Not recipes per se, but my latest escapades…

Tomato sauce: was cooking ravioli, and quickly throwing together a tomato sauce from 210g of tomato paste. Which, of course, tastes horrible. I followed H’s advice and put in a tablespoon of sugar, but it still didn’t work. Mmm, time to get creative… I had a jar of dried tomato paste in the fridge, so I threw a heaped teaspoon of that in the mix; taste the thing, still wasn’t satisfied. It lacked… umami, for want of a better word? I swear I reached for the bottle of nước mắm, but the thought of having a fishy-tasting tomato sauce stopped me at the last minute. Fortunately, I had fermented soy paste in the fridge–you can see where this is going, right? Threw in a little more sugar in addition to the teaspoon of soy paste, and pronounced myself satisfied. I then very carefully asked the H what he thought of the tomato sauce before admitting what I’d put into it… (he liked it, but his enthusiasm wavered a bit when I explained the composition process).

Bò bún: it helps if you think of bò bún (and other bún dishes) as a giant salad–yes, there’s meat in it, and warm rice vermicelli, but it’s not really a hot dish (and please please don’t microwave it, as I’ve seen a number of takeaway places do. It tastes horrible, and the soy’s gone all limp). So, accordingly, I made my bò bún with honey-dipped beef & shallot for the meat, and salad, soy and the remnants of a cucumber for the veggies. Mmmm… (also, it’s not real bò bún in my book unless the rice vermicelli are swimming in a ton of nước mắm–think of it as vinaigrette, except that it’s not a dribble you put on the salad, but several tablespoons…)

Been working on the novella again. Still not sure about the form–I feel it should be more complex than a short story, but I have this sinking feeling I put way too much in this, and that it’s really a novel in disguise. I’m also fighting my own genre pre-conceptions with this: I wanted to do a generational tale on a space station, focused on the troubles of a family in the wake of a civil war (basically, Dream of Red Mansions rather than Three Kingdoms), and my brain keeps insisting that I’m doing unimportant fluff, and that there should be explosions and battle scenes, and Important Scientific Problems to solve. Grr. Not where I wanted to go. Which isn’t to say, of course, that things aren’t earth-shattering in this, but they’re meant to be far less of a Boys’ Own Tale of Adventure, and more focused on consequences of dramatic acts on families and children (yes, I’m partly doing this in reaction to the whole Women in SF thing. You can tell).

Anyway, hope this shakes out all right. But darn, it does feel good to be writing again.

In other news, let’s see if replacing bean paste with hoisin sauce in the xa xíu marinade was a good idea. (my local Asian grocery had no bean paste, as it’s a Chinese ingredient and not a Vietnamese one).

So, I’m still perusing Irene Kuo’s Key to Chinese Cooking, and along the way I happened on a chapter that talked about Asian noodles, and how you could basically substitute spaghetti for Chinese egg noodles. Which struck me as odd because they don’t taste anything alike, but… see, the book was written in the Seventies, and back then, finding genuine egg noodles in the middle of the US must have been really hard (to some extent, it’s still freaking hard to find proper egg noodles in my part of the Parisian suburbs). And this put me in mind of a conversation I was having with a friend of mine, about how nước mắm used to be so hard to find in France, so the very first recipes that the Vietnamese immigrants came up had to make do with soy sauce… (which again tastes nothing like nước mắm)

It all comes back to a subject I find fascinating: the authenticity of cuisine–something I see crop up a lot on the internet, especially with regards to cookbooks. What makes an authentic recipe? What is and is not an acceptable variant? [1] How should a cuisine as a whole be judged? Because truth is, like cultures, cuisines merge and adapt, and evolve. Sometimes, they adapt because they don’t have basic ingredients: there’s a very cute Vietnamese cookbook in French, Le Chant du Riz Pilé (Song of Crushed/Ground Rice), which makes do without half the Vietnamese staples, because it’s an old book and those staples weren’t available in France at the time.

Sometimes, they merge with other cultures: the most well-known Vietnamese dishes, phở and bánh mì, didn’t actually exist before the turn of the 20th Century: they’re creations made in the melting pot between Vietnamese and French culture. Likewise, there’s a pretty common Vietnamese dish, thịt bò khô (beef stew), which has more than a few common points with an equally famous French dish, boeuf bourguignon (the Vietnamese version has more spices and herbs, but it’s strikingly similar). French cuisine now, as compared to the one at the turn of the century, has grown to include Mediterranean dishes such as taboulé and couscous, and Italian pasta have basically become part of every cook’s repertoire.

In the specific case of immigrants, new dishes become created, whether for the diaspora or for a foreign audience: General Tsao’s Chicken is a pretty good example of a typical Chinese-American dish that you won’t find in Chinese restaurants in France (and, if Wikipedia is correct, which isn’t always the case, a dish that the Chinese in China didn’t much appreciate).
Dishes fall out of favour, or become only cooked within the home of immigrants, because the majority doesn’t appreciate them: there is a fascinating phenomenon whereby most foreign restaurants in a given country will serve the same staples, because they’re the ones that the the majority of people appreciate (it can be because the majority of people is not immigrants, and is freaked out by stuff like pig’s ears; but it can also be because ingredients just aren’t the same. In Vietnamese cooking, chicken used to be a luxury, served mostly for feasts; but when the Vietnamese arrived in France and in the US, they found chicken was available really cheap, and so chicken began to feature on the menu a lot more than in Vietnam). Most Chinese restaurants in France serve the same things; the few Chinese restaurants I tried in the US also served the same things–but not at all the same as the French Chinese restaurants. It’s a fascinating process of accretion, whereby some parts of the cuisine just vanish, and some others acquire a disproportionate weight, depending on where and when the immigration happens. [2]

And, sometimes, things just change because time passes, and mentalities change. French cuisine used to rely a lot on butter for cooking ingredients, and on stuff like homemade stocks. Today, we’re more health-conscious (I don’t use butter, though I do know people who still do), and we’re more pressed for time–so the time-consuming parts of cooking such as making stock tend to get skipped (again, I do know people who make stock. It’s just not the norm anymore). What my French great-grandparents considered a good meal probably would have made me sick; and what I eat today would probably seem strange to them (even sticking to broadly French/European dishes. Let’s leave the nước mắm out of this for the moment…)

Not to mention, of course, that each of us have their own background and their own cuisine, often passed on from parent to child. The H considers his mother’s recipes to be the reference for a lot of things, and will scoff at other recipes (not because they’re inauthentic, but because he thinks they just don’t taste as good). I make my own stuff, mostly pastry, and the odd Vietnamese-French fusion dish (especially when my pantry is bare and all I have lying around are shallots, garlic and nước mắm. You wouldn’t believe what you can improvise with those around). Every French person has a different idea of what good French cooking is, and they’ll likely pass on some of it on to their friends and family–and get stuff passed on to them, as well, from their friends and family.

Yes, I know. I’m having a philosophical moment because of a cookbook. But still… it’s really fascinating stuff. Cuisine as a metaphor for culture. There you go, the thought of the day 🙂

[1] Mileage varies a lot, but here’s a hint as far as I’m concerned: don’t try to sell me chả giò (fried rolls) made with egg roll wrappers (chả giò should be made with rice paper). Egg roll wrappers are for Chinese or other Asian cuisines; the only Vietnamese dish I know which makes use of is a variant of wontons.
[2] There’s also the “restaurant effect”: restaurants tend to serve festive food that you can’t make at home; therefore, most people’s perception of foreign cuisines is really skewed, because the signature dishes tend to be extravagant dishes that are only served for feasts. One good example in France is chả giò, fried rolls, which everyone associates with Vietnamese cuisine in spite of the fact that it’s hardly part of an every day Vietnamese meal.

Aka nước màu.

I used the recipe in Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, which basically consists of making dry caramel in a deep pan, and then taking the pan off the heat and pouring boiling water over the sugar to stop the burning process. Good thing I’m paranoid and stood a long way off when pouring the water, because the reaction is, let’s say, quite dramatic, with plenty of sputtering and hissing (and burning sugar, let me tell you, is hot enough for very nasty surprises).

Next up: kho dishes! (nope, I don’t have the required clay pot, but I’m planning to use our Le Creuset French oven for those–we got it as a wedding gift and haven’t actually used it. Figured now is as good a time to break it out).

Note: it’s slightly darker than most pictures around the Internet, because I used “sucre blond” (unsure of how to translate that in English. I think it’s blond cane sugar) instead of white sugar. It’s apparently not recommended to use anything other than white sugar to make caramel, because impurities in non-refined sugar lead to caramelising failure; but unless I missed something, everything went fine here…

So it’s been about six months, and I thought I’d report a bit on our experience with the rice cooker.

First, a word of warning: this isn’t going to be a post of great revelations about rice cookers–it’s mostly us discovering obvious things. If you already know about rice cookers, especially high-end models, you can probably skip this blog post. We feel very much like we’ve just discovered something half the world already knows about…

I was very ambivalent about the appliance at first, thinking it a big investment with little return–after all, I could already cook rice at home without too much trouble, so why pay so much for a dedicated machine? (I did want a rice cooker, but one of the cheaper models. The H was the one who convinced me to get a high-end, fuzzy logic cooker).

Our rice cooker. It’s a Philips HD4751 (yeah, I know. Philips isn’t a company you’d associate with rice cookers, but they’ve recently started expanding into Malaysia and Singapore, and their electronics are CE-certified. See below for why this matters)

The biggest pro by far is freeing space on the stove–it might not look like much, but so many Asian dishes require cooking ingredients separately, and the four spots on the stove can get crowded very fast–especially if one of them is a huge wok, which tends to eat into the space of the other spots…

Second obvious pro: cooking rice on the stove is fairly easy (as long as you’re not cooking glutinous rice or Japanese short grain rice, which I’m given to understand is a little more complicated), but it does require a bit of attention. By contrast, the rice cooker pretty much takes care of itself: once the rice and water are in, I can go do other things (like chopping up vegetables or preparing a marinade), secure in the knowledge that I won’t have a burnt mess at the bottom of the casserole dish. All I have to do is open up the thing when the timer runs out, and fluff it a bit so that the rice doesn’t stick together, and then close it again–and it stays inside snug and warm until the rest of the ingredients are actually cooked (I’m given to understand the long keep-warm function is one of the big advantages of a higher-end model like ours; the cheaper ones don’t work so great).

The thing also handles other kinds of rice: sushi rice (which was handy for our few forays into Japanese cuisine); brown rice (which is nigh-impossible to cook on a stove), and cháo (congee/rice porridge). Cháo can be made on the stove, but again, the rice cooker makes it much more convenient.

Also, it has a steaming setting! See, the H and I both love dim sum, in particular ha kau, cha siu buns and other classic Chinese dishes. Accordingly, we tried several options for steaming our dim sun. Metal baskets, bamboo baskets, baskets lined with baking paper or foil (and believe me, piercing dozens of holes in baking paper or foil in order to let the steam pass is one of the most soul-destroying activities in the kitchen)… The steaming bit worked great, but what didn’t work was the get-the-dumplings-out-the-basket-without-tearing-them-apart bit. In other words, the damn things tended to stick to the hot surface, which made it very hard to get some decent-looking meals.
Our rice cooker, on the other hand, comes with a plastic white basket which slots over the main reservoir–and things actually don’t stick to it. I’m in love. Plus, you can cook rice and dim sum at the same time (the dim sum get cooked by the steam from the rice). Win!

Cons: if you don’t eat enough rice, of course, it’s pretty much a worthless investment. On the other hand, I’ve found that our global consumption of rice in the household increased–rice suddenly became as lazy an option as pasta when we both came home knackered from the day job.

One thing I do miss is the burnt bits at the bottom (they have a special name in Vietnamese, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it is). When they’re not charred, but just the right shade of golden, they make for delicious eating, and of course you can’t get those with a rice cooker, which makes perfect rice every time…

One minor con: we did need to get hold of someone who spoke Traditional Chinese before we could use the thing. As you can see, everything on it is labelled in Chinese characters, which can be a bit of a drawback when the instruction booklet isn’t explicit: it did include numbered diagrams, but it also suffered from a flaw I’ve often seen in Philips instruction booklets, which is that there are numbers missing, rendering the system pretty much useless. Thankfully, an amazing number of people showed up here, on FB and on LJ to help us interpret the labels.

Last con if you live in Europe: getting hold of the %% thing in the first place. Most rice cookers sold in the 13th Arrondissement (our local Chinese/Vietnamese district) are simpler models–most high-end rice cookers are made for the Asian markets, and are not CE-certified, which prevents them from being imported in Europe. It took us a whole afternoon to find this one.*

So, overall, very happy with the purchase. Coming late to the whole concept (or, indeed, the whole cuisine thing :-p), but definitely a fan. We’re probably one of the few French households with a sophisticated rice cooker and no coffee-maker whatsoever…

* Yes, we could probably have asked one of our numerous friends living in Asia to buy one for us, and bring it back–the thought didn’t occur to us until it was far too late…

When I started up the cooking experiments, way back near the beginning of this blog, I had a heck of a time mixing up that basic staple of Vietnamese cooking, dipping sauce (aka nước chấm). My grandmother’s instructions went something like this: “a little nước mắm (concentrated fish sauce), a little lime, a little sugar, and mix everything”. Of course, she’s been mixing it her whole life, so she can do it by colour. I, on the other hand, am not very good at colour, and have a boundless capacity for screwing up proportions (ask anyone who participated in New Year’s Eve, where I cooked 40 spring rolls, and enough venison for 15 people–which would have been great had there actually been 40 of us at table instead of 9…)

So when I started mixing my own fish sauce, I went by the (cook)book. I filched recipes from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Kitchen and from Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam, and used the same proportions. Invariably, though, the result ended up tasting really bad, and I ended up having to top up ingredients in a frantic attempt to get the taste and colour back into familiar ranges.

I thought it was further proof of my lack of talents at cooking–until I read this article on Andrea Nguyen’s Viet World Kitchen blog, on how to buy fish sauce. Down near the middle, there’s a note that says that fish sauce sold in the US is single-grade–with an average of 20°in purity (ie, 20% pure fish concentrate, 80 water).

But, see, in France, unlike in the US, fish sauce comes in several grades–25° or 35°. And my mom, my grandma and I (and most Vietnamese) buy 35°. So basically, I’ve been trying to get proportions right with the wrong kind of fish sauce, and all the quantities of those recipes should be adjusted by 20/35 (which is about 60%).

No wonder those recipes all tasted really foul, and that the only recipe which ever worked was the one I picked up on a French blog…

So, not up to much that I can safely admit (sekrit projects, plus speaking about the novel in progress on this blog seems to curse me to a halt in the writing of the manuscript). To tide you over until the weekend, a few links:

-I’m guessing by now most people will have seen the Amy Chua piece on the Washington Post, about why Chinese mothers are superior. I don’t have much to say about it other than “batshit crazy Asian mother”–and yes, I have an Asian mother, so I can speak from my (admittedly limited) experience. I can see some of the points, and some things Amy Chua mentions are certainly familiar from my own childhood, though not pushed quite this far. My TV time was limited; so was my video game time; neither of my parents were particularly happy when I brought home bad grades, and yes, both of them always pushed me to go further because they believed I could do better. And I’m glad they did it; I’m glad they placed a higher value on education than on sparing my feelings, and nurtured my ambition and drive–to the point where I thought of doing something as crazy as writing in a second language and getting away with it.
But, seriously, not allowing your children to be in school plays, forcing them to play a musical instrument and tormenting your daughter until she gets the piano piece right? Wow. That’s some serious going south here.
Allow me to dig up quintessential Chinese wisdom here, in the person of Confucius: “To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.” Ie, balance and perspective. Something that seems to be missing from all the horror stories about Asian moms (there were quite a few flying around on the internet in the wake of that article).

-And, in a lighter vein: Mature people truths (via Cat Rambo). Some of these are oh-so-painfully true.

-Finally, I’ve posted (with permission) on the SFWA forums “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s awesome story about expatriation, identity and what it means to be an immigrant in a strange land. Recommended by Richard Horton in his year-end summary of Interzone, and generally quite made of awesome. (and I’m not only saying that because Rochita is my friend). Well worth a read if you have forum access.

EDIT: apparently, the Amy Chua thing is only an excerpt from a larger book, which is intended to deal with the problems of her education system as well. Mea culpa.
EDIT #2: and, apparently, the WJS just quoted the most controversial part of Chua’s book without bothering to add a corrective, because controversy makes for more readers. Great. As I said on LJ, I feel like hitting something, preferably a WJS editor.

Wasn’t sure how public this was, but apparently people have already been announcing their own acceptances over the Internet. So…

Gardner Dozois has picked up my Xuya story “The Shipmaker” (which is in the current issue of Interzone) for his Year’s Best.

Er, wow? Particularly pleased, as this was the first story where I attempted to put Vietnamese on the map of my alternate universe–there aren’t that many Vietnamese main characters in spec-fic[1], and it’s high time I did my bit to remedy this.

If you need me, I’ll be in the corner, jumping and squeeing…

ETA: and it looks I get to share a TOC with Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle Chain”, which is one of the absolute best SF stories I read this year. W00t.

[1]There’s plenty of Vietnam War stories, which tend to be told from the American point of view–so not really fitting the billl. Plus, while the war was definitely traumatic for the country, it’s not the only thing that defines Vietnamese culture…

Not a model of speed, really (work plus writing leave me with little spare time). At least I’ve finally managed to learn the basics for the family unit (which also double as pronouns for most of them, so pretty useful). Of course, it only occurred to me after I finished that I probably wasn’t going to need the ones for the paternal side of the family (unless I was referring to them in a conversation with a Vietnamese)…

The book I’m using is good for getting some of the basics right (in addition to the semi-weekly pronunciation/vocabulary lessons taught by Mom/Grandmother), but I have to be careful with the pronunciation, which is the “standardised” one (read “mostly Northern”, as opposed to my Southern maternal family). Their use of pronouns is also problematic: they overuse the first person tôi (which draws a little too much attention to itself), and of course they fail to take into account the fact that the learner of the language could be Vietnamese or related to Vietnamese, which means they cheerfully skip the modes of address specific to relatives–which I’m likely to need, and fast, as the whole maternal family now knows what I’m up to.
That’s what I can spot; it leaves me a little worried about the stuff I can’t spot…

I was also reading a book on the history of Vietnam, which I thought was going to give me a more formal idea of the subject, but I stopped when I got to the part which described the fall of Saigon as a moment of rejoicing for the whole country. Er, no? I very much doubt all the inhabitants of Saigon were very happy to be “freed” from “the tyranny of a Western-controlled government”… [1]

[1]I’ll freely admit I’m not very objective either about the time period, but then again it’s not exactly easy, considering my family history.[2]
[2] And I’ll stop there, because this is getting a little too close to heart and too personal to be unpacked on a blog.

In an Asian cookbook that was among the bookstore’s pick for the month:
“Nước mắm sauce: pick it amber, and not black and/or smelly, as the last denotes inferior quality.”

Er… I guess it depends on your definition of “smelly”? My nước mắm sauce is as smelly as they come, and it’s certainly not inferior quality (it’s got the official Vietnamese seal of approval). Amber says weak to me, aka the Thai fish sauce I tried a few months ago that just wouldn’t decent dipping sauce no matter how much I poured. But I guess if we’re talking about European palates…

(yes, the BF thinks my latest batch of nước chấm is a little…extreme? I think I finally managed to mix it with the proper kick)