A Kitchen Tale — Trinh Diem Vy

V Vegan opened the Taste Vietnam Smaller Volumes series by returning to the plant-based kitchen of Ms Vy’s Buddhist childhood in Hoi An. A Kitchen Tale takes the wider view. Its subtitle, “From My Ancestors to the Future”, is both a description of the book’s structure and the animating idea behind all of Ms Vy’s work: that understanding a cuisine means understanding the lives that shaped it, generation by generation.

The book opens with a child’s first journey, the young Vy travelling one thousand kilometres by bus from Hoi An to Saigon, dazzled by the city’s che stalls and convinced that the moon had followed her from home. It moves through the kitchen of her childhood: the omnivore’s table that her parents kept, the rice husk stove that shaped how she understood heat and patience, the pickles and fermented foods that were never side dishes but infrastructure. It follows the arc of her working life from the first restaurant Mermaid, the first cooking class held there in October 1994, and the slow realisation that teaching Vietnamese food to international visitors was a form of cultural diplomacy no government programme could replicate.

Where V Vegan was a focused monograph on three ingredients, A Kitchen Tale is a more personal document: Ms Vy’s fullest account in this series of how she came to cook the way she cooks, and why. The recipes here are organised around a food pyramid that reflects her own nutritional philosophy – salads, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, pickles – but each section is anchored in memory and story rather than system.

A Kitchen Tale was produced by Metro Writers with Phuc Hung Books, with Matt Wythe as principal writer and art director, Michael Fountoulakis as principal photographer, and Michael Arnold as editor.

Trinh Diem Vy grew up in a market town that fed the world without knowing it. Hoi An’s cuisine had been shaped by Chinese merchants, Japanese traders, French colonists, and the generations who had been cooking and selling food there since the early twentieth century. The kitchen Ms Vy inherited was not a single tradition but a layered one: Buddhist and omnivore, ancient and adaptive, governed by the five-element principles of balance and by the practical intelligence of people who cooked on rice husk stoves and preserved everything the season gave them.

A Kitchen Tale is her account of that inheritance: a cookbook structured as a memoir. The recipes (salads, noodles, rice dishes, seafood, slow-cooked meats, soups, pickles, and sauces) are organised around Ms Vy’s own food pyramid: a practical nutritional philosophy rooted in the Vietnamese principle that what sustains the body and what honours the land are the same thing.

This is a book about one woman’s kitchen, built from the knowledge of those who came before her.

“As we strolled along the tree-lined boulevards — a lingering gift from the French colonial era — I looked up at the night sky. Seeing the moon, I grinned widely and pointed skywards, telling my cousin that the moon had followed me from home. In my childhood, Hoi An had no electric street lights; at night, only oil and paraffin lanterns or the moon illuminated the streets. I felt special that the moon had chosen to accompany me.”

“Before returning home, we stopped at a che stall — the sweet Vietnamese dessert. Anh Th. knew Saigon’s che was legendary, and I certainly wouldn’t turn down a chance to taste it. While Hoi An had its own che vendors, the city elevated it to another level: creamier coconut, richer flavours and a dazzling variety of ingredients. The vendor’s humble stall, to me, sparkled like a jewellery shop.”

— Trinh Diem Vy, A Kitchen Tale