The New Yorker's 2008 Food Issue - Non-Asians on Asian Food

Want some good info on Asian food? Check out  The New Yorker's annual food issue released today. There's a fabulous profile of Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, the folks behind Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (food traditions along the Mekong River) and the latest Beyond the Great Wall (foodways of western China).  Naomi and Jeffrey are terrific people and it's a pleasure to get to know them even better.

Journalist and author Fuschia Dunlop strikes another blow for Asian cooking. Her story about a Hangzhou, China, chef who strictly adheres to high standards demonstrates how Asia is not all about quick-money-making schemes and tainted food. Dunlop wrote a great memoir called Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper and cookbooks Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and Revolutionary Chinese Cooking (Hunan).

What does any of this have to do with Vietnamese food and cooking? These are the kinds of writers who demystify and de-exoticize Asian cuisines, connecting and knitting them into the global culinary landscape instead of letting them sit on the margins. That's what the aim of this blog is. If you read and cook from these people's works, you'll be able to connect the dots between Vietnamese cooking and the cooking of the region!

Finally, I often am asked: Do you have to be Asian to authoritatively write about Asian food? Do you have to be Asian to cook Asian food well? What do you think?

Comments

[Graham]

In answer to your question, "Do you have to be Asian to authoritatively write about Asian food?"

No, but it bloody well helps :)

Funnily enough one of the best Indian restaurants I have ever been to had a kitchen full of Indian curry obsessed white folk - they were brilliant.

You don't have to be Asian to cook good Asian food, just like you don't have to be French to cook good French food. Location and access to good ingredients is the key point and whether or not you are interested in food and then whether or not you have someone in the family or close to you who cooks well who can guide you. You can learn to do any cuisine well if you choose and are in the right place.

Is there anywhere outside of southern Vietnam where you can find and/or make a decent Banh Trang Phoi Suong, for example? That's not even a dish that relies upon cooking skill, it relies upon location and access to ingredients only grown in certain places. Anyone with an interest in food could replicate that dish given the raw ingredients, but can I find them in France.... Non, non, non :(

[Ed]

David Thompson (Sailor's Thai Sydney and now the Michelin starred Nahm,London) is probably one of the finest Thai chefs out there. His book on Thai Cooking is also one of the best. In Australia, it's mainly white anglos who have taken Asian cuisine and developed it for fine dining. It's exposure to the region and ingredients more than anything else. Remember when you had to be French to get a Michelin star?

[Andrea Nguyen]

Some of the most obsessed Asian food experts I know are white and driven by a need to do right by a cuisine. Those are not the kind of folks who sport ethnic costumes while cooking, such was the case at a San Diego, CA, food and wine event that I attended this weekend. I don't know of any Asian people who don special collarless outfits to get the seasoning just right. I can squat but not for very long before I'm in pain.

Graham, you question, assess and respect Vietnamese cooking in a way that's not cloyingly rhapsodic -- the tone that's often found in Vietnamese food writing. In that, you get Viet people to look at their cuisine with fresh, modern eyes, and they also have a better sense of how to communicate about their food with dignity. Having an 'outsider' appreciate your food thrills Viet people to bits; they'd had too many centuries of westerners telling them that their food was disgusting.

Asian people writing about Asian food often don't provide enough direct, un-biased information because they think non-Asian readers aren't interested, or they're embarrassed to discuss the dark underbelly of their cooking. What's wrong with mam tom shrimp sauce? It's not like we eat it by the spoonful or brush our teeth with it! So, having non-Asian people writing about and preparing Asian food is definitely positive so long as it's not goofy.

But there is definitely something about having a cultural, visceral connection with a cuisine that helps you to get at the information. Then, there's the issue of place, like banh trang phoi suong or tuong bean sauce. You can't export particularly specific foods like those. However, you can certainly interpret and translate it for others to appreciate.

David Thompson has dug up so many bits of interesting information on Thai cooking and related them to diners and cooks. There's a paltry amount of English-language Thai cookbooks that come out of Thailand. Thompson's "Thai Cooking" is a terrific reference work. Ed, you're absolutely right -- those Michelin stars have slowly begun to spread around.

[Chris]

I reckon that anyone can write smartly about a cuisine that they have intimate experience of, regardless of ethnicity (or collar shape)...however I do think one has to grow up, or at least spend formative years, within a particular culture to viscerally understand the specific roles and importance of food in that culture. Which of course is not synonymous with being able to write about it!

[Al]

"one has to grow up ... within a particular culture"
- (Chris)

That is true. One can learn to produce individual dishes "perfectly," but not know how to plan a meal, or a weeks worth of meals, or exactly what to do with leftovers. Those things are learned in a "real" home in the cuisine's original environment.

It would be fascinating, as a "Westerner," to adopt one viewpoint for a period of time. I know some Northern Viet dishes, some Hue dishes, etc., but what would it be like to "simulate" a few weeks in "Village X" ... breakfast, lunch, dinner (if that's even how they plan their meals), snacks, leftovers ... [cue Yul Brynner's "et ceteras"].

Even it one were to spend months of planning to have the ingredients available, and knew how to prepare them, it would be impossible to recreate the rhythms of trips to the market, friends and relatives coming and going ... [hit it, Yul!]

Al

[Robyn]

I think outsiders (foreigners, if you like) have the advantage of seeing what insiders miss (if Jeff and Naomi and Fuschia Dunlop aren't perfect examples of this I don't know who is). There are many things I'll never 'viscerally' know about Asian food - but there are also things that I am more likely to hone in on just because it's all 'foreign' to me. Often I've been told by Asians that I write about aspects of food culture they've always taken for granted, to the point that they don't 'see' them anymore (or never have). And they're glad for it.

The two points of view (Asian and non-Asian) are entirely complementary, I think. There's room (and, hopefully, a need) for all of us to do what we do.

[Harmony]

"Do you have to be Asian to cook Asian food well?"

I hope not! I'm a non-Asian married to an Asian, and I do the cooking, so I sure hope that ethnicity doesn't exclude me from cooking good Asian food.

It is helpful for any kind of cooking to grow up eating and cooking the food, so Asian natives or first generation emigrants are at a definite advantage. But there are tons of Asians living outside of Asia who know nothing more about Asian cuisine and cooking than your average white American.

[Andrea Nguyen]

It's funny because I write for both audiences -- insiders and outsiders. There's lots that you miss when you're too far deep into it to step out of your circle of comfort and look objectively at something. Writing about food in the way that Naomi, Jeffrey and Fuschia do is journalistic and anthropological.

With regard to reviews of Asian restaurants by non-Asian people, I always read them very carefully. How well does the person know the cuisine? Are they just being nice to the little people? But then I suppose that if you were to have a Vietnamese person reviewing Vietnamese restos, the criticisms would be flying and death threats would ensue. We can be our worst enemies.

Restaurant reviews are a whole other thing. Any reviewer must be at least somewhat knowledgeable about food in general - and all the better if they know the cuisine they're reviewing - to write what I'd consider a good review. But now I think we might be getting close to the topic of authenticity (how can you say what good Sichuan food is if you've never had REAL Sichuan food) and I don't want to go there.

As for cooking ... I don't believe you must be Asian to cook great Italian food any more than I believe an Asian can't make great macaroni and cheese. What's important is to have the soul of a cook. And that's not determined by ethnicity, who you were born to, or where you grew up.

[Robyn]

make that 'Asian to make great Asian food'

[Chris]

Hey Robyn, hear hear! :-) How you doing?

[Andrea Nguyen]

Aiya on restaurant reviews by un- or ill-informed writers. Without going to the real depth of things, the power of a review is appalling. It can actually destroy a good restaurant because it may max out the staff. On the other hand, a so-so place can ride a review for years, even decline. There's a Hue restaurant in Little Saigon that non-Viet reviewers and diners continue to flock to. Inside the community, people have been going elsewhere for better food for several years.

Whenever someone asks for a restaurant recommendation, I demure. One time I suggested a place that I thought prepared great northern Viet fare and a Viet person wrote me that she found hair in her rice, among other atrocities.

Cook at home, if at all possible, and you'll get the best food.

[Annie]

You have to have a passion for it. Actually being from the culture you write about has a certain advantage, as well as a certain disadvantage as Robyn points out.