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When it came out in 2006, Andrea Nguyen'sInto the Vietnamese Kitchenwas the first full-color, English-language deep dive into Vietnamese food, and it won accolades not just for its recipes but for the way it put food in fluent conversation with other aspects of Vietnamese culture and history. Nguyen's family fled Vietnam in 1975 and moved to Southern California, where—as Nguyenrecalled a couple years ago—they found fellow immigrants hawking banh mi, the wonderful Vietnamese sandwich encased in crunchy baguette, a legacy of French colonialism. But the SoCal banh mi the family got weren't particularly good, and Nguyen's mother insisted they start making them on their own. Subsequently, Nguyen never stopped. In fact banh mi were the sole subject of one ofher most recent cookbooks. (She's also devoted books to Asian dumplings,tofu, andpho.)
Having received no formal culinary training, Nguyen worked random jobs as an adult as she began to freelance as a food writer and dream up her first book. Through her books and on her popular blog,Viet World Kitchen, she strikes a tricky balance, translating dishes found in Asian home kitchens without oversimplifying them—as in herpot au feu, a recipe with complicated historical roots that Nguyen renders hearty and simple in the Vietnamese style. As Nguyenwrites, "at the end of the day, my aim is to (1) capture the human connections to food and (2) demystify Asian food without dumbing it down. There's no reason why more people shouldn't include good Asian cooking into their rotation." Thanks to her, they are.
