THE COOKBOOK TEST #0077: VIETNAMESE FOOD AND FOOD CULTURE
INSTALLMENT #0077 (FREE) I SMELL A RAT / WHAT'S IN A NAME? / PHO SURE / PLAYING CHICKEN
Dear Readers,
One of the hardest things for me to write is the dreaded Polarized Mixed Review. This is not a review of a mediocre book, but rather an assessment of one that somehow manages to unite both dreadful and superlative elements under the same roof.
I truly wanted to have an uncomplicated and positive experience with VIETNAMESE FOOD AND FOOD CULTURE. I love Vietnamese food, and seek it out on a regular basis here in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is home to a large and lively immigrant population that runs some absolutely killer restaurants.
And I was intrigued by the book's premise: The author, Paul B. Kennedy, is an American restaurateur who traveled and taught extensively in Vietnam over the course of five years. Seeing another part of the world through a white perspective can be challenging, but it can be done with tact, sensitivity, insight, curiosity, and a true spirit of cultural openness. [1]
That said: I do not think the non-recipe portions of Vietnamese Food and Food Culture were uniformly written with tact, sensitivity, insight, and a true spirit of cultural openness.
The book's extensive use of stock photography immediately put me on edge - I would rather the author had supplied blurry phone snapshots that told a specific, real, lived story than look at glossy Shutterstock images crafted to fill Powerpoint presentations.
And the book's introduction (themed around how being a "traveler" like the author is far more interesting and serious than being a "tourist" like, presumably, the vast majority of the book's readers) wasn't much better. It was a master class in telling rather than showing.
Instead of the author introducing us to Vietnamese friends and chefs and sharing story after story of conversations and observations, we get a laundry list of trivia including everything from a capsule account of the Coconut Religion (which the author describes, possibly fairly, as a cult) to an observation that Vietnamese police officers make drunk drivers do push-ups in lieu of a fine [2] to a surprisingly large number of detailed observations about how cheap everything is thanks to the exchange rate.
And then we get this passage, which really derailed things for me.
Travel makes the bored curious
Many think that durian smells like a rotten animal and tastes like onions saturated with turpentine, but somehow, it's still one of the most popular fruits in Vietnam - and, of course, widely eaten throughout Asia. Restaurants may provide diners with plastic gloves so the smell won't permeate the skin! Despite it all, people manage to eat durian without vomiting. If you've tried it and your experience doesn't match that description, then the fruit wasn't ripe! For many, rat meat is an acquired taste. Although you'll find them served more commonly in homes than in restaurants, the demand for this food is high enough that a cross-border rat trade has been established with neighboring Cambodia.
Here are my observations about this passage of writing. You may have additional thoughts.
1. The title has literally nothing to do with the content of the paragraph. If anything, this passage is the antithesis of curiosity - it provides shock value without any attempt at context, scientific explanation, empathy, or culinary analysis.
2. Far be it from me to give durian a blanket waiver, as I've tried it many times in many different formats, and have found it to be delicious, delicious and challenging, or just plain challenging. I once made the mistake of ordering a durian smoothie, and after dropping the fruit into the blender the restaurant's proprietors had to explain to other customers that no, there was not in fact a dangerous gas leak threatening their lives. I regret that smoothie.
But there's a reason for the fruit's popularity and its appearance in thousands of restaurant dishes and processed foods, and you won't find a hint of that in the author’s paragraph. The pungent complexity of this fruit is appealing to people for the same reason people like Scotch whiskey, or tripe, or uni, or sweetbreads: what strikes outsiders as a culinary disaster appeals to insiders because it's bold and compelling and ultimately delicious. If you suggest that the core attribute of a food is that it tastes like turpentine-drenched rot with no additional context, you are also suggesting that people who eat it are, at best, borderline crazy.
3. The transition from "durians are so horrible that they are nearly vomit-inducing" to "let's talk about eating rats" is nonexistent. What is the unwritten throughline here?
It's this: "Vietnamese people eat horrible stuff, isn't that weird?"
This is the sort of impulse that leads kids to make fun of immigrant kids' box lunches (and, presumably, that leads kids overseas to make fun of American kids' peanut butter sandwiches.)
Now: the author isn't factually wrong about the rats. (A BBC story explains the harvest and export process, and the rice-field provenance that renders the rats disease-free and tasty.) But absent any context, this whole passage of food writing is just a spotlight aimed at things that are strange and repulsive by Western norms, minus any attempt to sincerely explore and explain.
When people argue that you shouldn't have a white guy writing a cookbook about another culture's food, this is what they're warning about: an impulse to mock and "other" entire foodways.
And what's really frustrating is that most of the rest of the book, which is to say the recipes, doesn't fall victim to this impulse. It's an engaging and skillfully curated collection of apparently well-researched food, and there's a lot to suggest that the author truly loves and is curious about Vietnamese culinary history and practice.
I should add: As a writer, you're certainly allowed to say that you don't like eating durian, or that the idea of eating rats doesn't personally appeal to you. What you're not allowed to do is put other ways of eating on a shelf labeled "Super gross!!!" and then move on without any further explanation.
at your service,
James
VIETNAMESE FOOD AND FOOD CULTURE
PAUL B. KENNEDY
TUTTLE | 2025 | $25
I'm going to give Vietnamese Food and Food Culture a chance to prove itself by testing its recipes and tasting its food. But I do want to lodge one more grievance. The book's title is so sweeping, so majestic, and so confident that you might think you are getting the equivalent of THE SILVER SPOON or MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING. You might expect a team of researchers, an atlas-like breakdown on regional specialties and variants, a postgraduate level of sophisticated and impeccably sourced research. You would be wrong.
I don't hold it against the author that he has presented 60 recipes that represent many best-loved favorites from the pantheon of Vietnamese food, and that the book represents his efforts to collect and perfect sometimes involved and complex dishes for the benefit of his readers. I also respect his effort to document with words and clear photographs many of the key ingredients in the Vietnamese pantry.
And I don't hold it against the mercantile side of the publishing industry that the book sports a title that is too broad, too assertive, and too aggressive to support its contents. They want to sell books. If my reaction to the title is any indication (I thought: "Ooh! This looks really ambitious and authoritative!"), the title will help it sell books.
But I do wish somebody at some point had changed the title to represent that this is not THE book of Vietnamese food, it's A book about one man's journey through Vietnam that has resulted in a personally meaningful but far from comprehensive collection of dishes that readers might enjoy trying to make at home.
I have a smaller bone to pick with the cover's announcement that the book contains "60 Authentic Recipes," but I can't let it slide. Whenever I see the word "authentic" in this sort of context I involuntarily groan: "Fuuuuck no, come on."
At the risk of reviving a tedious argument that has been smoldering on and off since humanity's ancestors first roasted wooly mammoth meat over a specific type of wood, what does "authentic" mean? Who gets to determine what is "authentic"? Can anything removed from its original context and made thousands of miles away by people who have never tried the original dish be "authentic"?
When I make Turkish tray dumplings at home, I think they are freaking delicious and I love to share them with friends and family members. They come from a Turkish cookbook written by a real Turk. I would never in a million billion years describe my dumplings as "authentic," beyond being something that I authentically like to make at home for my family. [3]
Even if I went to Turkey, learned how to make tray dumplings, and then wrote a recipe from my understanding of how to make them, I would not tout that recipe as "authentic" just out of a sense of caution and respect. I didn't grow up with them, my grandmother didn't make them, and I would understand them at best as a traveler and a tourist.
All of this is to say that if I traveled somewhere across the world for five years and made a cookbook out of my adventures, the last freaking word I would put anywhere near that book would be "authentic," because I think that word - if it even needs to exist - belongs to people from a place making the food of that place. Or people from a place leaving that place and making new food that marries the traditions of the old place and the new place.
But it doesn't belong to people from a different place swinging through a different place for a while and then presenting that travel food to people from their own place.
Your mileage may vary; I think this is a thing civilized people can disagree about.
PHO SURE
I have eaten a fair bit of pho in my lifetime, and while none of it has been in Vietnam, most of it has been prepared by first generation Vietnamese or Hmong immigrants for other first generation Vietnamese or Hmong immigrants, mostly along University Avenue in Saint Paul. It's a beautiful soup, and once you get into it, you start to enjoy the subtle, soft-spoken charm of the North Vietnamese stuff as well as the brash, boldly spiced, aggressive swagger of its southern counterpart.
What I haven't done before is make pho, because the difficulty of doing it well as compared to going to Saint Paul and spending $9 for a giant bowl of it is self-evident. I was glad that this book gave me an opportunity to correct that shortcoming.
The first thing I noticed when I looked at the book's pho recipe is that it was detailed. Many herbs, many whole spices, all the makings of a soup with a lot of depth. That was pleasing to me, and a relief - a simplified pho wouldn't be much of a pho at all.
Less pleasing to me was that the backbone of the soup, the stock, was described in the ingredients as "2 quarts high quality pork stock," without any callout to a sub-recipe or indication of what makes high quality pork stock, well, "high quality." I figured that Ha Tien, my friendly massive local Southeast Asian grocery store, would have something that would do the trick, but I was flying blind.
I ended up getting a California-made but grittily serious-looking paste-format pork stock base by Sabico Food, which performed well. I don't know that it's "high quality" per se, but its provenance was right for the recipe, and the result was entirely satisfactory.
As I noted earlier, the recipe was detailed, leading me to dismiss the 15-minute prep time estimate as a figment of the author's imagination. I even set a timer to catch him out in an all-too-convenient lie, along the lines of those 20-30 minute estimates for how long it takes to caramelize onions.
However: Even with all the ingredients to assemble, prep took me 12 minutes. Touche. Flipping through the book I recognized that the recipes had a lot of highly detailed prep and cooking times, which I am now inclined to take as evidence of correctly field tested methods as opposed to the arbitrary guestimates I am used to seeing pop up in influencer cookbooks.
And the pho? Well, it was freaking delicious. The toasting of the spices and simmering of the broth filled the house with the aroma of pure contentment, and the finished product was rich, fully flavored and well balanced. I had to figure out the noodles on my own - the book’s recipe said "follow instructions on package" and my package had no instructions, but a combination of my own experience and a little Googlemancy cracked the nut. I've included a more helpful expansion of that journey as well as a brief note about stock in my adapted version of the recipe, below.
In conclusion: Well played, Mr. Kennedy, I would and probably will make this soup again.
PHÔ BÒ
Makes 4 servings
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour
Broth
1 yellow onion, peeled and halved lengthwise
3-inch piece of fresh ginger peeled and halved lengthwise
4 star anise
5 whole cloves
4 cardamom pods
3 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp fennel seeds
2 quarts of pork stock (either homemade or from a paste via an Asian market)
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp fish sauce (I like Squid brand)
Salt, to taste
To Serve
7 oz. (200g) dried rice noodles
1/2 pound (250 g) brisket or flank steak or chuck roast, raw, sliced thinly against the grain
1/4 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup Vietnamese basil leaves, coarsely chopped
2 scallions, green parts only, sliced
1 lime, cut into 8 wedges
1 bird's eye chili pepper, thinly sliced
Chili garlic sauce (optional)
Make or have available two quarts of pork stock. Soak your rice noodles in hot tap water for 20-30 minutes, then drain.
Apply medium-high heat to a dry cast-iron pan. Once hot, add the onion and ginger, cut sides down, and sear until charred. Remove from pan and set aside.
Heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the star anise, cardamom pods, cinnamon, coriander, and fennel. Toast, stirring frequently, until fragrant, 1-2 minutes. Add the charred onion and ginger and pork stock to the pot.
Once stock comes up to a simmer, cover the pot, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer for 30-40 minutes.
Strain the mixture, return the stock to the pot, and bring it to a boil. Stir in brown sugar, fish sauce, and salt to taste. Add rice noodles to pot and boil briefly (1-2 minutes) tasting one to ensure a slightly chewy but fully-cooked texture. Remove from heat.
Using tongs, divide cooked rice noodles between the four serving bowls. Top them with a portion of steak and herbs. Briefly return the broth to a boil, then pour hot broth directly onto the beef to cook it. Serve with lime wedges, chili pepper, and chili garlic sauce (if using) on the side.
PLAYING CHICKEN
After the success of the pho recipe, I was encouraged enough to try a chicken and rice noodle dish that looked simple, adaptable, and potentially delicious. It was all of those things. Were I to make it again, I might cook the chicken on an outdoor grill, get some chili crisp involved, and/or add more greenery (chopped herbs, chilis) to boost the flavor further, but this dish was far from boring - both the chicken and the sauce were mellow and tasty. My adaptation of the book's recipe just specifies the hack of using frozen lemongrass and adds a couple of chopped scallions for additional flavor and visual impact upon service.
LEMONGRASS CHICKEN WITH RICE NOODLES
Sauce
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1/4 cup water
2 Tbsp fish sauce
3 Tbsp honey
1 tsp sweet chili sauce
Chicken
2 lemongrass stalks (white parts only), smashed or 1 Tbsp frozen shredded lemongrass
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tbsp fresh lime juice
2 Tbsp fish sauce
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 shallot, peeled and halved
2 Tbsp vegetable oil, divided
1 1/2 pounds boneless chicken thighs
2 scallions, chopped
8 oz. (250g) dried rice noodles
Soak rice noodles in hot tap water for 20 minutes and then drain.
Make dipping sauce by combining lime juice, water, fish sauce, honey, and sweet chili sauce in a small bowl. Set aside.
In a shallow bowl, mix lemongrass, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, shallot, and 1 Tbsp vegetable oil. Add the chicken thighs and toss until thoroughly coated. Cover and refrigerate for 2-4 hours.
Warm the remaining tablespoon of oil in a large skillet over medium heat until shimmering. Remove the chicken from the marinade and add it to the pan. Cook until golden brown on both sides and cooked through, about 6-8 minutes per side. Remove to a cutting board.
Quickly saute your chopped scallions in the empty skillet, about 1 minute, until they start to wilt. Remove from skillet and turn off the stove.
As the chicken cooks: bring a pot of water to a boil, immerse and blanch the rice noodles for 1-2 minutes, drain and rinse with cool water, then plate.
Chop the cooked chicken into strips and lay them atop the noodles, and sprinkle with chopped scallions. Drizzle with sauce as desired.
VIETNAMESE FOOD AND FOOD CULTURE
(BUY IT / ***BORROW IT*** / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)
If Vietnamese Food and Food Culture had been co-written with a talented Vietnamese or Vietnamese-American researcher/creative collaborator, this could have been a solid gold smash hit. As it is, it's an ably assembled, reliable and nicely illustrated collection of recipes with a deep, creative well of dishes from which to draw, surrounded by a yawning gap where history, geography, and cultural context should have gone.
The history major / culinary travelogue author in me actively dislikes this book; the home cook / Vietnamese food buff in me actively adores it. When and if I find a book that is the authoritative "whole package" on this topic, I may let this book go, but for now I'm keeping it around and may well end up trying more of its recipes for my own edification.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Rick Bayless leaps to mind here as does Anthony Bourdain.
[2] The closest thing I could find to support this claim is a story about a police officer making a driver do push-ups as punishment for not wearing a mask during covid times. A Radio Free Asia story suggests that drunk driving laws in Vietnam are in fact quite fierce and strictly enforced, quoting a senior military official saying: "I know a case where a driver had only eaten a crab soup bowl with vinegar in it. He was then tested and found to have alcohol in his system and he was fined and his driving license withheld."
[3] There are many reasons to take my tray dumplings to task, but the central and most obvious one is that in the book, they get about 75 of them into a regularly sized pie plate, while I manage maybe 30. Why? Because Grandma Defne can roll her inhumanly elastic dough out to a delicate several microns in thickness while my dough resembles a down comforter.
