The pantry as an archive, the garden as a lens

Trawling the cookbook shelves for new solutions

Welcome back to use-it-up month, where we’re using all that late-summer bounty to actually cook from our pantries. Today: rice paper wrappers and tofu skins.

Hannah Che’s stir-fried tofu skin and tomato

I’ve been thinking, recently, about the pantry as an archive. A record of meals planned, enjoyed, abandoned, and dreamed of. Take my zip-locked bag of rice paper wrappers, their edges gone wild and a little dried out. Most times when I look at them I think of the rice paper rolls I made last year, from Andrea Nguyen’s Ever-Green Vietnamese, which I made sloppily and dunked lazily into peanut-hoisin sauce, and then I think of it I think of that sauce again, that I should make it, but first I need to make Andrea’s fermented chile-garlic sauce, which my fridge has been missing for months. I make a note to visit the farmers market, see what sort of hot chiles are on the menu right now, get some extra-stinky garlic. The rice paper wrappers are a remnant of that meal, an addition to my own personal archive brought on by a beloved cookbook. (They also, of course, nag at me.) This whole idea of using up what’s in our pantries, then, is a question of building and investigating and using our own personal archives. I suppose those archives include our cookbooks, as well.

A garden is an archive too, though I don’t have enough thoughts on this to say more. (I’m currently reading all of Jamaica Kincaid’s books in sequence, and I haven’t gotten to My Garden (Book) yet, though I did sort of cynically skim and quote it for this piece a few years back.) What I do know is that the other week I found myself staring at my rice paper wrappers, and a pile of cookbooks, and a small shopping bag of mostly-ripe tomatoes I’d grabbed hungrily from the community garden, and wondered what I might make. I also had a defrosting brick of Hodo Soy tofu skins in the fridge, purchased on a whim a while back with no specific intent. Some good scallions, and fresh herbs. If the pantry was the archive, I could use the garden—or at least its bounty—as a lens.

I cracked open Nini Nguyen’s new book, Dặc Biệt: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook, which more or less fell open to a recipe for grilled rice paper, which Nini explains has become popular with young people across Vietnam, though it hasn’t hit the mainstream in America yet. You heat the rice paper in a pan until it begins waving and wiggling, then top it with egg, scallion, meat, and cheese, a little aioli, and it becomes something crunchy and soft and foldable. (It’s often compared to pizza, Nguyen says, but she likens it more to a quesadilla, and I have to agree. It’s also, of course, its own alchemical thing, and a perfect canvas for riffing.)

For the tofu skins I knew I needed Hannah Che’s The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, which I am always sort of looking at longingly but never cooking from, a failure of my own imagination. But no more! Here I had a vegan spin on the classic Chinese tomato-and-egg stir fry, with pan-fried tofu skins replacing the egg. Here my tomatoes came in handy. Plus I’ve long identified as a ketchup kid, and I’m always happy to squeeze my bottle of Heinz into a pot of something sizzling¹.

The stir-fry was breakfast and the rice paper was lunch, and all of a sudden I had both added to and used up my archive. The grilled rice paper kept iterating on itself throughout the week, stretching the bounds of what I had: ground pork here, leftover chicken there. Marinated tofu would be great, as would, of course, fried tofu skins. Here are the recipes for both.

Grilled Rice Paper
Bánh tráng nướng

Serves 4; easily scaled to one
excerpted from Dặc Biệt: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook by Nini Nguyen with Sarah Zorn

Added lots of cilantro