little boy was already claimed by the strong flavors of black vinegar and cumin-dusted lamb skewers. He had come from a city that was once a major stop on the Silk Road and had developed its own cuisine with the addition of Middle Eastern ingredients: lamb and “earthy spices like cardamom and star anise.” Jason Wang left a “city of fiery desert food” for a country where soy sauce was an exotic item on supermarket shelves. His father discovered that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. served food that would never be found in China. He supported his family by cooking sweet, bland dishes in cities across the East Coast, working at a circuit of different restaurants for years.

Wang soon became homesick for the street food he’d known since birth. As soon as he was tall enough to see over the top of a barbecue grill, he began to recreate the lamb skewers that haunted his taste buds. Adding cumin and salt, he successfully replicated the flavor that he longed for. Obviously, his future in food was already set in place, although it took him time to realize that.

Anyone who has eaten the food of Xi’an will never forget its taste and textures. Xi capitalized on that distnctive cuisine after he moved his family to the Chinese city of Flushing, a district of Queens that has become the borough’s culinary capital. Growing from a streetside stall near a shopping plaza to “a mini empire of stores all across New York City,” Xi’an Famous Foods has turned cumin-lamb noodles into a New York dish that’s become as popular as pizza or bagels.

Wang pays homage to his birthplace with photographs (taken by Jenny Huang) and stories that are as enticing as the recipes that have come from the city of Xi’an. He reveals the bounty of the  Xi Cang street market as he remembers it, long before it became a tourist attraction that sells deep fried scorpions to crowds of out-of-towners. He teasingly exults over a childhood favorite spot that’s still in business, selling lamb dumplings in vinegar, while refusing to divulge its location, and is thrilled when he finds shops that only make the “daily bread of Xi’an,” fried in a skillet and served warm. He pays homage to the kitchens of his grandparents and offers The No-Frills Guide to Xi’an as a Tourist: a launching pad to this city whose history has been shaped by thirteen dynasties.

Xi’an Famous Foods is more than a cookbook, despite its extraordinary collection of recipes and its detailed instructions on how to follow them.  Wang has written a family history and a tribute to a rapidly changing center of Chinese culture, as well as to the Chinese outpost in New York that launched his family’s success.  On so many different levels, his book is an inspiration--to eat different kinds of food, to make it at home, to visit the banquet of Xi’an food hat exists in New York, and to explore the place where it all came from—”the swirling of cultures in Xi’an.”~Janet Brown

Chopstick Cinema : Exploring Asian Food and Film by Celeste Heiter (ThingsAsian Press)

There are three things that writer Celeste Heiter enjoys most in life - “Asian culture, gourmet cooking, and international films”. Heiter has combined her passions and created a weblog titled Chopstick Cinema in 2004 where she shares with readers “the process of choosing an Asian film, selecting recipes from where the country in which the film takes place, designing a menu, shopping for ingredients, setting the table, preparing the meal, enjoying the food while watching the film, and finally, writing a film review”. 

Chopstick Cinema : Exploring Asian Food and Film was compiled from her blog and is divided into ten chapters focusing on one Asian country and features ten recipes from that country. The recipes are for "nibbles, cold and hot appetizers, soup, salad, noodles, main course, two side dishes and dessert". Following the recipe, Heiter provides a review of a movie from that particular country. The cuisine and films Heiter focuses on are from China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Cambodia, India, and combined countries of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Heiter also lists alternate movie titles to choose from. 

The recipes provide a list of ingredients with measurements given in a combination of the Avoirdupois system (using pounds and ounces) and the U.S. customary units for volume (using teaspoons and tablespoons) with easy to follow directions. About the dishes, Heiter informs the reader that “some are classics prepared according to tradition; others are my own creations, based upon indigenous flavors and ingredients”. She also says you do not have to follow the recipes to the letter and provides suggestions for alternate ingredients.

The movies Heiter reviews in her book include “Raise the Red Lantern” from China, “The Cave of the Yellow Dog” from Mongolia, “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring” from South Korea, “The Scent of Green Papaya” from Vietnam, “Rice Rhapsody” from Singapore, “Magnifico” from the Philippines, “Firefly Dreams” from Japan, “The Rice People” from Cambodia, and “Lagaan : Once Upon a Time in India” from India. 

I enjoy Asian cinema as much as I like watching Hollywood blockbusters and low budget B-films and I also love to eat Asian cuisine be it Japanese, Korean, or Southeast Asian. However, as I am not a good cook in the kitchen, I must admit I only browsed through the recipes. Chopstick Cinema will give you ideas of what to order when you go out to a restaurant featuring that country’s cuisine. 

And for those people who want to challenge themselves to make these dishes, Heiter suggests choosing three to five dishes for a party of four to six and to enjoy the meal while watching one of the films. If the amateur or professional cooks are afraid of not finding the ingredients necessary, Heiter lists a number of  sites on the Internet where you can order them.. 

On a sad note, Heiter passed away in 2016 but you can still find more of her recipes and read more of her film reviews on her Chopstick Cinema weblog. A great collection for the gourmand and Asian film connoisseur. and although I may not try my hand at cooking, I will continue to browse her blog and read her reviews and check out what other culinary delights and movies I’ve been missing out on. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsianBooks

Ekiben : The Ultimate Japanese Travel Food by Aki Tomura (IBC Publishing)

I am an army brat. My father was in the army. My mother is Japanese. I spent most of my elementary years living on a base in Tokyo, Japan in the early '70s. We lived on a base called Grant Heights which was located in Itabashi Ward, near Narimasu station. Every summer, my brother and I would look forward to going to my grandmother's house in Maizuru, a small coastal town on the Sea of Japan that was located in Kyoto Prefecture. ot get there, we would take the “bullet” train, commonly known as the shinkansen, where we would look forward to sitting in the dining car and having a bowl of curry rice.

I moved back to Tokyo, Japan as an adult in 1995. After settling into my new job and surroundings, and saving a bit of money, I was able to visit my grandmother's home in Maizuru again. This meant I would be taking the shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. I was so looking forward to sitting in the dining car and having a bowl of curry rice again. It was over twenty years since my first shinkansen experience--imagine my shock when I found there was no longer a dining car on the route from Tokyo to Kyoto. It had been replaced by a moving cart, similar to what’s found on the airlines, except you had to pay for your own drinks, snacks, and food. But then, I discovered something else. I discovered the world of the ekiben. (Eki is the Japanese word for “station”. Ben is a shortened form of bento, the ready-made box lunch.) 

This book, Ekiben, has a  subtitle that’s direct and to the point, The box lunch you buy at the station and eat on the train. The book also provides a short history of the ekiben which I wasn't familiar with. When the railroads were being built during the Meiji era (1868-1912), bentos were made available at every station. They are still available but they have evolved quite a bit. The ekibens are usually eaten on a long train journey and there is an incredible variety of the types of ekibens you can buy.

This book provides you with just the tip of the iceberg concerning ekibens. It can be used as a guide to show you at which station the ekibens are available, providing a full color picture of the package and its contents.

The book is divided into seven regions, starting with Hokkaido and the Tohoku area (which includes Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, Yamagata, and Akita Prefectures), the Kanto region (which includes Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa Prefectures and the Tokyo metropolis), the Hokuriki region (which includes Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, and Fukui Prefectures), the Chubu region (which includes Aichi, Gifu, Nagano, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, and Mie Prefectures), the Kinki region (which includes Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Nara, Wakayama, and Shiga Prefectures), the Chugoku region (which includes Shimane, Okayama, Yamaguchi, and Hiroshima Prefectures), and ending with the Shikoku and Kyushu regions (which includes Kagawa, Tokushima, Ehime, Kochi Prefectures in Shikoku and Fukuoka, Oita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Kumamoto, Nagasaki, Saga, and Okinawa Prefectures in Kyushu).

For every ekiben, each page will show you the name of the bento, the type of bento it is (there are about nine different types introduced), the name of the railway, the name of the station where its available, the package appearance, an image of the box, an image of the contents, and at the bottom of the page, a description of the bento.

These days, you don't even have to go to a particular station. There is an ekiben specialty store inside Tokyo station, where you can buy ekibens from all over Japan. Many department stores have ekiben campaigns from time to time as well.

Although I miss eating curry rice in the dining car on the shinkansen,  I still look forward to long train journeys which gives me a chance to try the different types of ekiben. When visiting Japan, eating an ekiben should definitely be on your list of things to do!~Ernie Hoyt

Pretty Good Number One : An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton (Viaduct Music)

I never get tired of reading about other people's experiences in my adopted homeland of Japan so this month,  I chose something close to my heart. It’s a  story about traveling, food, and Japan by an author who happens to live in my hometown of Seattle! I didn't realize this was Amster-Burton's second book after Hungry Monkey : A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater, which I have yet to read but I must say, this is one entertaining romp through one of the world's best gastronomic capitals, Tokyo.

The book I chose to review may have a strange title to Americans maybe, but if you have ever been to Nakano, where Amster-Burton's family stayed for a month while experiencing the culinary life of Tokyo, it would not surprise you. Japan is full of English signs that don't seem to make any sense to native speakers. Amster-Burton covers what every novice or first time visitor should check out--ramen, sushi, okonomiyaki ( a Japanese style of pancake which is savory, not sweet) and of course takoyaki (octopus balls which are a staple in Osaka). All of this he accomplishes with his 8-year- old daughter in tow (and a wife who actually suggests living in Tokyo for a short spell).

You will be captivated not only by him and his daughter satisfying their palates, but also finding joy in the way they find everything about Japan fascinating--riding on the bullet train, browsing the depa-chika (the food section in the basement of department stores), the convenience stores, and other everyday things most expats take for granted.

It reminded me of all my solitary food excursions I used to take when I first moved here, but as the author only spent a short time here, he missed out on a variety of food festivals that are held almost weekly throughout the summer at Yoyogi Park. Still, even a long time resident of Japan will be able to “gobble” up this food and travel memoir.

Thailand's Best Street Food by Chawadee Nualkhair (Tuttle)

All over the world people are looking for street food, except perhaps for the people who grew up eating it. They’re often looking for more “sophistication” in their dining choices, which range from McDonalds to sous vide, depending on their income levels. They’re replaced by travelers, whose eagerness to find street food is exceeded only by their ignorance. Where? What? When? (And sometimes)—Why?
 

Several years ago, Chawadee Nualkhair brought light to the darkness for Bangkok visitors when she wrote Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls, which is now out of print but still relevant if you can find one on alibris or at a used bookstore. (I suggest Dasa Books and Coffee in Bangkok.) In its wake, she brings Thailand’s Best Street Food to eaters whose ambition surpasses their local knowledge—or for Thai residents who are overwhelmed by their culinary choices.

It may seem hubristic to the point of madness to narrow Thailand’s street food choices to a scant 160 pages, but that isn’t what Ms. Nualkhair is doing. She has written a sort of eater’s primer, giving a springboard of information that will launch the reader’s own journey of discovery—or, with any luck at all, her own series of street food guides to the regions she introduces in her latest book.

She begins with questions: Is street food dying out? What is a street food stall? How did she make her selections for this book? The question and answer that I loved best in her first book is absent here: How do you determine the hygiene of a particular vendor? Nualkhair’s advice is look carefully at the jars that hold condiments; if they aren’t clean, walk away.

A visual glossary to different kinds of noodles with accompanying ingredients and broth, fried noodles, rice dishes, appetizers and snacks, desserts, and beverages, with names in both English and Thai is almost worth the price of the book. Don’t want ice in your drink? Point to the Thai script for it and shake your head vigorously with a dramatic rendition of “Nononono." The only thing missing is the Thai script for “Where is the toilet?” which just might come in handy.

Otherwise the reader is covered, beyond a doubt. There are maps to each culinary destination; there are names and addresses of the food stalls both in English and in Thai, there are wonderful and tempting photographs (that certainly deserve more space than they have been given), and every so often there is a recipe—Elvis Suki’s Grilled Scallops, anyone? Adventurous eaters are even told which stalls have restrooms and which do not provide bathroom tissue.

The choices range from north to south, with the greatest concentration given to Bangkok. But every region is given careful attention—think quality over quantity, along with information that will help in conducting further independent study.

Really, what more does anyone need? On my next trip to Thailand, this book is going along too.~Janet Brown

Bangkok's Top Fifty Street Food Stalls by Chawadee Nualkhair (Wordplay)

I'll never forget how amazed I was when I first arrived in Bangkok and a friend took me for my first meal. We sat by the side of a road on teetering chairs with friendly dogs waiting to see what we ordered and ate some of the best food I'd ever had in my life.

But I was lucky. I had a friend who lived here who helped initiate me into the wonderful world of street stalls. Even now, sixteen years later, when I go to a new neighborhood in Bangkok, I'm overwhelmed by the food choices and sometimes by the looks of the unfamiliar food carts. I know the food is going to be terrific but where to start and how much will selective blindness play in my decision?

I am a huge fan of eating on the street. Not only is it more fun than a food court, the food is usually fresher, since few food stalls have access to refrigeration. but I often wonder--if I hadn't been guided by a friend early on, would I have ventured into the joys of street food? How do travelers who have only a few days in Bangkok become immersed in this part of Thai culture?

The answer is easy now--they buy this book. Chawadee Nualkhair has made food pilgrimages to neighborhoods that travelers often frequent and has found places she loves there. In a city with "300,000 to 500,000 food stalls," she has narrowed the choices down to a manageable number, with dishes ranging from fish maw soup in Chinatown to samosas in the Sikh neighborhood, from mussel omelets to pork satay--and yes-- phad thai and papaya salad too. She offers a comprehensive glossary of Thai desserts and beverages (butterfly pea juice anyone?) with a dictionary of useful phrases like "Where is the bathroom?" written both in English transliteration and in Thai. (Essential for those of us who find tonal languages daunting.)

Perhaps the saddest part of this book today is her description of Soi 38 on Sukhumvit Road, which was once Bangkok's most convenient "food stall market", offering a splendid variety of choices as evening approaches and the night air turns cool(er). Providing food for the hungry from six at night until three the next morning, this is now gone in the name of progress

Yet there are also sections of this book that still thrive and will keep even those jaded Old Bangkok Hands happy as well, with food in the Hualamphong area and Chinatown--and maps to make the discovery process painless.

The perfect size to tuck into my bag, this book is my new best friend-read it and eat! Its wonderful photographs are sure to jump-start your appetite--and that's a good thing. If you're here for a week, you're going to want to try all 50 of Chawadee's choices. (Just be prepared to eat seven meals a day--and eight on Sunday!)~Janet Brown

Coffee Life in Japan by Merry White (University of California Press)

Starbucks has given Seattle a reputation for coffee worldwide, providing standardized espresso drinks and clean restrooms all across the globe. In much of Asia, especially in China, the Pacific Northwest chain has become a chic place to sit and sip—but not in Japan.

Merry White begins her examination of coffeehouses in Japan with memories of “the Vienna, a four-story velvet extravaganza, where kaffe Wien was served with Mozart, amid gilt chairs and filigreed balconies,” of “a neighborhood café, redolent of male friendship, old cigarettes, and smelly feet,” and a “a half-underground, cavelike café” where customers removed all of their clothes, were daubed with blue paint and then were urged to press their bodies against sheets of white paper hanging from the walls. This was in Tokyo in the 1960s, when Howard Schultz was still drinking milk in elementary school and most coffee-drinkers in Seattle still used a percolator.

Japan enthusiastically took to coffee in 1888, when the first coffeehouse emerged in Tokyo, established by a cosmopolite Japanese who had been adopted by a man from Taiwan, was raised to speak four languages, and was sent to Yale University when he was sixteen. Although this initial foray into coffee culture went bankrupt (its founder died seven years later in Seattle), Meiji-era Japan perceived coffee drinking as a modern virtue and the café as an intriguing personal space in a country where this came at a premium. “Coffee,” White explains, “became Japanese quickly…From the early 1900s, coffee, a drink for everyday, became a commonplace and Japanese beverage.”

And the beverage was powered by the places where it was enjoyed. With its ‘dry inebriation,” coffee “was seen also as the drink of thoughtfulness,” providing a way to be “private in public.” While in the West, coffeehouses were gathering places of extroverted sociability, in Japan they became an essential “third place,” spots where pressures of home and work were escaped for a time, where private space could be purchased for the price of a cup of coffee.

As places where people are free to interact or not as they choose, Japanese coffeehouses became “shape- shifters.”  There are cafés for every facet of a personality—places to be anonymous and quiet, places to see art, places to hear jazz, places that serve as classical music venues where patrons request that certain record albums be played as they sit silently sipping their coffee, places where tiny fish nibble the submerged bare feet of coffee drinkers, and of course the neighborhood spots where “everybody knows your name.”

The Japanese café is not a matter of style over substance. The drinking of coffee is a paramount consideration and each cup is often hand-crafted--kodawari., or the art of dedication, is essential. The beans are often roasted in the coffeehouse, with a particular bean often ordered ahead of time by a customer, and are ground for that serving alone, as soon as the order has been placed. The water is poured over the ground beans in a slow and meticulous stream of carefully-placed drips, only after it has been cooled from its boiling point to the proper temperature. The freshly-ground coffee is moistened without the water ever touching the sides of the filter. “Coffee masters” often disdain espresso machines, preferring the time-honored drip from a narrow-spouted kettle over a filter made of flannel. One master is known for evicting from his shop customers who ask for cream and sugar to put in the coffee he makes—“he would have made it stronger or hotter, or with a different bean, if sugar or milk were needed.”

Small wonder that the Japanese art of coffee is spreading throughout the world. Suzuki beans and cafés are found throughout Southeast Asia and Japanese coffee-making methods are being taught in the U.S. from New York City to San Francisco. Perhaps Seattle, with its resurging Nihonmachi, will eventually lead the way for coffee drinkers to experience the full spectrum of public caffeination as it’s described in Coffee Life in Japan.~Janet Brown

Sushi & Beyond : What the Japanese know about Cooking by Michael Booth (Vintage Books)

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you’re asked about Japanese cuisine?  The most obvious answer is found in the title above; I imagine most people would say “sushi”.  But Booth hasn’t written a guide book to sushi and the best places to eat it.  Look at the “& Beyond” and know that there is going to be more than sushi involved in Booth’s exploration of Japanese cookery.

The book starts out with a conversation Booth has with a friend at a restaurant in Normandy called Sa.Qua.Na—but to call this a conversation is a bit tame, Booth trades insults with Toshi, a half-Japanese, half-Korean man who is his fellow-student at the Paris Cordon Bleu.  Booth lightly compares the food of Sa.Qua.Na’s chef to that of Japan’s, knowing that the chef had worked in Japan for a few years.  This sets Toshi off, saying, “What you know about Japan food?  You think you know anything about Japan food?  Only in Japan!  You can not taste it here in Europe.  This man is nothing like Japan food.  Where is tradition?  Where is season?  Where is meaning?...”

Booth’s retort was just as impassioned, if not a bit juvenile – “I know enough about it to know how dull it is…What have you got?  Raw fish, noodles, deep-fried vegetables – and you stole all that from that from Thailand, the Chinese, the Portuguese.  Doesn’t matter though, does it?  You just dunk it in soy sauce and it all tastes the same, right?  Ooh, don’t tell me, cod sperm and whale meat.  Mmm, gotta get me some of those.”

I was beginning to wonder if this was going to be an interesting book after all but my worries were put to rest.  After these two adversaries graduate, Toshi gives Booth a book entitled “Japanese Cooking : A Simple Art” by Shizuo Tsuji.  After reading this, Booth decides to head over to the Land of the Rising Sun to see what all the fuss is about.

His plan is to try a bit of everything there is to eat, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, taking his wife and two young kids with him. Their first stop of course is Tokyo where they rent a small apartment and venture into the culinary heart of Japan in Shinjuku’s famous “Shoben Yokocho.” This translates to “Piss Alley” and it is full of small yakitori shops. Here Booth finds more than just chicken breast on skewers—there’s nankotsu (cartilage), bonjiri (chicken butt), hatsu (chicken hearts).  They go to Ryogoku, Tokyo’s home to sumo wrestlers and also home to an array ofchanko nabe (one- pot stews) shops run and owned by former sumo wrestlers.  Booth interviews Japan’s top chefs and checks out a few restaurants that many Japanese cannot get a reservation to enter. But this isn’t what he really wants. He yearns to make some Japanese dishes for himself and then eat them.

In order to reach this goal, Booth signs up for a couple of cooking classes and also takes a tour of Japan’s two top cooking schools.  The Ecole de Cuisine et Nutrition Hattori, run by Dr Yukio Hattori in the Kanto area which encompasses Tokyo, and the Tsuji Culinary Institute which was founded by the author of “Japanese Cooking” – Shizuo Tsuji— and is currently run by his son in the Kansai area.

But Booth can’t mention sushi without taking a tour of Japan’s busiest fish market – Tsukiji.  He fills us in on the seafood of Hokkaido, the fugu (puffer fish) of Shimonoseki, Kobe beef, wagyu, and how miso is made. He takes a tour of one of Kikkoman’s factories that makes soy sauce, discusses the controversy surrounding MSG, checks out the food- stall culture of Fukuoka in Kyushu, dines on a kaiseki meal in Kyoto and even manages to dine at the extra- exclusive, members- only restaurant called Mibu, “the place that made Joel Robuchon weep and humbled Ferran Adria.”

Anyone who claims to be a “foodie” or a gourmand and sees those two names in the same sentence is definitely going to want to read this book…and will enjoy it.  I know I did!  by Ernie Hoyt

Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam by Kim Fay (ThingsAsian Press)

Sometimes I think American women travel to discover the taste of good food and to rediscover "The Art of Eating," as M.F.K. Fisher termed it in her classic volume of travel, cookery, and enjoyment. When I first discovered that book, I carried it with me and read it every chance I got--waiting at doctors' offices, at soccer practices, at traffic lights. A friend saw me with it and asked, "Doesn't that title frighten you?"

She was a woman who was substantially overweight; I was a woman who was constantly on a diet, but M.F.K. gave me an inkling of what food and eating could be.  I didn't discover that art until I went to Thailand where eating was an act of pleasure, not one of guilt, shame,and fear.

Although I am sure that Kim Fay's relationship with food was much less troubled than mine, it is quite clear from her book that she discovered how much immense pleasure comes from good food that is freshly prepared and eaten in the company of friends during her four years of living in Vietnam.

Missing this dimension to her daily life when she went back home to the states, Kim returns to Vietnam with her photographer-sister to explore that country's food--its history, its preparation, its flavors, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The result is a wonderful mixture of travel memoir,  food literature, and cultural history, served up with a generous helping of humor and a number of tantalizing recipes.

Kim and her sister Julie are joined by Kim's friend Huong, a fashionable and opinionated woman with a stunningly healthy appetite and a talent for finding the best places to fulfill her ravenous desire for good food. The three of them roam through cooking classes and restaurants, from Vietnam's finest hotels to roadside stands, learning to cook regional classics  while enjoying other dishes that they soon want to learn to cook.

Talking to chefs and organic farmers, connoisseurs of fish sauce and women who learned the importance of food through experiencing past famine, Kim Fay is adept at illuminating a country through the food that it prepares. Her love for Vietnam is obvious and her skill at describing who she meets, what she sees, and what she tastes as she travels from one end of the country to another makes her readers love it as well.

Through her eyes, Vietnam is revealed in all of its colors and flavors and textures. from "the opal blue" of its tropical twilight to "the sweet seep of sugar cane' that infuses the taste of ground pork, from the colonial splendor of the hillside retreat of Dalat to a cozy household kitchen with its "dented pots, daggerlike knives, and faded plastic spice containers",  from world-famous chef  Didier Corlou to the "Julia Child of Vietnam."

Although she generously provides clear instructions on how to prepare claypot fish, banana flower salad and fresh spring rolls, along with lesser-known dishes,  Kim Fay has written far more than the usual food memoir. She has infused the art of eating in Vietnam with its history, its culture, and more than a few damned good stories.  Read her book, laugh, and then book your own culinary odyssey to Vietnam, with your copy of Communion tucked securely into your suitcase. Bon appetit! ~by Janet Brown

Available at ThingsAsian Books

---

Ivan's Ramen by Ivan Orkin (Little More)

If you’re an expat living in Tokyo like me, one of the first things you will probably fall in love with is ramen.  It’s the fast-food of Japan.  There are over 5000 ramen shops to choose from in Tokyo alone.  But Ivan Ramen has something that no other ramen shop has in Tokyo, or perhaps even in Japan.  Ivan Ramen is the only ramen shop in Tokyo that’s own and run by an American – Ivan Orkin.  What makes this story so amazing is that Ivan did not even know how to make ramen before he started his restaurant.

This is his story of how he followed his dream.  Ivan takes us back to his roots in New York City where he was born in a small Jewish neighborhood.  His father was a lawyer, while his mother enjoyed hobbies such as painting and photography.  They had a house-maid who did all the domestic chores and left his mother with free time to pursue her favorite activities.  As the family was pretty well off, one of Ivan’s earliest memories was of his parents taking him to different restaurants.  Even at a young age, it was these trips to various restaurants that would mold Ivan into what he is today.

Ivan Ramen

Ivan’s first introduction to Japanese cuisine is at 15 when he works part-time as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant called “Tsubo”.  It’s here where he gets his first taste of Japanese cuisine starting with tamagokake gohan. This is plain white rice that’s topped with a raw egg and perhaps a dash of soy sauce, and is not on a regular menu.  Ivan has such fond memories of working here and with the Japanese staff that he decides to study Japanese in college.

In college, he becomes fascinated with ramen after going to the movies and watching Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo”, and if you get a chance to watch the movie, you may become a ramen convert yourself.  After graduating, Ivan makes his first trip to Japan as a teacher of English, a job where he found no satisfaction.  Realizing that he enjoys cooking,  he returns to the States and enrolls in the prestigious Culinary Institute of America.  Back in the States, Ivan longs to eat the ramen he tasted while in Japan but the only place to get good noodles in New York at this time is in Chinatown.  Eating the noodles there, he has an epiphany--to move back to Japan and start his own ramen shop.

With the help and support of his Japanese wife, he heads back with  her to the Land of the Rising Sun.  But Ivan as yet does not know the first thing about making ramen.  Fortune shineds upon him as he finds someone to teach him the skill he needs.  Soon, Ivan decides to open his own ramen shop.  This is much easier said than done.  First off, a lot of people say he is crazy to even attempt such an adventure.  Others say there was no way that an American could run a successful ramen shop.  Even with all the pressure and negative responses, Ivan follows his dream with determination.  With his wife and two friends, Ivan finally opens his shop in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward near Rokka Koen Station.  News of an American owning and running his own ramen shop in Tokyo brings in curious customers.  His shop gains popularity from word of mouth and becomes a big hit in the ramen community.

Being a ramen fan myself, I most definitely had to go to Ivan Ramen.  I can assure you that the pictures in the book are as eye-pleasing and appetizing as the real thing.  This is probably the only ramen shop in Tokyo where you can also order hand-made ice cream from their menu.  Ivan’s concept is to have a family-friendly atmosphere where you can dine on delicious ramen, using only uses fresh ingredients which he buys locally.  He also makes his own noodles at the shop.  In fact, his kitchen space is twice as large as the dining space where he continues to experiment with new menu ideas.  If you get a chance to visit Tokyo and crave ramen for lunch, Ivan Ramen is a must-stop on your itinerary.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop (Norton)

When the SARS epidemic became news in China, speculation claimed that the illness might be caused by eating civet cat. This theory was particularly disturbing to Fuchsia Dunlop, who only days before had feasted at a banquet where she had been served a claypot soup that had been proudly identified by her host as containing civet meat.

Less than ten years before, Fuchsia had been daunted by the prospect of eating preserved duck eggs in Hong Kong, on her introductory trip to Asia. A self-confessed "worrier" when she first went to China, she soon "realised that if you want a real encounter with another culture, you have to abandon your cocoon." As a woman who had been taught that it was bad manners to refuse food that was given to you, and who yearned to escape academia for a culinary life, Fuchsia came to China to research ethnic minorities and became seduced by Sichuan pepper instead.

As a student living in a province that is famous for its food, Fuchsia is delighted by the way that Sichuan's "dark pink, pimply" peppercorns make her mouth "dance and tingle." That unfamiliar and alluring sensation leads her to eat everything she can find in this cuisine that "makes the ordinary extraordinary." She falls in love with Sichuanese food, and her new passion leads her to a new career--learning everything she can about the food of China and presenting to the rest of the world through cookbooks.

And yet to learn the language of cookery, Fuchsia needs to learn not just how to speak Chinese, but how to live in China. With the "basic grammar of cuisine," comes the hard-won knowledge of how to behave, how to speak the different dialects of the provinces she lives in, and how to become "nonchalant about risk." She succeeds so well that this well brought-up English girl slurps, spits, and splutters strange sounds at the table, admitting that "inside me, there is someone who is no longer entirely English." She becomes a foreigner in her own country, while in China she is "all too often a big-nosed barbarian," one of those blessed and cursed people who "juggle cultures."

Because she is a juggler, Fuchsia does not write an ordinary book extolling the delights and horrors of eating in China. She knows too much to have her knowledge fail to permeate her pages--and has lived in China long enough that she doesn't present herself as an expert--but as someone who has observed while learning.

She sees the city of Chendu change from a quiet city of wooden houses and "labyrinths of lanes" to a city that is "futuristic in its gleaming ambition" and admires the "brazen confidence" of a country with the courage to remake itself. She recognizes the decadence of eating shark's fin while still savoring it in her mouth, and makes at least one of her readers long for the opportunity to eat a fried rabbit's head, "cleft in half and tossed in a wok with chili and spring onion." And she poses difficult questions to those who love to look at China as the world's most voracious consumer, pointing out that it is a country that is just "catching up with the greed of the rest of the world."

When she concludes with a vivid story of how she quite mindfully eats a caterpillar that she has inadvertently steamed, along with vegetables from her mother's garden in England, describing her qualms and its "insipid, watery taste," it's impossible to keep from remembering the first taste of escargot or a live oyster. Fuchsia Dunlop's gift is to unite the world of adventurous eaters by making them look at their various barbaric appetites and understand that while it's all a matter of taste, learning the tastes of other countries can break down barriers while eradicating boundaries. Bon appetit!

Ant Egg Soup by Natacha Du Pont De Bie (Sceptre Books)

If you believe that one of the main reasons to travel is to find new things to eat and if your favorite souvenirs are recipes from the countries you explore, then Natacha Du Pont De Bie is going to be your new best friend. She's the kind of woman who goes to a country simply because she's intrigued by its food, "a tourist with an inquisitive nature and an empty stomach."

Discovering that there was only one book in print written in English about the cuisine of Laos, she tracked it down, found the man who published it, Alan Davidson,and learned that he as the former British Ambassador to Laos had been given a collection of royal recipes by the Crown Prince, shortly before the monarchy was dissolved by the Pathet Lao. That was enough to send Natacha to Laos, and in 2000 off she went with her copy of Traditional Recipes of Laos, determined to meet people who would show her how different contemporary Lao cooking was from that which had been set before the King.

Arriving in Vientiane just in time for lunch, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who stamps her passport in the airport and is immediately taken to eat raw laap. This may not be the most conventional introduction to Lao food for the beginner but Natacha loves it, telling both the reasons why and how to make it in kitchens far from Laos.

There are far too few books about traveling and eating in Laos, and for that reason alone this book stands out. But to recommend it on those grounds alone would be unfair to Natacha. She's a traveler who wants to go everywhere, eat everything, talk with her mouth full, peer over shoulders in every kitchen--and then tell stories about it all. She's not averse to drinking too much Beer Lao, or even more disastrously lao-lao, but is up the next morning to see what's for breakfast (coffee, bananas, rice balls, baguettes, honey, chili sauce, sticky rice and home-made papaya jam greet her during her first Lao hangover.)

She's the kind of woman who's never met a market she didn't like, and her journey through Laos is studded with descriptions of markets and how to cook the food that's sold there. And she's clever enough to go with people who can show her food that won't be found outside of Laos' national borders--like a sliver of wood called sa-khan that's put in stews and tastes "faintly metallic with a mere trace of clove" which,she says,"made the inside of my mouth tingle and zing" and gives plain water the flavor of lemon. Ant eggs have a mild, nutty flavor that prompts her to call them the "caviar of Laos" and she tells how to cook them, if you can find them frozen or canned. Or better yet, just follow in Natacha's footsteps and eat them in Salavan on the edge of the Bolaven Plateau. I certainly plan to--and I'll probably be there in the company of my battered and travel-worn copy of Ant Egg Soup.

Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan)

Travel is a bottomless pit of addiction, airline tickets are expensive, and carbon footprints are becoming an overriding concern for many who used to hop on a plane without a qualm. Faced with these incontrovertible facts while feeling the distinct symptoms of what in some parts of the world is called "cabin fever," what is a wanderlust-plagued and housebound creature to do? Pick up a cookbook, of course--but not just any cookbook.

For desperate times like these, it's essential to turn to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, the husband and wife who have spent more than twenty years roaming the world with their two children, their cameras, their culinary curiosity and their spirit of adventure. They choose a spot and move in, exploring it through its food--eating, making friends with cooks, and then learning from them. These are not slash-and-burn adventurers; they are pioneer practitioners of Slow Travel and when they leave a place, they take with them far more than recipes. Any cookbook that comes from Alford and Duguid is a finely distilled mixture of stories and photographs that brings an entire world to their readers, rather than a simple collection of exotic dishes and how to prepare them. To open any of their books is to embark on an adventure that is almost as satisfying as making a real-life journey, and to feast upon words and images that are every bit as seductive and as satisfying as the food that they describe.

Anyone who turns the first page of Hot Sour Salty Sweet is immediately carried off on a journey along the Mekong river, swept through China's province of Yunnan, into Burma's Shan State, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, ending in Vietnam, where the river meets the sea. While following the river, Duguid and Alford find " a shared approach to food, as well as a common palate" among the people of these widely divergent cultures. The countries of the Mekong are tied together by a common thread. "Food is for fun, for joy."

Food is celebrated in these pages, and through this festive approach toward nutritional fuel is a celebration of the places and people who produce it. Although there is no recipe for fish heads and fat, Jeffrey Alford's story of being the only man in a group of several hundred Chinese women who spent the day rhythmically chanting in a dry riverbed, stopping at midday to picnic on a fish head and a chunk of fat washed down with tea, leaves an unforgettable image and questions that inevitably lead to cultural exploration. If readers want to know how the fish heads were prepared, or what kind of fat was eaten, that particular journey of discovery is left for them to pursue. What Alford makes clear is the welcoming and generous hospitality that allowed him to be part of something that otherwise would never be part of his experience, which is what every traveler yearns for.

That same generosity permeates every part of this food odyssey. Noodles are photographed only after the photographer has spent hours watching soaked rice being ground between two millstones by hand, to turn to flour, then a wet dough, then squeezed through holes in a bag into boiling water to become "beautiful white coils." The fish in a photograph was probably caught between the palms of two agile hands in a pond, and the smiling child who is embracing a chicken will doubtless eat it with equal happiness soon. Duguid and Alford's own children are awakened early one morning in Northern Laos by a water buffalo peering at them through the door of their hotel room, in a town where they will later breakfast on freshly made noodles at a market stall--and then a recipe is given to bring the flavor and fragrance of a Laos breakfast to a table somewhere on the other side of the world.

This is a cookbook that may never be used in a kitchen. It's the kind of book that captures readers for hours and then sends them away from their sheltering walls, ravenous and eager to explore their corner of the world for its own particular sights and scents and explosions of taste.