Southeast Asian

In the winter months, when khúc, a green that looks like edible chrysanthemum leaves but tastes like spinach, is in season, cooks in northern Vietnam pound the leaves and use the juice to color the dough for these dumplings, which are filled with buttery mung bean and caramelized shallot. Sticky rice appears twice in the recipe, as the flour in the dough and as pearly grains covering the dumplings, making them look like snowballs. My mother remembers these jade green dumplings as the perfect antidote to the north’s cold, dreary winters. Well-positioned street vendors would lure customers with steamers full of piping-hot bánh khúc, which were piled on top of one another in the tray and had to be carefully pried apart before the exchange of money and food could occur. This is her recipe, which substitutes spinach for the khúc. For convenience, I use prewashed baby spinach leaves and purée them in a food processor. Measure the spinach carefully to ensure the dough won’t be too soft or mushy. Regular oil and ground pork stand in for the traditional filling enrichment of freshly rendered pork fat and hand-chopped pork belly. To yield nice round dumplings, I stray from tradition and steam them in a single layer, rather than piling them up.

In this dish from my youth, the chicken is marinated and poached before it is battered and fried until crunchy. Poaching the chicken first enables you to deep-fry in less time, yields more tender meat, and mellows the pungency of the garlic. Small pieces of bone-in chicken are traditionally used, but I prefer to fry boneless, skinless thighs for convenience. Rolling the chicken in panko (Japanese bread crumbs) yields a crispy shell that keeps for hours.

Here , simple dough made of glutinous rice flour, water, and salt is shaped into small, round disks and steamed on banana leaf circles, which impart fragrance and prevent sticking. The result is bánh day, eggshell-white cakes that are eaten in pairs with slices of Viet sausage slipped between them. The cakes are sweet and chewy, while the sausage provides a savory counterpoint. If you don’t have time to make the sausage at home, pick some up at a Viet market or deli.

Fragrant and delectable, these meatballs are made from a fine chicken paste seasoned with toasted ground rice and enriched by tiny bits of pork fat. Although they are traditionally grilled, I cook them in the oven, where they are less likely to overbrown or even burn. They are served with rice paper, lettuce, fresh herbs, and a sweet-and-spicy sauce, and diners assemble their own hand rolls. You will need to soak 16 to 18 (8- or 10-inch) bamboo skewers in water for at least 45 minutes before you thread the meatballs onto them. At the table, set out kitchen scissors or knives for diners to cut their meatballs in half before wrapping them. (Like cherry tomatoes, these meatballs are hard to eat if left whole.) This is a hands-on dish that requires only a dinner plate at each place setting.

From French Poule au pot to Chinese Hainan chicken to this classic Vietnamese preparation, poached chicken offers clear, pure flavors. In my family, we enjoy the hot poaching broth as the soup course (canh) and slice up the cool chicken for the main dish. The chicken is strewn with fine strips of fresh, tender young lime or lemon leaves, to provide an unusual bright, citrusy contrast. Thai lime leaves, known also as makrut or kaffir leaves, are particularly wonderful if you can find them. At the table, we ladle the broth into our bowls and add a squirt of lime juice and a spoonful of rice. In between eating bowls of broth, we eat the chicken and citrus leaves with more rice, dunking them first in a sauce of lime juice, salt, and pepper. Add a simple stir-fried vegetable and you have a satisfying meal. Purchase the best-quality chicken available for this recipe. Immersing it in an ice bath once it is cooked produces tight skin that Asian diners appreciate: a bit chewy and somewhat crunchy but not greasy. Also, as the chicken cools, a delicious layer of gelatinous juices forms between the skin and meat. Since cooling takes a while, you need to poach the chicken about four hours in advance of serving, or even the day before. Traditionally, the chicken is cut through the bone into small pieces for serving, but I prefer to slice the meat, except for the wings, off the bone.

A harbinger of good fortune, xoi gac is traditionally served at Viet weddings and Tet celebrations, paired with roast pork or sausages. As my mom says, “Red is a lucky color and the sticky rice helps the luck stay with you.” This sticky rice is named after the gac fruit (Momordica cochinchinensis) whose cockscomb red pulp and seed membranes stain the grains with brilliant color and impart a light fruity fragrance and flavor. Rough skinned and cantaloupe sized, the fruit is believed to promote health and energy. (In fact, it is full of antioxidants.) Because this exotic fruit is not yet widely available in the United States, Vietnamese American cooks often substitute food coloring when they make this dish. I prefer a combination of tomato paste and ground annatto seeds, which better mimics the real thing. If you travel to Vietnam, buy some gac powder from one of the spice vendors at Ben Thanh Market in Saigon, and use 2 tablespoons of the powder in place of the tomato paste and annatto.

When Vietnamese cooks stuff fowl for roasting, the dressing is often made with sticky rice. These preparations, which bridge Vietnamese and French culinary traditions, commonly include lotus seeds, too. My family prefers the flavor of chestnuts, however, which we simmer in chicken stock, butter, and cilantro. The presence of shiitake mushrooms and Cognac in this recipe illustrates yet another marriage of East and West. This dressing is good with roast turkey, chicken, game hens, and goose. While you may stuff the birds, I find baking the dressing separately is easier, plus the grains on the bottom form a tasty crust. Shelling and peeling chestnuts is time-consuming, but this recipe doesn’t require many of them. For guidance on buying and peeling the nuts, see the accompanying Note.

Imagine my mom’s delight when she first spotted canned hominy at American markets (and later, hulled mung beans). Gone were the days when she had to soak and treat dried corn kernels with slaked lime before cooking them to prepare this treat. She also had to soak and skin unhulled mung beans before she could steam and grind them. By the time this dish appeared at the table, nearly two days had passed. But it was all worth it: the rice and hominy formed a chewy, soft base for the buttery yellow mung beans, toasted sesame seeds, and fried shallots. Serve this sticky rice dish alone or with slices of Viet sausages or roasted chicken, duck, or pork.

Here is a curry with big flavors, thanks to lots of lemongrass, curry powder, ginger, and chile flakes. The coconut milk unifies all the elements and enriches the dish. For the best Viet flavor, buy Vietnamese-style curry powder (page 327) at an Asian market. Serve the curry in a shallow bowl with a baguette for dipping or spoon it over rice or noodles.

This is a classic northern interpretation of kho, homey simmered dishes that are part of everyday Viet meals. It reflects the simple art of Vietnamese cooking, requiring just a few ingredients yet yielding a savory result. The chicken releases its juices during cooking, which add to the overall flavor of the bittersweet caramel sauce, a Vietnamese staple. The ginger softens, mellows, and blends with the other ingredients as it cooks, but it still delivers a mild sharpness to the finished dish. Traditionally, this kho calls for cutting bone-in, skin-on chicken into chunks. However, for the sake of ease and health, I, like many other Vietnamese Americans, now use boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Serve with lots of rice to sop up the sauce.

My parents had told me so many times about how good chicken was in Vietnam that I couldn’t wait to taste it for myself when I returned with my husband in January 2003. Our first day was in Hanoi, and after checking into the hotel, we set out into the streets looking for lunch. At a small, arty café, we ordered ga nuong, expecting something akin to ga ro-ti (opposite). Instead, the hipster waitress returned with plates of sliced grilled chicken thigh, rice, and the ingredients—salt, white pepper, lime, chile—for mixing up a dipping sauce. We took a few bites and then practically inhaled the rest, not because we were famished but because the dish was so unbelievably good. The toothsome meat and crispy skin were wonderful dipped in the tart-and-hot sauce. Nowadays, whenever I make this dish for an easy dinner, I am reminded of that memorable lunch.

Whenever we have left over garlicky roast chicken, my family prepares this simple sticky rice dish, which we typically eat for breakfast, though it would be fine for lunch, too. If you don’t have time to roast your own chicken, you can use store-bought rotisserie chicken. Try to shred the chicken into bite-sized pieces as thick as a chopstick.

Anyone who has tried to cook Chinese fried rice knows how challenging it can be to do it well. While the Vietnamese repertoire has a number of fried rice dishes, it also includes an easier alternative called com tron, freshly cooked rice tossed with a handful of ingredients. In this recipe, you can use whatever meats or seafood you have on hand, such as Char Siu Pork (page 142), any Vietnamese sausage (see chapter 6), roast chicken, grilled pork, or shrimp, along with bell pepper, egg strips, and scallion to create a beautiful mixture of colors, shapes, and textures.

Deeply seasoned and studded with chicken and colorful vegetables, this special-occasion rice is traditionally cooked in a clay pot and presented at the table in the cooking vessel. Many Vietnamese American cooks, my mother included, switched to preparing this dish in large, heavy Western pots, such as Dutch ovens, which conduct heat well and don’t break like clay pots sometimes do. Their easier and more convenient approach doesn’t compromise flavor, and sometimes a wonderful golden crust forms at the bottom. However, if you would like to cook the rice in a clay pot, see the Note following the method. For this recipe, you want to use long-grain rice that will cook up to a chewy firmness. If you happen to have new-crop rice, which tends to cook up more sticky than firm, reduce the quantity of stock slightly, or purchase regular long-grain rice.

Vietnamese cooks roast chickens in three ways: on the stove top in a pan with a little liquid for succulence, over charcoal for charred smokiness, or in the oven for crispy skin. The method mostly depends on the kind of heat source available. For example, ovens were traditionally luxurious home appliances in Vietnam. In 1966, my mom’s oven was a metal box indirectly heated by hot charcoal set underneath and/or on top. When the Americans came, she was able to salvage a modern oven for her Saigon home kitchen. After we arrived in America, Mom delighted in roasting this easy garlicky chicken for our family. With a reliable oven and affordable chicken, we ate ga ro-ti regularly with rice for dinner, sliced up and stuffed into a baguette sandwich (page 34) for lunch or a snack, and arranged atop sticky rice (page 246) for breakfast or lunch. When preparing ga ro-ti (which takes its name from the French term for roasting), use the more succulent parts—drumsticks, thighs, wings—for the best flavor.

A Batch of Rice in which the grains remain distinct is called com roi (separated rice), while rice that has been compacted by hand into dense balls or logs is called com nam (pressed rice). Like Japanese onigiri (rice balls), com nam is both shaped and eaten by hand. You simply pick up a piece, press it against a boldly flavored food like Caramelized Minced Pork (page 131), Cotton Pork (page 134), or sesame salt (see Note), and pop the morsel into your mouth. For many Vietnamese of my parents’ generation, com nam is an old-fashioned food that conjures up memories of home, perhaps because it was a creative way for moms to get their kids to eat more rice, the main source of sustenance. As a reminder of such times, my dad regularly prepared com nam and then presliced it for family road trips, picnics, and whenever we wanted a fun alternative to eating rice from a bowl.

Vietnamese cooking, like Chinese cooking, takes texture seriously. In fact, ingredients such as dried white tree fungus, a highly prized relative of the wood ear, lack flavor but offer interesting texture. Crunchy, resilient, and gelatinous, white tree fungus is expensive when compared with regular mushrooms and most other fungi and is thus saved for special occasions. It looks like crinkly, golden sponges and is sold in boxes or plastic bags at Chinese and Viet markets. It is important to use a good chicken stock in this recipe. Both the mild-flavored fungus and the vegetables need the contrast of a rich backdrop. The resulting soup will remind you of an underwater scene, the florets of white tree fungus suspended like silvery blades of seaweed among the orange carrot slices and bright green snow peas. For extra flair, add hand-shredded poached chicken breast along with the carrot.

When it is dungeness crab season (November through May on the West Coast), one of my favorite ways to capture the essence of Cancer magister is to make these golden noodles. Cellophane noodles absorb whatever flavors they are combined with, in this case the sweet brininess of crabmeat and tomalley. This dish is best when it is made with a live crab that you cook yourself. If you are too squeamish to cook crab at home, buy a precooked crab the day it is cooked. But don’t have the crab cracked, as you want all the delicious juices to stay inside. See page 322 for directions on cooking and cleaning the crab and picking the crabmeat.

Loaded with asparagus and crab, this soup is elegant looking and delicately flavored. Vietnamese consider it special-occasion fare because it features asparagus, a pricey ingredient introduced by the French as an imported canned good. In Vietnamese, asparagus is mang tay, literally “French bamboo,” an apt name as both asparagus and bamboo shoots grow quickly. Resourceful Viet cooks often maximize the asparagus flavor by adding the spears and their canning liquid to the soup. But the taste is nonetheless rather flat, and canned asparagus is mushy. To achieve a strong asparagus flavor, I use fresh asparagus to prepare the soup. Asparagus declines in sweetness as soon as it is harvested, so choose only the freshest. Spring is asparagus season, and at farmers’ markets the spears are sold within twenty-four hours of being cut. To keep them fresh, stand them in a tall container filled with about an inch of water. (If the ends look dry, trim them first.) Refrigerate the container; there is no need to cover it with plastic.

One summer when I was child, a family friend regularly gave us grocery bags full of Chinese chives (he) from her garden. The grassy foot-long chives are easy to grow from seed, and this woman must have had a bumper crop that year. We put the bounty to good use in this delicious noodle dish. No matter how many times it appeared on the dinner table, I never tired of the soft chives, hints of garlic, bits of shrimp and pork, and tart lime finish. Chinese chives are significantly larger than Western chives, and their flat leaves have a delicate garlic, rather than onion, flavor. In Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, they are typically sold in one-pound bundles. Vietnamese cooks treat them like a green vegetable, often cooking them with noodles. Here, their flat shape mixes perfectly with bánh pho. For a light meal, serve the noodles as the main course, pairing it with one of the special-event salads in chapter 1.