Favorite Cookbooks: Andrea Nguyen Recipe
Cookbook author, freelance writer, and cooking teacher Andrea Nguyen, shares her favorite cookbooks with us.
Andrea and I have been friends for a few years now. She writes inspiring articles about people and their deep connections with food. And she writes books that dive head-first into the topic at hand, while remaining wonderfully accessible. Truth be told, when I first met her I was a bit intimidated. But that feeling didn't last long. She's light, with an easy smile, and a sense of humor that had me at go. On the culinary front, she up for anything. We got together for drinks at a friend's house recently and she showed up with jars of homemade Maraschino cherries, one jar made using one technique, the other jar using a different approach -an impromptu tasting ensued. Not long after that, I saw on her site she was reverse engineering her own Sriracha chile sauce (!). I don't see her as often as I'd like to, and I regret that she doesn't live just a little bit closer to me.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with her debut cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. It was among the finalists for a James Beard Foundation award (best Asian cookbook) and two International Association of Culinary Professionals awards (best first book and best international book). For all you dumpling fans out there, her second book, Asian Dumplings, tackles the subject spanning samosas, lumpia, pot stickers, momo, gyōza, wontons, bāo, and then some. She's a contributing editor to Saveur magazine, writes for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News, and teaches cooking classes regularly. When I asked Andrea to share some of her favorite cookbooks, she replied with the following...
A woman I know lost her entire cookbook collection in one of the recent Santa Barbara fires. I winced when I heard about it as I've often wondered what I'd grab or miss the most should disaster strike. My collection of cookbooks fills several seven-foot-tall bookshelves in my dining room and office. It is comprised of my mother's notebook of handwritten recipes that she carried from Vietnam when we fled, works that I perused during my youth, gems discovered overseas or hunted down at used bookstores, and many acquired online during late night shopping forays. I'd be heartbroken if I no longer had certain ones as they are special, irreplaceable artifacts of time and place. However, if my entire library of cookbooks were to vanish, I would find my bearing and seed a new collection with these works:
Eastern
Irene Kuo's The Key to Chinese Cooking (Knopf, 1977) was my first Chinese cookbook. After my family arrived in the U.S. in 1975, we started going to our local library to checkout cookbooks and then eventually joined Book-of-the-Month clubs to start our own cookbook collection. My three sisters and I read all the fine print and took turns joining so we could get multiple deals on cookbooks. Kuo's was among our family's favorites. She was spot on back in '77 and still is today. I own two copies, one with a broken spine and the other has hardly been cracked open as it waits for the first one to completely fall apart.
If I lost those copies, I'd track down a third copy. But I'd supplement Kuo's Chinese recipes with those by Grace Young in The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen and The Breath of a Wok (Simon & Schuster, 1999 and 2004). All the recipes work in Grace's books, and she has a great palate.
For dreaming about and cooking the flavors of South and Southeast Asia, I'd get Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Beyond the Great Wall (Artisan, 2000 and 2008). Their books have fed my creativity, piqued my curiosity, and satisfied my hunger for Asian food and culture for years. The over-sized tomes are not merely for coffee table décor. They are books to cook and learn from.
Latin
I've lived in California for most of my life and Mexican food is a necessity. Rick Bayless has never failed me with his recipes for making uncommonly delicious Mexican Food. I can easily spend a day cooking from his books, especially Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen (Scribner, 1996). For the ultimate from-scratch cooking experience, I'd also pick up Diana Kennedy's From My Mexican Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2003).
Western
Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is getting lots of press these days but frankly, I don't often use those volumes. If I want well-honed instructions on classic French and American dishes, I make a beeline for The Way to Cook (Knopf, 1993). She very clearly, and with her signature humor, tells you how to make terrific pate, meatloaf, and pumpkin pie. There's work involved but it's neither nervous making nor laborious seeming. Along with J.C. (and I'm not talking Jesus here), I'd pick up James Beard's American Cookery (Little Brown and Co., 1980). For Italian recipes, Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992) has been my kitchen companion since it came out in 1992 and I'd surely bring her back.
These cookbooks by Child, Beard, and Hazan all have an authoritative voice that is friendly, not motherly. (Who wants their mom hovering over them as they cook?) Their thoughtful and straight-ahead approach to home cooking inspires my writing and informs my understanding of American and European fare.
Reference
I'm a geek who LOVES reading cookbook glossaries. Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food is one of the books that I grab to look something up as I research and develop recipes; either the first or second edition would do. For Asian ingredients, Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food (Tuttle, 2008) and Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients (William Morrow, 2000) are my requisite reference works.
Finally, I would be disingenuous if I didn't say that I'd be quick to replenish copies of my own cookbooks. Truth be told, I regularly cook from them and follow my own instructions. The results are surprisingly good!
Cooking is a craft that I regularly practice and these are among the works that I cherish most. My personal and professional life would be incomplete without cookbooks around.
Here's where you can find Andrea:
- Andrea's newest book: Asian Dumplings
- Andrea's first book: Into the Vietnamese Kitchen
- Viet World Kitchen
- Asian Dumpling Tips
- Follow Andrea on Twitter
Photo by: Penny De Los Santos. You can follow Penny's blog here, or her twitter stream. My hope is that I can convince her to share her favorite cookbooks with us at some point too!
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Comments
I wish you had posted one of her recipes...
I have 4 Asian cookbooks that, long ago, I read cover-to-cover in the reading room (you know, that special room in every house). I forced myself to read EVERY recipe (both the ingredient list and the how-to-do-it section) so I'd have a basic idea about what to do in terms of Asian cooking. Some of the very best information was in the how-to section. There's still SO very much to learn! Thanks for the newest recommendations. Like someone else said, I think I have way too many cookbooks, and since I've been cooking for over 45 years, I seldom dip into my collection of books -- but every now and then I pull out my 45-year-old Betty Crocker and a few others to reinforce proportions and cooking temperatures. I'm a little more nutritionally conscious than my Betty Crocker cookbook seems to be, but that's where the improvising fun comes into play along with the age-old advice from many of my favorite old-time cook books. It'd be hard to say which is the most favorite, but maybe the dust on the top edge would tell (oops -- I'm not the tidiest of homemakers you can probably tell, but, what the hey, I live way out in the country and we're not that way, way out here where everything's pretty natural).
Heidi, I checked out Penny's site with her wonderful photos currently of sheep farming (ranching) in Idaho, I liked the lamb chops on the barbecue, a reasonably rare sight I believe in the US but part of our culture here in New Zealand. After all we do have about 40 million sheep. I think the US have 8 million
While I have (too!) many cookbooks in general, our Asian section is woefully underserved. I have enjoyed Andrea's writings but have yet to plunge for the book - thanks for the nudge. Sidenote: Bisquik as an advertiser here??
Thanks for the great list of cookbooks! I found the suggestions for Asian cookbooks especially helpful as I've been working more Asian meals into our family menus. Thank you for your great work on the site, it's one of my favorites!
Inspiring. Reading this really makes me just want to spend a day with any of the cookbooks mentioned and get lost. I am new to using cookbooks and love it! (I used to always just cook what I knew how to make - and very simply). I love your site. Thanks.
I adore Andrea's writing (Saveur-subscriber) and her recipes. She is such a sincere, passionate, and knowledgable contributer to the food world. Andrea - you are so appreciated! Thanks for sharing Heidi! James Beard's American Cookery has been on my "maybe" list for years now - seems like it is time to hit up Omnivore Books and make the purchase.
That sounds like a gorgeous book. I love the list you've outlined here; haven't got a Vietnamese cookbook in my collection. It sounds so good! Thank you for sharing this so beautifully!
Thank you so much, I have been looking for a great vietnamese cookbook so I can start cooking food for my vietnamese exchange student. Yeah!
Thanks for the info - I'll have to check out her book!
Loved reading this. Thank you. My family and I live in an 800 sq. ft. house, so I have to keep my cookbook acquisition down. My mom has at least 500 volumes, though, so love of cookbooks is something I can't get away from. After reading Andrea's picks, it looks like I'm on the right track with my mini-library.
I love dumplings so that is one cookbook I will definitely have to check out. I also enjoyed seeing your list of must have cookbooks. Many of those are among my favorites as well.
Thanks...I love reading new cookbooks and I am so NOT knowledgeable....but these 'interviews' surely help. Sounds all great as this is my current area I am pushing into with my cooking...all things Asian and Japanese is my current one..very very hard for a German by the way...grin...
I love seeing lists of favorite cookbooks. Also, I just read Asian Dumplings and am putting together a post about it this morning. Hope Penny shares a list with you soon!
Heidi thank you so much for showcasing the work of others. Your generosity is one of my favorite things about this site, and the way you connect your readers to others in your field is truly inspirational to me. I look forward to checking out these titles... and wish that all of you lived in my neighborhood. Ah well, it's getting a bit nippy here - correction: maybe I wish to live in yours. All the best, Michaela
Great list, thanks a lot. I am allways looking for a good read and new inputs.
Oh this is wonderful to know - thank you!
Great tips for cook books! I recently bought a used copy of Marcella Hazan's book and I love it: the basics, simple and written when 'fast food' was not invented yet ("simmer on the lowest simmer for 3h. 5h would be better"). Reading this post, I ordered the key to chinese cooking book, hopefully a similar revelation with regard to chinese cooking. Thanks again!
I just met Andrea at the World Chef Showcase - I can see why you love her. She was fantastic - very friendly and a great source of knowledge (fantastic presenter too!). I also got her Asian Dumpling book and am drooling right now. That would be one of my new favourite cookbooks just on the pictures and reading the recipes alone! I can't wait to try it out
I have been after the Charmaine Solomon book for a while now. I don't think it is currently in print but I didn't realise that Amazon were selling used copies. Even the used copies aren't that cheap which just goes to show you how popular this book is.
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