Gifts from a Vietnamese American Chef, Tu David Phu

Book review by Kristina Sepetys

 

Oakland resident Tu David Phu studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco and went on to cook at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, Gather, and early in his career, Saul’s Deli. Further afield, he cooked at Acquerello and Quince in San Francisco and The Breslin and Gramercy Tavern in New York. He developed skills and honed his craft, but when restaurant staff traded stories about the meals they ate at home, Phu never felt comfortable sharing about the Vietnamese food he grew up eating.

Over time, Phu realized his most important and influential cooking experiences came from his parents, refugees from Phú Quốc, a Vietnamese island off the coast of Cambodia. As he found that he wanted to share his own food and cultural history, he hosted his own pop-ups and storytelling events, like the nine-course Vietnamese meals in a series he called An.

Now, Phu has gathered many of those stories and recipes into a colorful new cookbook.

“The recipes and stories in this book are the generational wealth that I received from my family; and now, they’re gifts I’m passing on to you,” Phu says in the introduction to his new cookbook, co-written with Soleil Ho, The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quôc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between (4 Color Books, 2024).

You won’t find recipes for bánh mì or similarly familiar Vietnamese dishes. Instead, Phu shares what he describes as “nostalgia for what came before as well as a strong sense of pride in the place that raised me.” As the Top Chef alum, San Francisco Chronicle Rising Star Chef, author, and Emmy-nominated filmmaker explains in the book’s introduction, “I found my voice advocating for immigrant and refugee cuisines like mine to gain the respect they deserve.”

Phu organizes the book by different aspects of his life, starting with over two dozen staples, stocks, and condiments his mother made in their small Oakland apartment, where they often faced food insecurity. With limited means, Phu’s family didn’t have the luxury of purchasing whatever ingredients they needed. Instead, his mother used her ingenuity, transforming scraps and discards from his father’s job at Fisherman’s Wharf and growing specialty ingredients in her garden. She made items like dried corn silk to keep the pantry stocked and nourish the family, working culinary magic to extract as much flavor and nutrition as possible.

Phu shares recipes for foundational basics like lemongrass paste (dán sả), everyday fish sauce, (nước mắm cham), coconut caramel sauce for meats and braises, and over a half-dozen variations of the flavored fish sauces that give many Vietnamese dishes their unique character. Dark brown and distinctively scented, fish sauce is a key ingredient that Phu describes as “our identity—and it contains multitudes.”

A section on Phú Quôc Island, the place Phu’s parents met and the birthplace of Vietnam’s fish sauce industry, includes recipes for local dishes like curried coconut noodles made with halibut and a list of intriguing ingredients like shrimp floss, shredded banana flower, and fish wort leaves. (Phu says you can use Thai basil if you’re without the fish wort.) He also includes a list of restaurants he recommends in case you happen to find yourself on Phú Quôc Island.

Other sections feature seafood dishes that Phu has eaten while living in the San Francisco Bay Area, 8,000 miles away from Phú Quôc Island. He includes many detailed introductions and headnotes, so the reader learns how his dad taught him about breaking down fish for a porridge, a comfort food that’s made rich with other seafoods like squid and clams and seasoned with ginger, garlic, fried shallots, cilantro, and green onions.

Avoiding food waste is important to Phu, and he shares many of the lessons in frugality he learned from his parents. When his father would bring home scraps from his job, they would turn the discarded bits like scallop frills (the side muscle, removed before cooking), fish bladders, bloodline (the dark red or black muscle that runs down the center of a fish, generally considered too oily and fishy for most eaters), and fish heads into delicious, nourishing meals. The cookbook includes recipes using some of these ingredients, like a Tuna Bloodline Tartare (huyết cá tái chanh) and Hot Pot-style Salmon Head Sour Soup (canh chua dầu cá hồi). Anything that remained or wasn’t edible was plowed into their garden. Nothing was wasted.

A section on food that grew out of the Vietnam war emphasizes the resourcefulness of cooks at the time. Nutty-flavored scorched rice (which might otherwise have been thrown away) is prepared with ginger and green onion sauce, coconut pulp, squid floss, and topped with toasted, chopped peanuts. Pho, the noodle soup with broth, meats, noodles, and a pile of fragrant herbs on top, may be familiar to many eaters, but what they may not know is that this dish was popularized by the Vietnam War, in part, according to Phu, by food shortages that arose from the loss of fertile farmland destroyed by Agent Orange, food rationing, and the difficulty of life under Viet Cong rule. Following the war, refugees introduced the dish in restaurants abroad. 

Seafood figures prominently in dishes throughout the book. Seafood Egg Drop Soup (súp hải sản thập cẩm), a holiday favorite at Phu’s house, mixes canned vegetables, quail eggs, crab, scallops, and shrimp. A fancier combination from his pop-up offerings is his oysters with caviar, a bit of citrus, whipped dashi, and a pineapple-infused fish sauce.

One of my favorite recipes in the book is the Banana Bread Pudding. “When our Costco croissants got too old to eat fresh,” Phu explains in the headnote, “my mom would turn them into this amazing bread pudding, which she’d cook in our crappy little toaster oven.” The sliced croissants are mixed with a coconut batter, layered with lady finger bananas, baked to set, and finished with a darkened caramelized top. The warm, buttery sweet dessert—creative, resourceful, and deeply satisfying—reflects different aspects of Phu’s Vietnamese and American heritage and epitomizes the spirit of this highly personal cookbook.

Learn more and purchase this book here.

 

Kampuche-Style BBQ Chicken
Gà Nướng Kampuche

Reprinted with permission from The Memory of Taste by Tu David Phu & Soleil Ho, copyright © 2024. Published by 4 Color Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Photographs copyright © Dylan James Ho and Jeni Afuso

To keep me and my sister home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, my parents engaged in a holiday season cold war with blowout dishes of their own, including this ridiculously flavorful chicken my dad learned to make from the Khmer side of his family. Oh, you want some good old rubbery Thanksgiving turkey? How about some juicy, caramelized, lemongrass-rubbed chicken instead? Turkey never even crossed our minds when we knew this bird would be on the table for dinner. The whole process of marinating and cooking this dish takes about 5 hours, but the intense flavor is so worth the effort.

Note: Heritage chickens are extraordinary for long braises and stews. Their bones are ideal for making chicken stock. Both meat and bones are packed with great flavor because their muscles are more developed. However, their meat yields are significantly lower. In contrast, organic chickens are extremely versatile; they are specifically bred to get a better yield.

Serves 4

• One (2½-pound) heritage chicken
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic
• ½ cup minced green onions, white and green parts
• 2 tablespoons minced lemongrass
• ½ cup oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon Maggi seasoning sauce
• ½ teaspoon sesame oil
• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• Cracked black pepper
• Kosher salt
• Neutral oil (such as vegetable oil), enough to coat the chicken
• Nước Mắm Khóm | Pineapple Fish Sauce (recipe below) for serving

For the sake of efficiency—and for even cooking—spatchcock the chicken (you can also have your butcher do this). If you spatchcock the bird yourself, you can save the bones in the freezer to make Nước Luộc Gà (chicken stock) later. To spatchcock the bird, you’ll remove the backbone by cutting along both sides of it using a sharp pair of kitchen shears. You should now be able to open up the chicken, sort of like a grisly book. Locate the breastbone and remove it by breaking it off. Carve out the wishbone (like a clavicle), then remove the rib bones. If you’re more of a visual learner, there are tons of how-to videos for this on YouTube.

Next, make the marinade by combining the garlic, green onions, lemongrass, oyster sauce, Maggi seasoning, sesame oil, sugar, and 1⁄8 teaspoon pepper in a small bowl. Set a wire roasting rack on a large, foil-lined baking sheet and lay the chicken on top of it, skin-side down. Generously rub the marinade all over the meat, making sure to get all up in the crevices. Do try to avoid rubbing the marinade on the skin. Let the chicken marinate like this in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

After 2 hours, take the tray out of the fridge—but no, you’re not cooking just yet. Flip the chicken over so that the skin is facing up. Wiggle your fingers under the chicken’s skin to loosen it, especially around the breast and thighs. Generously season the chicken’s skin with salt and pepper, then drizzle neutral oil all over it. Use a brush or paper towel to gently swipe the oil all over the chicken to ensure even browning. Let the chicken rest at room temperature for 2 hours.

Now it’s time to roast. Preheat your oven to 450°F. Roast the chicken for about 45 minutes, rotating the pan every 15 minutes, until a probe thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the chicken registers at 165°F for 30 seconds straight. Remove the chicken from the oven and let it rest on a cutting board for 20 minutes.

To serve, separate the drumsticks and thighs, then halve the breast lengthwise. Slice the breast pieces on the diagonal and arrange the pieces on a nice serving platter with Pineapple Fish Sauce on the side.

Pineapple Fish Sauce
Nước Mắm Khóm

In this version of nước chấm, pineapple is the main character. The combination of coconut water and pineapple gives this sauce a refreshing tropical flavor, like a piña colada that also happens to taste like anchovies. It was on the table during the last meal I had with my maternal grandfather, my ông ngoại, before he died. I remember sitting at the table with him, watching his normally sharp features soften with pleasure as we dipped slices of poached herring into the sauce, the minced pineapple clinging to the pieces.
This sauce is great for adding brightness and dimension to “raw” dishes, including the ceviche-like Huyết Cá Tái Chanh (Tuna Bloodline Tartare) and Vietnamese beef carpaccio. For this recipe, you can substitute canned crushed pineapple in place of fresh pineapple—doing so will make the sauce more caramelly and “cooked.” And as with the recipe for Nước Mắm Dừa (Coconut Fish Sauce), you have the option to use a whole young coconut along with its meat. Try it if you’re feeling ambitious and want to make the ultimate luxury, head-to-toe Gucci version of the recipe.

Makes 1 cup

• 1⁄2 cup minced coconut meat
• 2 tablespoons minced shallot
• 2 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1⁄2 cup lemon juice or lime juice
• 1 Thai bird’s eye chile, minced
• 3 tablespoons palm sugar
• 1⁄2 cup fish sauce
• 1 cup minced fresh pineapple or canned crushed pineapple
• 1⁄2 cup coconut water

Add the coconut meat, shallot, and garlic to a small mixing bowl, then pour the lemon juice over the mixture and allow it to macerate for at least 30 seconds, so the aromatics “cook” in the acid. Add the chile to the bowl, then mix thoroughly. Add the sugar, fish sauce, pineapple, and coconut water to the bowl, then mix until the sugar dissolves.

Serve immediately or store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.