A Q&A with Andrea Nguyen, Plus My Favorite Steak Recipe

The brilliant and meticulous cookbook author talks translation, substitutions, and hoarding pandan leaves.

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Today I’m bringing you a Q&A with one of my favorite cookbook authors, Andrea Nguyen. I’ve always admired Andrea’s balance of eager, friendly curiosity and fastidiousness when it comes to food writing and cooking. Andrea has written six cookbooks—Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, Asian Dumplings, Asian Tofu, The Banh Mi Handbook, The Pho Cookbook, and Vietnamese Food Any Day, which I cooked out of a lot during lockdown—and is at work on her seventh, Ever-Green Vietnamese. (You can preorder it here.) She also co-hosts the Everything Cookbooks Podcast. She has spent much of her career studying the history and traditions of Vietnamese food, and shares her knowledge with such warmth and ease. She’s a real home cook’s cookbook author, with the incisive eye of an academic.

I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation; Andrea was also kind enough to share her recipe for Shaking Beef, the dish of hers that I’ve made the most—it’s down there at the end, after all her brilliant words.

When we got on the phone, Andrea dove into talking about the new book before I remembered to turn my recorder on. (Rookie mistake on my part….) She had just handed in a round of edits, during which she had to comb through the nitty gritty of each recipe, from prepositions to diacritics. We start from there.

I imagine that, especially as somebody who has taken up one specific cuisine as a large portion of your work, there's an added layer of pressure to really think through all of those details.

Exactly. And nowadays, when I'm looking at other works where people are really trying to be inclusive and to cover different cuisines, I see stuff and I'm like, wait a second! Because I studied Mandarin Chinese and know enough about Cantonese where I'm like, if you're gonna go full on diacritics, you gotta go full on diacritics. You can't just go part way, you know, and if you don't study the language, you can't just rely upon Wikipedia or Google translate.

It can look really cute to have Chinese characters and stuff. But the way that Chinese is spelled out and Romanized, there's different ways of doing it. And people don't understand that. Here’s a good example: 

Japanese chili oil is called la yu and [it’s] what a lot of people are familiar with. But the Chinese have chili oil too. So you can't say like, oh, Chinese chili oil is called la yu. Because that's a Japanese term, but people don't understand that. And so there's all these layers of language that as we have the opportunity to present diversity, you know, you just gotta slow down. And I think that writing with sources such as Wikipedia and Google translate can only take you so far.

Right. And I know you mentioned having your parents essentially like help you proofread, especially with the question of diacritics. Has there ever been a person in the publishing process who specialized in these things? Or how have you dealt with that in the past?

It was just me. But this time around, I have a novelist friend who has helped me answer questions for me on certain terminology. And the Vietnamese language changes too. And so she's very up to date on that sort of thing. So she's like one of my lifelines.

There’s always this question of, how do I translate a dish that I created? How do I come up with that recipe name? And sometimes, I’ll ask my mom—I’ll serve something to her and just say, what should we name this? And give her all these different options. And she’ll just cut to the chase and say, use the fewest words possible, because then there will be less confusion. 

Is there an example you can remember that she helped you with?

Well you know the rice paper rolls, the ones that aren’t fried? Those are often called summer rolls or spring rolls. I just call them or salad rolls. But I called them rice paper rolls in the book. Because they're not eaten in the summer or the springtime—they're eaten year round.

And it is just a rice paper roll. Traditionally the term would literally mean salad roll. But in the book I have this explainer on rice paper rolls to help people understand what they are and how to make them really easily. And then I was just like, just call them by their Vietnamese name, which is gỏi cuốn. If we could do that, that'd be great. Think about it—if you had to translate “taco” every single time into English? What do you say? But thank God everyone knows what a taco is, or a lot more people know what phở is or bánh mì is. And my thought with gỏi cuốn is, there are three gateway foods that get people into Vietnamese food. One is bánh mì, one is phở, and the other is gỏi cuốn. So I’m like, if we could just use the Vietnamese names that would help me so much. 

Maybe we're on the precipice.

You know, when we're working between cultures, in a third cultural fashion, how do we do it justice? When I write, I think about those things and how true they are to my sensibilities of what Vietnamese food is and what it can be.

Absolutely. And this is your 7th book, but I know you were working on it during Covid—what was that like?

There was just all of this added drama to the book-making process. You know, for the photo shoots, it's super difficult to begin with because you're trying to make the most romantic, inspiring and informative photo possible. And yet at the same time, you're physically and mentally drained at the end of each day. So that pressure of doing things during Covid and getting ingredients was hard. I ended up mail ordering a particular wild pepper leaf, la lot leaf, from Florida. Because I didn’t know if I could get the leaves from San Jose, which is like one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the United States. And it was a really difficult to get the leaves. I found some, they barely hung in there. But I also had to have this backup plant that was very, very lush. We, we called him Dale.

What!

Dale! Aubrey, the photographer, said we gotta name the plant. She said Dale sounded like someone who would be from Florida. And so Dale is in an opening photo in the book. [Laughs] You just have to take all these strange precautions; I was hoarding ingredients for about nine months because I didn't know if I could get the brands that I wanted. So when we drove my car up to San Francisco for the photo shoot, it looked like the Clampetts from the Beverly Hillbillies, it was so packed full of food and equipment and clothes and whatever. 

Those shoots are so exhausting. And it seems like it doesn't particularly get easier the more of them you do. Obviously you’ve gained an incredible amount of knowledge, but the labor is still the labor. 

Exactly. The labor is still there. And getting back to your question of whether there was ever a copy editor who worked with me who was an expert in my cuisine, the answer is no—they try to be, but they're reviewing for inconsistencies. 

I mean, I wish that I could gift people the kinds of culinary knowledge that I have in the editing process, because I think that I cook, and I understand cultures from a lot of different levels—I would love to be able to help people create books, and pose questions that a copy editor might not. You have to cook to be a good cookbook editor, I think. And if you don't, then you're just project managing and moving files around.

Right. I mean, recipe editing and editing traditional prose are such different skills.

Exactly. Exactly. And you really wanna be clear. Ever-Green Vietnamese is a mostly vegetable and mostly vegetarian cookbook, but it's for everyone. So the fish sauce ingredient line, instead of saying “fish sauce” I have a recipe for making vegan fish sauce in the book, and you can buy vegan fish sauce too. But then what do you, how do you tell people that they can use regular fish sauce versus the homemade vegan one? And so it was going back and forth about language. You can say “regular fish sauce”, but then you go, well, what's irregular, what's regular? You know, people are very sensitive, and at the end of the day I just want people to cook this food and enjoy it. As many people as possible. And that's just the language itself, you haven't even touched on substitutions. 

Let's talk about substitutions!

So in Vietnamese Food Any Day all the ingredients came from the regular supermarket. And this one, about 80% of ingredients come from the regular supermarket. And then the other 20, you know, I have to nudge people to go to the Asian markets, but even so, I'm a practical purist when it comes to cooking and writing.

So I always make sure that if you can’t get to an Asian market or the farmer's market for water spinach, that there are options for you. Because that's just realistic, even though I really want you to use water spinach. Even though I really, really want you to make like next-level vegetarian food with fermented tofu, there are options for substitutes. They're not gonna be the same, but you can certainly make some delicious food. 

And what what was the driving force behind the new book? 

In 2019 I had some some physical problems due to stress, just traveling way too much and working way too much. So I needed to adjust my diet. And I'm not a virtuous eater or a virtuous cook who is going to stick to one diet. But I knew that I wanted to keep enjoying the foods that I loved and I knew how to make relatively easily. And in thinking back on what Vietnamese food is, it's reliant upon what is grown and harvested from the earth. It’s plant forward, it's plant driven. And so I changed my diet and I lost like 15 pounds and I really understood that this was me returning to my food roots. I feel like it's the most creative book that I've written.

And how often are you cooking from cookbooks? What's your cookbook diet like?

Well, I judge James Beard and IACP, so my food book diet has been very high. And the ones that I'm interested in are the ones that can teach me something. And if I look at a recipe or a book and I gauge that it’s well written and I trust the person to show me something new, I'm just gonna dive in and follow. So when people say to me, oh, I hate to follow recipes, I'm like, I love to follow recipes! Especially when they're well written. They give me parameters in which I can change things, or I know that I can change things. 

But I'll try to make something from a new book at least once a month. Like, I’ve been making the bread recipe from Arabiyya, Reem Assil’s book. She’s got these cool bread recipes, and one of them involves you slapping the dough between your hands and your arm to stretch it out, and it’s a technique that’s so cool. And then you cook it on an inverted wok on your stove. As soon as I saw that I was like, gosh darn it, I’m gonna play with that. So she’s teaching me something, and I return to it because I’m practicing. 

What are you doing these days for your cookbook diet?

Well, it's a struggle for me to find time right now. I would love to spend a lot more time reading cookbooks than I do. And that's one of the reasons that I've really enjoyed doing this newsletter because it kind of gives me an excuse to spend more time reading cookbooks and actually cooking from them. 

I mean, I use the Times cooking app all the time. It’s so easy to be like, okay, I have X, Y, and Z, what can I make? Whereas in a cookbook you're often tailoring your shopping to the recipe that you wanna cook. But from a critical perspective, I'm like, well, what's lost when I'm doing that? And I do think it's a loss of context, but also just the opportunity to learn things that you weren't expecting to learn. Which I do think is central to the cookbook reading experience.

Yeah. It’s the unexpected. Even though you may curate your cookbook collection, you're not curating the exact content of the cookbooks. 

I have one last thing I want to ask you, that I’m trying to ask everyone for this series. Can you tell me what’s in your freezer?

Oh sure. Um, there are bags of old chilis that I grew in my yard. There is tamarind liquid. Let’s see. I have small portions of ground pork that I freeze because really good ground pork is hard to come by and I only use it in these small quantities. So then I'll buy like two pounds and then I'll separate it into five to six ounce portions. There's a lot of frozen pandan, which I saw at the Asian market and I was so afraid that I wouldn't have enough. It’s that question of, what did you over-buy during the pandemic? For me, pandan was one of them. Because it’s imported from Vietnam and I thought that for Ever-Green Vietnamese, I'd better make sure I have fresh pandan. And then in the end I did not develop a single recipe for the book with pandan. 

Shaking Beef

Excerpted from Vietnamese Food Any Day by Andrea Nguyen

A deliciously quirky combo of warm cubes of seared steak atop a cool salad, this classic is traditionally considered a special-occasion dish in Vietnam, where beefsteak is a luxury. Given that, cooks cleverly cut the meat into smaller pieces to imbue it with flavor, cook it quickly, and serve it to a crowd. The name in Vietnamese, thịt bò lúc lắc, refers to the back-and- forth shaking (lúc lắc) of the skillet as the beef (thịt bò) cooks. Shaking beef is a Viet restaurant favorite, and a cinch to make at home. 

For the steak, choose well-marbled pieces. When the beef hits the greens, they wilt slightly and the beef juices and dressing blend together into a tangy sauce, which is great spooned over rice or other grains. 

SERVES 4