In honor of AAPI Heritage Month, I’m highlighting three cookbooks by Asian women that came out in the past year. Each has been nominated for a James Beard Award. I have huge respect and admiration for each of these authors, and have interviewed all three for Good Food. Andrea Nguyen and Hetty Lui McKinnon’s cookbooks focus on plant-based eating in the most delicious ways. And Clarissa Wei’s important book is about the cuisine and history of people in Taiwan.
I’ve known Andrea Nguyen for years. Her book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, was the first book on Vietnamese food of its kind in English. She’s written many more, each time sharing her meticulous expertise and a considerable dose of common sense and humor. A celebrated cookbook author, food writer, and cooking teacher based in Northern California, Nguyen is known for her expertise in Vietnamese cuisine. Nguyen was born in Vietnam and her family fled during the fall of Saigon. They ended up in Southern California, where food preparation became a place of refuge and belonging. She has dedicated her career to preserving and sharing the flavors and techniques of Vietnamese cooking.
Her seventh and most recent book, Ever-Green Vietnamese: Super-Fresh Recipes, Starring Plants from Land and Sea, highlights, interprets, and updates plant-based Vietnamese cooking. It has been nominated by the Beard Foundation this year. Nguyen says that there is minimal Asian market shopping required, but she nudges us a bit. She figured out how to vegan-ize fish sauce, which is a huge accomplishment, but I really love her Vietnamese Mocha Cake recipe, which took her 30 tries to get perfect. The same link shares her Char Siu Roasted Cauliflower recipe, which is pretty stellar as well.
Clarissa Wei is a Taiwanese American food writer, recipe developer, and cookbook author known for exploring Chinese and Taiwanese cuisine. For years, she was based in LA, where she wrote extensively on topics related to food culture, travel, and politics. She moved to Taiwan to focus on writing the book Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation. It’s a significant culinary work written in partnership with Ivy Chen, a well-known Taiwanese cooking teacher and guide. She’s shared the classic Beef Noodle Soup recipe with us.
Hetty Lui McKinnon, who is Australian and Chinese, is a marvelous storyteller whose produce-centered book, Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds, is a love letter to her relationship with her father, a produce buyer. She has a marvelous recipe-centered newsletter, To Vegetables With Love. She already shared a Fennel and Gnocchi Salad with Fennel Frond Pesto recipe when I interviewed her for Good Food. This month, I’m making her Lime Turmeric Rice Noodle Salad with Asparagus. It’s so easy, but fun to cook the noodles in water tinted with turmeric, and watch them turn yellow. Her James Beard Foundation nod is so well deserved.
More:
In the Vietnamese kitchen, teacher Andrea Nguyen focuses on vegetarian dishes
How Hetty Lui McKinnon's father shaped her future in food
How the Eisenhower administration influenced modern Taiwanese cuisine