Mãn by Kim Thúy

Author:Kim Thúy [Thúy, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-81381-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

đòn gánh

the yoke

LA PALANCHE was a resounding success across the province, so much so that a producer suggested a television cooking show. I wanted to broaden the experiment we’d worked on with Philippe, so Julie invited chefs to revisit or to reinvent our Vietnamese recipes on screen, with me. These collaborations confirmed for us that mainly we were creating the same balance of tastes in the mouth but by using ingredients specific to each chef’s region. The osso bucco was brightened up by gremolata, while the lemongrass beef stew was served with pickled daikon for its slightly bitter taste. In traditional Québécois cuisine, beef meatballs are cooked in a brown sauce whose consistency and colour resembles the one based on soya and fermented black beans that garnishes grilled Vietnamese meatballs. In Louisiana, fish is coated in Cajun spices to blacken it, while the Vietnamese use lemongrass and minced garlic.

Of course, certain tastes have an exclusive identity and well-defined borders. For instance, none of the chefs I met knew what to do with the cartilage in chicken bones, while people in Bangkok go into ecstasies over those breaded lumps. It would be cruel of me to impose fermented shrimp paste, intensely mauve and aromatic, on my guest chefs, as it would be to feed them green guavas drenched in salt with very hot peppers. Salmon, however, grilled or fried, goes well with a salad of green mango and ginger. Like friends of long standing, fish sauce goes perfectly with maple syrup in a marinade for spareribs, while in a soup made with tamarind, tomatoes, pineapple and fish, celery is a worthy substitute for the stems of elephant ears. The two vegetables absorb the flavours and carry the broth into their porous flesh as submissively as a servant, at the same time as present as an aspirate h. Oddly enough, the leaf of the elephant ear, unlike its porous stem, could provide shelter from rain because it is impermeable, like the leaves of water lilies and lotus blossoms. Julie, charmed by the two facets of those plants, had a pond dug in the restaurant’s backyard for floating tropical flowers. As soon as the first bud appeared, Maman would recite a popular traditional song that every Vietnamese knows by heart:

Trong đầm gì đẹp bằng sen,

Lá xanh, bông trắng lại chen nhụy vàng,

Nhụy vàng, bông trắng, lá xanh,

Gần bùn mà chẳng hôi tanh mùi bùn.

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