Best pho book in 125 years
Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
date Dec 8, 2006 12:33 PM
subject [Vsg] best pho book in 125 years
Hi all,
I have been at home with a bug and a broken computer, storing up things
to post. Sorry to be piggish, but once I get off the couch I might not
get back to vsg for a while.
Here is a brief notice of "I (heart) Pho", a museum catalogue that
stands alone very well as a book. It is edited by Cu*o*`ng Phu/ Le^,
who also curated the show at Liverpool [Australia, not UK] Regional
Museum in June 2006.
The poet Linh Dinh sent me a copy, after trying to explain to me why it
was so wonderful. Let me try.
Pho is coeval with what we now call Viet Nam, and what we can call
Vietnamese literature, with ediorial offices and publishing houses and
an urban audience. People started eating pho and pulling rickshaws at
about the same time they started writing about such things in newspapers.
Writing about pho is nostalgic modernism, longing for the everyday life
that urban life summons into being and sweeps away. A native of the
city where pizza and hamburgers were invented, I've got this desire in
my bones.
Cuong Phu Le has gathered in about 60 pages the most astonishing
collection of longing for pho I have seen in English, French, or
Vietnamese. There are poems and articles, photos and recipes.
There is an introductory essay by Boitran Huynh-Beattie, who just wrote
what sounds like a great dissertation on Saigon aesthetics from 1925 on.
There is an article from San Francisco journalist Andrew Lam
gathering coversations from his rambles around the Pacific talking with
people about soup.
Andrew's article includes every neat anecdote I have heard about pho.
Linh Dinh has a poem, and Phan Nhien Hao as well, cleverly defending the
essance of a highly contingent product. There is a single
representative shot from each of several fascinating photographic
studies and video work.
OK, I can't do the book justice. There are historicism and
essentialism, prose and graphic art. It's even got a quote from Huu
Ngoc. The recipes are dead serious.
The catalogue also documents every last participant in the exhibition
and in the catalogue, a great resource for disapora culture. That is
just one of many notes that books carries of the Australian brand of
egalitarianism, which marries matiness with respect for talent and work.
The catalogue definitely belongs in every research or teaching
collection on Viet Nam. I mean right next to the dictionary, David
Marr, Ralph Smith and some Kieu translation. For ordering contact:
Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, reception@casulapowerhouse.com
Dan
Nora Taylor <nthanoi04@yahoo.com>
date Dec 8, 2006 5:00 PM
subject Re: [Vsg] best pho book in 125 years
Dan,
I had received an email posting of this exhibition
from one of the participating artists Justine Nguyen
Xuan Mai Long. I would love to know if the catalogue
is available in the US.
Nora
Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
date Dec 10, 2006 9:59 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] best pho book in 125 years; also Andrea Nguyen cookbook
Hi Nora, I haven't tried to order one yet. If anyone tries to, through
reception@casulapowerhouse.com, it would be good to hear how it works.
The "Catalogues" page at www.caulspowerhouse.com is under construction.
I just now heard Andrea Nguyen, who does the recipes in the catalogue,
on the radio talking about her own new cookbook, Into the Vietnamese
Kitchen.
The special feature of the book is that she gives Vietnamese lore with
the recipes. She impressed me with a brief, clear, accurate and
thoughtful presentation of deep history and the modern nation in Viet Nam,
For example, she distinguished between the arrival of missionaries and
the period of colonization, introduced both the emergence of the
S-shaped state ca. 1800 and the Au Lac story, and gave the pot-au-feu
derivation for pho while placing such influences in mainland SE Asian
context.
Quite a performance in 90 sec. Next time I get paid will look into
buying her book too.
Dan
BoiTran Huynh <boitranb@yahoo.com>
date Dec 10, 2006 7:19 PM
subject Re: [Vsg] best pho book in 125 years; also Andrea Nguyen cookbook
Hi, folks,
You can contact Cuong Le on this email. Cuong LePhu <cuong@casulapowerhouse.com>, and Cuong can tell you more about the further journey of this exhibition, Pho Goes Global.
The Powerhouse Art Centres is being renovated at the moment, but all their works have been active at the Liverpool Museum of New South Wales.
Yes, I wrote the introduction for the catalogue. It's fun to work with these artists on this exhibition.
Boitran Huynh-Beattie
Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
date Dec 27, 2006 11:05 AM
subject [Vsg] Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen
Hi all, here is another major book that those who buy for institutional
teaching and research collections on Viet Nam might have missed.
If you're busy, please skip this circumstantial account and take my word
for it:
Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors (Ten
Speed, 2006) is a lavishly illustrated, highly specific account of
Vietnamese cooking, with a serious index, English and Vietnamese
bibliographies, and invaluable ethnographic accounts in good historical
context.
I bought several copies for Xmas gifts after I heard Andrea on the radio
introduce the modern history of Viet Nam and its memory of ancient times
in a few deft sentences while speaking for the new book.
The copy I had delivered here to Orange County, North Carolina, to take
around the corner to my sister-in-law, didn't make it there. I gave
Denise instead an Edna Lewis book I had bought for myself.
Edna wrote from a lifetime in service in New York, drawing on the
traditions of her hometown, one of the free settlements of blacks that
dot our South.
Denise, a Sicilian from our Italian hometown of New Haven, will use
Edna's book to further assimilate here in North Carolina. The business
she runs with my brother involves feeding a lot of bluesmen and women.
The most cosmopolitan people you are going to meet, who play Argentina
and France, Australia and Belgium and connect with everyone, they really
don't like to eat anything but down-home cooking.
So Denise can use Edna's book, where Andrea's would have been fun. I
can use Andrea's book for work, and will be sending it out to colleagues.
I haven't tried following any of the recipes yet. I have a friend who
does this for a living, drawing a paycheck in a test kitchen, going
through cookbook recipes to make sure they work.
Only a public corporation can afford that. Ten Speed, Andrea's
publisher, is an independent, or was the last time I looked. It has
grown into something like Rodale - corporate-scale marketing reach with
the cleverness and loyalty of a private business - on the strength of
inspired publishing decisions.
Ten Speed's famous cookbooks, which no one else would have published at
the time, are the ubiquitous Moosewood vegetarian cookbook, and the
hilarious but substantial White Trash Cookbook.
It's appropriate, since counter-culturalists in Ithaca and poor whites
in general were among those Americans most keenly aware of the war in
Viet Nam, that the Berkeley publisher of these classics should turn out
a great book on Vietnamese cooking.
This is the kind of thing I can tell you about, the implications of
textual cues. The cover and front matter are heavy with detailed
endorsements by colleagues.
The explicit engagement with other authorities extends through the
recipes, making this a work of scholarship in the sense of something
written in dialogue with others in the field.
It is also scholarly in the sense of thoughtful arrangement for the
needs of the reader. At the back, along with the index, there is a
bibliography, guide to resources, and guide to ingredients.
At the front, after the legitimating acknowledgments and foreword, the
Introduction is a personal narrative of coming to the US which is of
teachable quality. The next section, Roots of Vietnamese Cooking, is as
good a five-page summary of modern Viet Nam as any of us could do.
After that, the book is for active use. Sections are: Kitchen
Essentials; Gifts to the Mouth; Essential Soups; Precious Poultry and
Everyday Eggs; Bountiful Fish and Shellfish; Class Meats; The Art of
Charcuterie; Vegetables for All Seasons; Noodles from Morning Until
Night; Indispensable Rice; the World of Banh; Sweets and Palate
Refreshes; Basics.
I will use the recipes the way I use other sources, learning one dish at
a time, a handful a year, using what ingredients and tools I have in the
house and calling up friends to guess at whatever procedures I can't
understand from the text.
I expect to use the overall book more frequently than that, for the same
purpose as the food glossary Nina McPherson wrote for her translations
of Paradise of the Blind. There are explanations here of the food I run
across in my reading, and at my friends' houses.
The index gives page references for Vietnamese names of dishes, and the
sections seem intuitively helpful for tracking down a recipe. There are
beautiful full-page illustrations for some dishes, but not enough to
count on for identification.
One strength of the book is also a failing. It is definitely a Viet
book, using that adjective as a synonym for Vietnamese and scanting the
highlanders and the Cham. There is sensitivity to region and to the
Chinese.
Another lack is any sense of the everyday use of food to negotiate
deference and obligation, something I can pretend to be oblivious to as
a foreigner but it is good to know about.
This failing is another aspect of a virtue. Andrea emphasizes the
liberatory, self-reliant, connective, pleasurable aspects of cooking and
eating. Her family seems to live the charmed life that comes with
social virtuosity.
It's a happy book. Each recipe comes with acute observations on joyous
survival back in a Viet Nam and here in the US. It really belongs in
libraries.
Dan