Best Vietnamese Cookbooks

A cookbook both useful in the kitchen and beautiful on the coffee table, Eat Real Vietnamese Food features over ninety delicious, classical Vietnamese recipes.These recipes may not be available elsewhere. Vietnamese chefs are notoriously secretive concerning their recipes.Each recipe is presented with clear, easy to follow, illustrated step-by-step directions as well as the historical background of the dish.This book is a high quality production: full color in hard cover format with a dust jacket. But, why do we need another Vietnamese cookbook? The author, award winning cookbook writer Lien Nguyen, explains:This book started as a quiet, seemingly innocuous project: a few years ago, I decided to learn more about Vietnamese cooking, because, after all, it is my cultural heritage, and I also love to eat! My mother had an extensive collection of recipes, some neatly gathered in a notebook, but most scribbled on loose sheets of paper, often presenting several conflicting versions of the same dish. So, I decided to sort it out and write down those she thought were the best version for each of her specialties. Any undertaking of mine has a tendency toward "mission creep," as my husband will readily tell you, and this one was no exception. As I moved along, this book evolved into a project immortalizing a disappearing cuisine and a disappearing way of life. We decided to focus on my mom's domain of expertise: Vietnamese food from the early 50s. Vietnam has had a long, restless history, and the 20th century was particularly turbulent. These difficult, troubled times made the 50s of particular interest in the culinary sense: in those years, many Vietnamese people emigrated from the North (including my father's family) and settled in the South, bringing with them, among other things, different ways of cooking and eating. They didn't always have access to authentic Southern cuisine: old classics were modified, sometimes happily reinterpreted, sometimes badly misunderstood. Lat... [Read More]