Stickyrice

'Cooks, Books and Blogs', Ubud, Bali

I'm honoured, excited and slightly petrified to announce that I'm attending this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia. I've been before as a reader in 2011 but this year I've ended up on the list with writers. Me, a blogger, and my mates Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl, co-authors of two (soon to be three) cookbooks on Vietnamese cuisine are part of the special events program at the festival. We'll be gassing on about our cooking, eating and writing experiences in Vietnam over the years in an event called 'Cooks, Books and Blogs'.

Vietnam has a growing reputation as a destination for food tourism. For many people who travel here, experiencing the cuisine is one of their main priorities. Accessing what the locals eat can be intimidating, however. Learning about the key elements and techniques to prepare and cook the cuisine is also often part of travellers' plans when they visit Vietnam. And the cuisine has lots of culture, history and stories associated with it.

At our event, Tracey, Andreas and I hope to share our combined 25 (or so) years of culinary digging in Vietnam. We'll show you pictures that will not only make you hungry but also make you want to visit. Tracey has also designed a menu for the event. As we talk, you'll have the ingredients of the cuisine on your palate.

If you're in Bali next Saturday (12th October), we'd love for you to come. You can purchase tickets here.

Hội An Tofu Pudding

In the mail today I received a cookbook I've been anticipating for some time, Andrea Nguyen's 'Asian Tofu'. I've been a big admirer of her quiet but insightful work at Viet World Kitchen ever since my old mate Noodlepie pointed me in her direction when I was starting this blog up back in 2005. I was a regular lurker in her Vietnamese herb primer page trying to make sense of the botannical wonder outside of coriander and mint, of which there is a lot. I've emailed Andrea for the odd translation or insight into a dish or ingredient and she's always been most obliging. We are yet to meet but it's only a matter of time.

Until that happens, I will continue to enjoy her writing on traditional aspects of Vietnamese cuisine, her recipes - some traditional, some with twists - and her little stories of life in and out of the huge Vietnamese diaspora in America. And with this new book in my hands combined with ease of access to tofu in many of its forms in Hanoi's wet markets, I'm hoping to glean from Andrea all that she knows about this chameleon ingredient.

One way that tofu can be enjoyed on the streets of Vietnam, usually from mobile vendors on bicycles or on foot, is as a custard-like pudding. These days scooped out of large saucepans or insulated containers with a slightly curved plastic or metal paddle, this velvety tofu used to be prepared in large earthenware jars. Known in Hanoi as tào phớ and in the centre and south as đậu hủ, the eight to twelve wobbly discs placed in a bowl by the vendor are not traditionally a dessert but rather a mid-morning or afternoon snack.  

Down in Hội An a month ago, however, I walked straight out of a late lunch at the chicken rice house and into the waving arms of a double-hatted đậu hủ seller. Her ginger-infused syrup drizzled over the just warm tofu pudding - well, to me that would read quite nicely on a dessert menu.

In the mouth, it is delicately sweet and spicy. And in my new book, I have Andrea's recipe.

Book Review: Vietnamese Street Food

If a cookbook only has pretty pictures and recipes, that's okay. I might oo and ah while I flick through it, sticky-note some of the pages with recipes that match my food pangs and get it out again from time to time. It may not be of much further interest, even accounting for the ardent appreciation I have for nearly all things food. I guess what I'm saying is that these kinds of recipe books are a dime a dozen.

But what if the recipe book truly captured the essence of the cuisine's physical place? If it piqued something either nostalgic or yearning in you, in its depiction of that place. If it symbolised in its images your place; a place of plastic stools and tables, of crooked fragile doorways and cracking colonial facades, of bare winter branches, of tireless women with sweat on their brows, of magical market scenes. What if the book was designed with an aesthetic that reflects your experience in that place, with the geometric floor tiles of your abode recreated to edge its pages, with the retro motifs from the plastic tablecloths of your thousand street food meals lifted and superimposed.

How about if the cookbook subtly teaches you something; of the origins of this style of streetside dining, that they relate to the country's wars, changes in its work practices and economic reform. Teaches you something about the society, that "life (there) happens on the streets" and that to survive there, one must have a solid grasp of "the politics of the pavement". Teaches you something about the country's agriculture sector, that the "millions of paddies not only produce the country's staple, rice, but have always been a rich source of protein, providing eels, crabs, snails and frogs".

And what if you see people you know smiling at you from the pages of the cookbook, their lifestyles and wares laid bare. And you can relate to their stories of hardship and know them to be true. And you've sat in their midst and watched them craft their buns or dumplings or clumps of sticky rice. You've heard their voices and seen them flustered and terse or silly with the giggles. You deal with them and their type, daily.

Then, when you turn to the recipes in the book, two realisations occur. First, you have the wherewithal to create these dishes. The wet market, which carries the aromatics of the cuisine's chopping board, the green sprigs the cuisine is famous for, all the animal bits and noodles and rice in all required forms, is just up the street. Second, you've been coached without knowing it, in the finer points of many dishes' preparation and assembly. For ten years, you've witnessed the flash-dunking of noodles, the scissoring of hot chillies, the fanning of the fire.

You can cook these dishes.

In all of the traditional ways: by rolling - a combination of Chinese sausage, jicama and omelette in rice paper for a dunking in a rich hoisin dipping sauce; by grilling - Hanoi's barbeque lunch dish, bun cha, thinly cut bork belly and pork patties, marinated in fish sauce, shallots and sugar, served with noodles and herbs; by boiling - a gingery rice porridge of duck, spring onions and Asian basil; by frying - salt 'n' pepper squid in a coating of chilli, garlic and shallots.

And you can marvel and wonder about the details of preparing others. Marvel at the sense of smell required to choose a rice grain "with a good perfume" or the ability to tie several ingredients together in a spring roll with lettuce and a blanched spring onion bow. Wonder what it might feel like to "peel the thick skin from a pig's tongue". More pleasantly, wonder at the rich taste of black sesame seed and peanut soup on a spoon in your mouth.

Then consider your embarrassment of riches - cook the dishes you want to cook from this book and have the other ones on the street, in your neighbourhood, in your adopted home. Better still, invite the writers of the book and the photographer, who happen to live in your town, to join you.

Vietnamese Street Food
by Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl
Photographed by Michael Fountoulakis
Design by Daniella Germain
Hardie Grant Books

*thanks Michael for permission to use the images in this post