The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between [A Cookbook]

by Tu David Phu, Soleil Ho

Overview

A playful collection of over 85 Vietnamese and Viet American dishes and immersive travel photography from Top Chef alum Tu David Phu that blends the Oakland native’s modern culinary style with the food wisdom from his refugee family.

“Stripped of Oriental exoticism, this is a cookbook infused with the intense flavors of refugee kitchens and the inauthentic authenticity of the diaspora.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Sympathizer

Tu David Phu trained in the nation’s top restaurants only to realize the culinary lessons that truly impacted him were those passed on by his parents, refugees from Phú Quôc. In his hometown of Oakland, California, his parents taught him hard-won lessons in frugality, food-covery cooking, and practical gill-to-fin eating.

Centered around Tu’s childhood memories in the diverse Bay Area and family stories of life on Phú Quốc island, The Memory of Taste explores the Phu family’s ability to thrive and adapt from one coastal community to another. With tried-and-true tips like how to butcher a fish, tastebud-tingling flavor combinations, and stunning photographs, Tu guides both novice and experienced chefs alike in his take on Viet cooking, including:

• Staples in every Vietnamese kitchen like Cơm Tấm (Broken Rice), Dán Sả (Lemongrass Paste), and Nước Mắm Cham (Everyday Fish Sauce)
• Seafood dishes that utilize the less “desired” parts like Huyết Cá Tái Chanh (Tuna Bloodline Tartare), Canh Chua Đầu Cá Hồi (Hot Pot-style Salmon Head Sour Soup), and Xương Cá Hồi Ghiên Giòn (Fried Fish Frames)
• Fine-dining dishes from Tu’s pop-up days like Gỏi Cuốn Cá Cornets, Mì Xào Tỏi Nấm Cục (Truffled Garlic Noodles), and Bánh Canh Carbonara
• Adapted recipes from new traditions like Bánh Ít Trần (Sticky Rice Dumplings), Cơm Cua Hấp (Dungeness Crab Donburi), and Phở Vịt Nướng (Roasted Duck Phở)

The Memory of Taste is Tu’s story of returning to his roots and finding long-hidden culinary treasure. In his debut cookbook, Tu offers readers a chance to enjoy the bounty of his parents’ lessons, just as he has.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984861917
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	09/10/2024
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	119 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Tu David Phu is a Vietnamese American, San Francisco Chronicle Rising Star Chef, a Top Chef alumnus, author, and an Emmy-nominated filmmaker from Oakland. He is the executive chef and managing partner at District One in Las Vegas. Tu has cooked across various cultures, from the American culinary treasures to classical European traditions. But it is what he calls “the memory of taste” that pulled him back to his roots: the practices, ingredients, techniques, and flavors of Vietnamese cuisines, and he is passionate about sharing the riches and lessons of his birthright through food.

Soleil Ho is a Vietnamese American writer, podcaster, and burnt-out chef. They served as the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic for four years, and their food and culture writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Bitch Media, GQ, and The Best American Food Writing. They've also won the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award.

Stephen Satterfield has spent his career redefining food and beverage by organizing, activating, and educating. He is the founder of Whetstone and the host of the critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries, High on the Hog.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

It was always hard to talk to my parents about anything but food. For most of my life, I didn’t know anything about their past: their childhoods in the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc or how, as young adults, they escaped from war. Other families might get some warm, chest-deep glow from reminiscing together. That’s not the case with mine. For my parents, their memories haunt them. They would brush off any questions about the past as quickly as I could ask them. To me, their time in Vietnam was mostly a giant question mark.

While working in fine dining restaurants at the beginning of my career, I was usually the only Viet guy in the kitchen—but it wasn’t necessarily my racial identity that singled me out. I felt it in those casual moments between rushes in the kitchen, when all the cooks would get to talking about memory and family, in that intimate way that develops when you’re working elbow-to-elbow and sweating all over each other for twelve hours at a time. Those were the times when we’d talk about what we ate as kids, our first tastes of perfectly ripe tomatoes, and the way our mothers or grandmothers would massage olive oil into lettuce from their gardens. I say “we” here, but I’m lying. It was them, but it wasn’t me.

At the time, I saw my family history as this gaping nothingness: a series of silent head shakes, pursed lips, and changed subjects. There was nothing “respectable” for me to be nostalgic about—no mind-blowing food moments that would stand up to some bourgie tomato story. Was I going to tell my fellow cooks about all the vegetable scraps and fish heads that my parents would save to keep me and my sister fed, just so they could make jokes about how I grew up eating literal garbage? Hell no! So, when I heard other chefs talk about their upbringings with all the hazy-eyed romance of a Jane Austen novel, I shut up. All I felt was jealousy and resentment.

I don’t remember when it started, but when I was a kid, I tended to project way too much of what I saw on TV onto my own life. Back in the ’90s, it was shows like Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Step by Step that showed me what a “normal family” was. When people asked me about my home life, I would stretch the truth a little so we could fit the mold. The way I told it, my dad wasn’t a fishmonger who worked under-the-table night shifts; he was a “fish expert”: something vague enough so you could plausibly imagine him taming dolphins at the aquarium. And I would say my mom was a “seamstress,” a word that sounded harmless on the surface. What I didn’t tell them was that she worked in sweatshops, earning a fraction of a penny for each piece of clothing she made. A normal family would work 9-to-5 jobs and eat sloppy joes for dinner. A normal family would be so mentally and physically far away from the nightmare of war that they might as well be on a different planet.

I pieced together the real story of my parents later in life, from sometimesconflicting snippets that I got from relatives in the United States and Vietnam and from hints that my mom would drop as we cooked together. It goes something like this. In Phú Quốc, a conch-shaped island off the southern shores of Cambodia, my parents met at a fish market. My mom, who came from a wealthy family of fish sauce–makers, suddenly noticed the buff young Viet-Khmer guy selling fish that he and his brothers had caught that morning. In the fight between her family’s disapproval and her feelings, the feelings kicked disapproval’s ass to the curb. You’d think that just a tug-of-war between feelings and family would be enough strife and drama for a lifetime. But then there was the war.

It was a war that most Americans still barely know anything about, but it’s the poison that beats in the heart of my family’s trauma, so America owes it to my family—and so many others—to at least hear about it. So here goes. From 1965 to 1973, the United States—led by Lyndon B. Johnson and then Richard Nixon—dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs onto Cambodia in what they called “Operation Menu.” Out of that chaos rose the Khmer Rouge, a paranoid and genocidal military regime that ruled over Cambodia, waging war on Vietnam as well as on its own people. In the early 1970s, when my parents were still just two teenagers in love, my dad was drafted by the People’s Army of Vietnam to fight against the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know what my dad saw back then; I only know what came after. When my dad returned, it was to a home scarred by war. He and my mom were certain that if they had stayed, they would have starved. So they left.

Both barely into their twenties, my parents escaped Vietnam by boat. Cut off from home, they were stripped of all their possessions when they were robbed by pirates at sea. They ended up in a Thai refugee camp for nine months. It was at the camp where my mom sewed for money and learned how to utilize and stretch every single scrap of food she was able to get her hands on. Years after they left, that fight for survival and that life-or-death frugality stayed with them, reappearing in our lives every day when we sat down to eat a meal.

It took me so many years to see my family’s food for what it really was. When you’re taught in European-style fine dining to only use the most pristine tips of asparagus for a tasting menu course, you develop this ingrained mental hierarchy of what “good” and “bad” food is. Even if you end up using the not-so-pretty produce for other purposes, you can’t help but think of it as undesirable or not worth the money. In this environment, it was easy for me to stumble down the slippery slope of thinking that my family’s food was inferior. From there, it wasn’t too far of a leap to start feeling ashamed of where I came from. Over the years, I’ve had to consciously let go of those ideas and drag myself off of my fancy-chef high horse to really appreciate what my parents gave me.

Cooking with my parents led me to a deeper appreciation of our customs and foodways and opened a window to their past. While my mom showed me how to collect strands of corn silk to use in a dish, her fingers working with a master seamstress’s precision, I caught glimpses of the skills that allowed her to survive in a refugee camp. When my dad would take me grocery shopping, I would hear stories about the long lineage of fishermen he came from while he scrutinized the seafood counter for the best—and most affordable—specimen to bring home. He told me both of my grandfathers were famous free divers on the island, known for diving into the ocean three hundred feet deep to save people from sinking ships.

Those rare times when my parents let their masks slip just a little, I could see into the memories of conflict, alienation, and food insecurity that built them into the people I’ve known my whole life. The kitchen was the safest place for me to ask, “I remember this flavor; can you tell me more?”

Everything that I ate growing up was a piece of this huge puzzle that was my family. There were porridges and stir-fries enriched with whatever my dad would bring home after long hours working at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. He filled our fridge with scraps: scallop frills, fish bladders, bloodline, and fish heads. My mom would slowly extract all the flavor she could out of the cheapest cuts of meat and fish, simmering fish bones and chicken carcasses on the stove to break down the collagen into nutritious stocks and soups, and I would dart in and out of the kitchen the whole time, tasting each phase of the broth with her. On good days, we’d have celery, onions, and carrots to add to the stocks. On bad days, we’d only have rice and instant ramen to eat. The kitchen was stocked with repurposed jars and plastic tubs filled with leftover scraps: orange peels for candying, cucumber seeds, and corn silk, which she’d sauté to serve on rice.

Anything my mom couldn’t cook—and that was a high bar to clear—she’d stir into the soil of her garden. Under her care, inedible animal organs, crushed oyster shells, and spoiled milk transformed American dirt into the passion fruit, brown sugar cane, Thai bird’s eye chiles, kumquats, and guavas of her home island.

Before I ever got to visit our hometown in Vietnam, I could taste it. My parents brought Phú Quốc home when they laid baskets of fresh herbs, rice paper, and marinated fish on our dinner table and taught me and my sister how to roll everything up into the perfect bite. Fish sauce, the pride of the island, was a constant presence and a reminder of our people’s resourcefulness and ingenuity. My parents’ memories of home hurt, but even that pain—as raw as it still was decades later—couldn’t keep them from dropping breadcrumbs for us to follow.

Editorial Reviews

Many kinds of Vietnamese cuisine exist, and this vibrant and very memorable version from Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho emerges from the ways Vietnamese people have loved and lived through colonialism, war, poverty, and the refugee experience. Stripped of Oriental exoticism, this is a cookbook infused with the intense flavors of refugee kitchens and the inauthentic authenticity of the diaspora.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, The Refugees, The Committed, and A Man of Two Faces

“Tu confidently walks the line of his Vietnamese American heritage in his food and the impact of his memories and stories play out in his recipes. The Memory of Taste is a great book for readers who want to learn about the context of traditional Vietnamese food through Californian influences that makes Tu’s food unique, but can also help make sense of your own cherished food memories.”—Brandon Jew, James Beard award–winning author and chef of Mister Jiu’s

“Bold and unapologetic in its words and flavors, The Memory of Taste is a testament to how powerful diasporic stories are in the language of food. In an intimately familiar story, Tu reminds me that those of us who have survived the generational trauma of war and forced migration, are blessed to honor the past and pave a more beautiful way forward with delicious nourishing meals that connect us all to our shared humanity.”—Reem Assil, award-winning chef and author of Arabiyya

“Chef Tu’s The Memory of Taste beautifully intertwines culture, cuisine, and personal revelation, offering an enlightening and heartwarming exploration of heritage through food. The engaging narratives and unique recipes provide a fresh perspective on cultural representation. The portrayal of fish sauce embodies the soul of Chef Tu’s story and Vietnamese cuisine, making this book a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper connection to food and heritage.”—Leah Cohen, chef and owner of Pig & Khao and Piggyback NYC, author of Lemongrass & Lime

“The Memory of Taste resonated with me deeply as a refugee child with parents who had to flee a war-torn country. Tu’s candid storytelling took me on a journey of profound emotions filled with delightful recipes. Most importantly, it shows how cooking and food can help us connect more deeply with our family’s history and identity.”—Nite Yun, chef and owner of Nyum Bai and Lunette Cambodia

From the Publisher

08/01/2024

Top Chef alumnus Phu has created a stunning, in-depth exploration of Vietnamese cuisine. The book, a loving tribute to the culinary lessons Phu learned from his mother, begins in their homeland and follows their immigration to the U.S. The emotional narrative is at once a history of his parents' struggles and an appreciation of his learned approach to sustainability in cooking. Chapters focus on phases of the Phu family's history, ending with the author's take on his heritage and his journey to Oakland, CA. Pantry supply lists and recipe introductions add depth to the stories told throughout the book. The volume combines its elements to impart deep knowledge of Vietnamese cooking and culture, attempting to honor the past and walk it into the present. The recipes are precise and have clear instructions, allowing ambitious cooks new to the subject to connect with Vietnamese cuisine. Phu's unique preparations for pho, rice, seafood, meat, and desserts will inspire readers and spark a connection to their own histories. VERDICT A solid choice for combining family history with traditional and modern Vietnamese cuisine.—Ron Block

Library Journal