The Vietnamese Cookbook

by Hoang Huu Can. 64 pages.

Published by Alister Taylor Price:

Reviewed by Gary Griffiths

It is doubtful that Alister Taylor's decadent orgy of fish sauce, bamboo shoots, boiled lotus seeds and the like will shatter Kiwi culinary traditions of boiled cabbage and the Sunday Roast. To all but the most adventurous and politically sympathetic, the dishes contained in this book would be indigestible—and even if your politics are the right colour, the Vietnamese Cookbook will never replace Mum's cooking.

The author, reputedly chef to the Vietnamese Peace delegation in Paris, is careful not to reveal the bare bones of his craft to us Kiwi running dogs. The essence of Vietnamese cuisine lies in careful gradations of heat application from slow and time consuming 'clear simmering' to very quick 'stir-frying'—but you won't find even a mention of the theory and basic methods in this book. The Ingredients of the book are an assembled collection of over-familiar black and white photos of Vietnamese peasants, with the addition of a few peckish slice-of-Vietnamese-life hand drawn graphics and blended throughout with savoury poems-all without any hint of sage. So few and poor is the selection of recipes that Comrade Taylor seems to have forgotten that this should be a cookbook and not a literary magazine cum tourist guide. At least the propaganda has been added sparingly.

It seems that that son-of-a-turtle Taylor has ripped the recipes off the original British foreign-devil publishes, and has not bothered to adapt the recipes to New Zealand conditions. Consequently all the fish recipes are useless, because the Northern Sea fish varieties are unobtainable here. The same applies to many of the other ingredients, e.g. 'double cream' which is at least twice as thick as the local crap. The recipes are completely beyond the average student's budget necessitating expensive ingredients such as prawns (about $2 a pound), pork, and chicken. There are virtually no vegetarian dishes using cheaper ingredients such as rice, noodles, pastry, eggs or soya beans—the staples of the Vietnamese proletarian diet.

However, royalties from the sale of the "Vietnamese Cookbook" will go towards the building of a North Vietnamese hospital-so those undiscriminating bourgeois liberals who buy it will at least possess the wrong book for the right reasons —and they probably won't mind.