Vietnamese

This Southern Vietnamese specialty is technically a pickle because the vegetables steep in brine, but it is eaten in large amounts, more like a salad, with intensely flavored pork and fish kho (dishes simmered in caramel sauce). The texture and flavors of the vegetables provide the perfect bright contrast to the inky, deep flavors of kho. Flat, delicately flavored Chinese chives are traditionally combined with the bean sprouts and carrot. Because these chives can be hard to find, I often substitute leafy green scallion tops. Select small scallions the width of a chopstick or medium scallions. Larger ones can be too harsh. If you can find Chinese chives, substitute a nickel-sized bunch for the scallions.

The Vietnamese name for this fast pickle literally translates as “sour stuff.” Although it doesn’t sound enticing, it is exactly what you want to serve whenever you need a simple garnish (or side) that is tart, sweet, and crunchy. I keep a jar of it in the refrigerator for stuffing baguette sandwiches (page 34), for serving alongside grilled meats such as Grilled Garlicky Five-Spice Pork Steaks (page 143), and for adding to Duck and Chinese Egg Noodle Soup (page 220). Some people like the vegetables on the sweet side, but I prefer a tangy flavor and therefore use less sugar. When selecting daikons, look for evenly shaped, firm, smooth, unblemished roots.

Viet cooks often deep-fry cubes of tofu until crisp and golden and then add them to a stir-fry or a simmering liquid (in this case, a mixture of fish sauce, water, and scallion). Fried tofu absorbs other flavors especially well, yet holds its shape and retains its faintly nutty overtones. The end result is a chewy, almost meaty quality. Look for regular or medium-firm tofu for deep-frying, never the silken type or the firm type that is best for grilling. Freshly made tofu (see opposite) will puff up during frying and then deflate as it cools; packaged tofu won’t do that and will be denser after it is out of the oil. Both will have excellent flavor. When building your menu, treat this recipe as the main savory dish and accompany it with a vegetable dish and/or meat-and-vegetable stir-fry, a simple soup, and rice.

Of all the Vietnamese tofu dishes, this recipe and the deep-fried tofu on page 191 are the ones I ate most often as a child. To this day, my mom still panfries double batches of stuffed tofu so that she and my dad can reheat individual servings in the toaster oven over the course of several days. For this recipe, use tofu sold in large, bricklike blocks, rather than smaller cakes, as it is easier to cut the big blocks to size. Regular tofu is a little difficult to stuff but produces a delicate, silky interior. The exterior doesn’t hold its crispiness but is delicious nonetheless. Medium-firm tofu is easier to stuff and holds its crispiness for a long time, but the interior is chewy and less delicate. Firm tofu is too hard and silken tofu is much too soft, When tomatoes are out of season, substitute a 14 1/2-ounce can of whole tomatoes, drained and chopped, and use 1/4 cup of the canning liquid in place of the water. Or, skip the tomato sauce altogether and instead dip the tofu in Simple Dipping Sauce (page 309) or a combination of soy sauce and fresh chiles.

Introduced to Vietnam by the French as salade russe, this salad is a fine example of how Viet cooking blurs culinary and cultural traditions. Home cooks incorporated it into their repertoire, and I grew up treating it as any other Viet vegetable dish. During the summer, my mother served it with roasted chicken that had been marinated in garlic and Maggi Seasoning sauce. While there are many versions of this salad, I prefer combining the three root vegetables with chopped egg and a creamy herb vinaigrette. Use red beets for a beautiful magenta salad, pink or golden beets for a jewel-toned salad. For an interesting barbecue menu, serve the salad with Grilled Lemongrass Pork Riblets (page 145), Grilled Corn with Scallion Oil (page 183), and a lightly dressed green salad.

In Vietnam, small clay charcoal-fired braziers are used to cook dishes like this smoky eggplant topped with scallion and served with a garlic-chile dipping sauce. Here in the States, I often make this dish in the summer when the farmers’ market is brimming with an incredible array of eggplants. (The vegetable is at its sweetest in August and September.) You can cook the eggplant over a gas burner, or even bake it, but you’ll have the best results on a grill. Small globe eggplants, meaty Italian eggplants, and slender Japanese eggplants all work well for this recipe.

People often ask me what I remember about my life in Vietnam. I always respond that my memory is filled with photographic images of people and places, but because I was only six years old when we fled, I had not yet experienced enough of life to have fuller pictures. However, one of my most vivid memories is of our cook, Older Sister Thien, squatting and fanning the small charcoal brazier on which she grilled corn on the cob. As the corn cooked to a charred chewy sweetness, she brushed on scallion oil made with home-rendered lard. The aroma and taste were heavenly. Here is my updated version with regular cooking oil. With so many varieties of corn available in summertime, you should have no trouble finding the sweetest one for grilling. This is traditionally a snack food, but it is also a wonderful addition to an Eastern or Western barbecue. Parboiling the ears before grilling ensures that the corn is evenly cooked and the grill work is fast.

Eggplants are prepared in many ways by Viet cooks, but my two favorites are deep-fried, as in this recipe, and grilled or roasted until smoky and soft , as in Grilled Eggplant with Seared Scallion (page 184). Here, I coat thickish eggplant slices with a thin batter, which yields deep-fried pieces with a moist interior and a delicate crust that remains crisp well after frying. For the best results, use slender, firm, blemish-free Chinese, Italian, or Japanese eggplants. They have an appealing meatiness and fry better than large globe eggplants.

Because cool-season crops such as cabbage and cauliflower are difficult to grow in Vietnam, they enjoy a special status. In fact, my dad remembers how his mother carefully tended the cabbage heads in the family garden, covering each one with a cooking pot to encourage the leaves to curl. When we came to the States and found cabbage so readily available, my mother began fixing this easy stir-fry regularly for our weeknight suppers. I have since followed suit, and also sometimes serve it as a simple lunch with rice. The naturally sweet and spicy cabbage ribbons are enriched by a coating of egg, while a final splash of fish sauce adds a nutty, briny flavor.

It is hard to imagine the Viet table without water spinach (a.k.a. morning glory in English, rau muông in Vietnamese, and ong choy in Cantonese; illustrated on page 174), a long, tubular leafy green that is part of the lifeblood of the country and appears in many guises. The tender tops with their pointy leaves are often boiled or stir-fried. The hollow stems are sometimes laboriously split into slender pieces, dropped in water to curl, and then the crunchy raw spirals are used as a garnish for certain noodle dishes, such as Crab and Shrimp Rice Noodle Soup (page 215); as a bed for a beef stir-fry; or as a lightly dressed salad. Water spinach is also pickled. Even today my parents become wistful at the mention of a rustic meal of boiled rau muông, soup prepared from the left over cooking liquid, a heady fish kho, and rice. So, it was a sad moment when we arrived in the United States to discover that we could not afford water spinach, which cost nearly two dollars a pound and was not widely available. What had once been an everyday vegetable was suddenly a splurge. When my parents did buy it, my mother would stir-fry the greens with garlic and fermented shrimp sauce (mâm tôm) and finish the dish with lots of lime. Aromatic, earthy, and tangy, the traditional combination was a comforting reminder of our culinary roots. Nowadays, rau muông is thankfully much less expensive and is easily found at Chinese and Southeast Asian markets. During the peak summer season, prices are downright cheap. Here are two options for stir-frying the bounty: first, the soulful dish of my youth, followed by a more modern preparation flavored with garlic and oyster sauce, which pairs well with Eastern and Western dishes (try it with a steak). If you can’t find water spinach, Western spinach can be used for either of the two stir-fries that follow.

This elegant and easy-to-prepare stew is one of my favorite vegetarian dishes. The Garnet sweet potato (usually mistakenly labeled a yam) has bright orange flesh, and the raw peanuts deliver protein and crunch. When peanuts are boiled, simmered, or steamed, they become beanlike, revealing their true identity as legumes. You may need to look for shelled raw peanuts at Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, as they are rarely carried in regular supermarkets. I often use pinkish tan–skinned banana squash for this recipe, which is typically sold in pieces wrapped in plastic. It is easy to peel and you can buy just as much as you need for the stew. Select a piece that has deep-colored flesh, more orange than yellow. Or, you may use your favorite winter squash, such as butternut, in place of the banana squash.

In the Vietnamese Kitchen, papaya is more than just a sweet fruit. The mild, firm flesh of an unripened green papaya is treated like a vegetable. Green papaya may be pickled, added to soup, or featured in salads like this one. Here, crunchy, light jade papaya shreds are flecked with chopped herbs and bits of shrimp and pork and tossed with a dressing of lime juice, fish sauce, and garlic. Look for green papayas at Vietnamese or Thai markets, Chinese markets with a Southeast Asian clientele, or Latin grocery stores. A bit of yellowing on the skin is fine, but make sure the flesh is neither soft nor mushy. Whole fruits will keep in the refrigerator for about a week.

A hybrid dish (cua means “crab” in Vietnamese, and farci means “stuffed” in French), this deviled crab is enriched by butter and employs fish sauce to amplify the brininess of the crustacean. Many cooks stuff the crab shells with the raw filling and then fry them. Because it is hard to tell when the filling is cooked, I was taught to sauté it first, which also yields a more flavorful result. I also forgo frying and instead bake the filling in ramekins, topping them with bread crumbs for a crispy finish. What makes this deviled crab special is fresh crabmeat and tomalley (liver) and fat, which you can only get if you start with a whole crab. (If you don’t like the tomalley and fat, omit them for a less rich dish.) Find the freshest, feistiest crab you can, even if it is not a Dungeness, my local species. Live crabs are available at Asian and other markets, but already cooked crabs will work, too—as long as you have a trustworthy fishmonger. Ask when the crab was cooked. And if it has an ammonia-like smell, it is over the hill, so pass it up. You will need about 1/2 pound of crabmeat.

This is probably the most commonly served salad in the Vietnamese repertoire. Festive looking and tasty, goi dua chuot often makes an appearance at our family celebrations. In fact, my mother made it for the one hundred guests at my wedding reception. Vietnamese delis pack this popular salad for their customers with the dressing on the side. But those versions are often prepared with cucumbers that have thick, waxed skins. I recommend pickling or English cucumbers, as their skins are thin and not waxed and their flavors are superior. Small, briny bay shrimp are easily distributed throughout the salad, to accent every bite, while the chicken and pork lend richness. For an extra note of authenticity, serve the salad with Fried Shrimp Chips (page 37) or Toasted Sesame Rice Crackers (page 320) for scooping up bitefuls.

A northern specialty, this dish traditionally features oc buou (apple snail), a freshwater mollusk with a shell that resembles the escargot shells sold in plastic tubes at gourmet markets. The chewy mollusk meat is made into a stuffing with mushroom and scallion and then steamed in the original shells with strips of ginger or lemongrass leaves. To eat the snails, you pull up the leaves, which lifts out the stuffing, and then you dip the stuffing into a ginger-lime sauce. Finally, you pour the aromatic cooking juice left over in the shell into a spoon and sip it like a fine consommé. Because fresh Vietnamese snails aren’t available in the States, I replicate this delicious dish with frozen apple snail or periwinkle meat. The yellowish chunks are sold in one-pound packages at Chinese and Vietnamese markets; sometimes periwinkle is available thawed and packed in Styrofoam trays. (Or, substitute conch or other sea snails normally used for chowder.) Without shells to stuff, I use ceramic egg cups or tall sake cups. The presentation isn’t as provocative, but it is still lovely. Ribbons cut from lemongrass stalks, more aromatic and more readily available than ginger leaves, harness the stuffing in the cups and give the cooking juices a heady citrus flavor.

The easy availability of butter in America was a boon for my mother, who saw endless possibilities for perfecting French pâtés chaud, large puff pastry rounds filled with an aromatic meat mixture. She regularly made the rich pastries from scratch, and they were standard breakfast fare for my siblings and me growing up. As adults, we have scaled back our consumption, making the pastries smaller and serving them as finger food on special occasions. Shaping tiny round pastries is laborious, so we form logs and cut them into diamonds. Unlike my mom, I don’t have the patience or time to make my own puff pastry. Instead, I rely on a local bakery for frozen sheets of all-butter puff pastry or use the frozen puff pastry sold at supermarkets. The latter are usually sold two sheets to a box, with each sheet weighing about 1/2 pound and measuring about ten inches square.

As you fry these stuffed squid, the fragrant aromas that rise from the pan will have you dreaming of enjoying them along with a cold beer. Many Vietnamese cooks add minced garlic to the stuffing, but our family prefers ginger, a nod to ginger-centric northern Vietnam. The tart, spicy, salty dipping sauce heightens the flavors in the stuffing. Select young, fresh squid with bodies about five inches long, not including the tentacles. For the best flavor, clean the squid yourself, rather than buying them already cleaned. Because both squid sizes and a cook’s stuffing technique can vary, this recipe makes more stuffing than you will need. If only a little is left over, discard it. If there is a fair amount, mix in an egg or two and fry up into an omelet (see Pork and Mushroom Omelet, page 97, for cooking instructions).

When I was a child, my mom often kept me busy making wontons, putting three or four packages of the skins and a big bowl of pork-and-shrimp filling in front of me. (That’s 150 to 200 wontons!) She served the fried wontons to family and guests alike, who delighted in dipping the crispy morsels into our homemade sweet-and-sour sauce, a lighter version of the Chinese classic flavored with fish sauce instead of soy sauce.