Tracey Lister

This is the third cookbook written by the husband-and-wife team, Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl. Ms. Lister has a cooking school in Hanoi (the Hanoi Cooking Centre). Her husband, a writer, shares her interest in Vietnamese culture.

This cookbook contains seven chapters of recipes:

• Rice and Bread/Grains of Life
• Vegetables and Salads/Greenhouse Effect
• Fish and Crustaceans/Vietnam and China/MOT HAI BA—Yoh!
• Poultry/The Other Fast Food Nation
• Pork, Beef, and Goat/Pho: Vietnam in a Bowl
• Condiments: Phu Quoc’s Treasures
• Sweets/Old Black Magic

It would have been nice if the authors had included a glossary.

The subsections of the chapters turn out to be a few pages of prose and photos that appear in the middle of the recipes. I really don’t like this because it interrupts the flow of the recipes. I wonder why those sections can’t appear at the beginning or end of the chapters if they have to be in the chapters at all.

In spite of the aforementioned small quibbles, this is, without a doubt, the best Vietnamese cookbook that I have ever seen, although I do need to look again at Lister and Pohl’s other cookbooks. Most Vietnamese cookbooks offer the same recipes and contain nothing that is notably different. This cookbook, however, offers the home cook recipes that utilize ingredients that have not been previously seen in Vietnamese cookbooks. Some of these additions transform side dishes into plausible light main courses. [give it five stars]

Recipes that catch my eye: banana flower salad (cf); green mango and sun-dried squid salad*** (a different variation; try it); green papaya spring rolls (with julienned pig ear); green papaya salad*** (with dried beef; try it); lotus root salad (with chicken); rice flour pancakes (made in a banh khot pan—which, based on the photo, could be replaced by an aebleskiver pan; to be filled with a savory substance); squid and pomelo salad; eel in caul fat (omit the perilla/shiso); caramel fish with galangal*** (different, and probably not hazardous to one’s cookware; my daughter might like this); clam and dill broth (appears to be akin to canh chua—this is canh ngao); baby chicken char-grilled with kaffir lime leaves**** (this sounds like it is extremely tasty; also includes garlic, chile, galangal, lemongrass, etc.; possibly reduce or eliminate the 5-spice powder; my daughter might like this); soy-poached chicken (looks to be the Vietnamese version of red-cooked chicken); barbecued lemongrass-marinated pork with rice vermicelli** (eliminate the peanut butter); tapioca dumplings with prawn and pork (looks yummy, but will I ever make that dough?); bun cha dipping sauce (looks like a nice start for sweet chile sauce [the kind with the julienned carrot] with some tinkering); peanut, garlic and shallot dipping sauce (needless to say, I would eliminate the peanut butter); pickled cabbage; salty peanut and sesame cookies** (my daughter might like this).… (meer)