Asian Street Food Right Here

Home cooking in Asia is about getting fresh food on the table fast. In Beijing, when I lived there decades ago, people might walk home from work with a live fish twitching from a hook, or buy pork from a street stand selecting pig parts hanging from hooks, or pick up greens from a street merchant, and, if the buyer has  small change and an empty on hand, he might buy a bottle of cheap, warm, weak, good beer from a cart. By 5 p.m., every kitchen in Beijing’s China Daily compound, most of them lit overhead by a single 40-watt bulb, rang with  chop-chop-chopping, the young women wearing baseball caps to protect their hair from clouds of atomized peanut oil.

They made, both men and women, wonderful food: bites of eggplant, glistening with black beans and suffused with garlic, an egg dish designed to replicate crab, sort of. Soup sometimes, flavored with slices of Asian squash. And rice, always in Beijing at the end of the meal, just in case anyone was still hungry. 

So, when I saw Charles Phan’s “Vietnamese Home Cooking” in a big bookstore in Poughkeepsie, I forked over $35  without thinking it over more than two or three times. I love Asian home cooking and Asian street cooking, too.

It’s a beautiful book, with a handy layout and good photographs. And though it includes  simple fare like Chinese doughnuts (the dough, however, resting for 8 hours before frying) and chicken rice porridge — a breakfast of champions, Phan tells us – the book also has a dish called Shaking Beef, requiring 1 1/2 pounds of trimmed filet mignon. He has a famous restaurant in San Francisco, after all, The Slanting Door, and that means pricey ingredients and cheffy flourishes from time to time. (I’ve made this dish and it is exceptional.)

Phan’s recipe for Lemon Grass Chicken is fabulous, too. But any dish with 13 ingredients, including home-made stock, and lemon grass, a tough but incredibly aromatic herb to be chopped into dust, is not after-work home cooking.

Of course Phan’s book includes some fascinating methods for making fast food at home with a little advance work. Lo Soi Braised Pork, for one. Lo soi means old water: fry gently in a dry pan cinnamon sticks, anise pods, cloves, cardamom pods, crushed ginger, fish sauce,  brown sugar, add 7 cups of water and  simmer for a while. If the cook takes this step in advance, a pound of lean pork can be added to the simmering lo soi and served in 20 minutes. A duck in 35.

   But the beautiful, even  stirring, idea is that with some care and feeding, the lo soi can be used again and again, just like the chefs  known to use the same lo soi throughout their entire careers.

Phan also has a recipe for summer rolls: sheets of rice paper, rolled around  lettuce, cooked rice vermicelli, slices of roast pork or chicken, shrimp, fresh mint and a non-traditional peanut dipping sauce and a half recipe of aioli, a garlicky mayonnnaise Phan’s ethnically Chinese mother picked up in Viet Nam where Phan was born.

Now this is street food. I have seen it in Asian grocery stores in Boston and Hartford, piles of rolls cloaked in a damp cloth to keep them pliable and tasty. It can be made easily, but it takes practice to make them look orderly.

First, you need a package of 10-inch rounds of rice paper, available at Sharon Farm Market, and sometimes at Guido’s in Great Barrington. Dip the sheets briefly in warm water, place on a board and add a tender lettuce like boston. Top with aioli, 1/4 cup of cooked  rice vermicelli, three little slices of cooked pork and three fresh leaves of mint. Roll tightly from one end and fold over sides of the rice paper. Maneuver three halved slices of cooked shrimp with the pink sides lying on the rice paper, roll up and eat with Phan’s recipe for peanut sauce, a rich (restaurant) concoction blending peanuts, lime juice, red miso, a tablespoon of cooked rice, combined in a blender and served in little dishes for each diner.

Phan says Vietnamese food is so fat free it needs the sauce and the mayonnaise.

I’d say skip the peanut sauce, spread on a little Japanese Kewpie mayo available at Amazon and you have a treat, a little untidy until you get good at rolling up the summer rolls, but tasty.

   A hardcover edition of Charles Phan’s “Vietnamese Home Cooking” is available from Amazon ranging from $25.34 to (inexplicably) $84.33; only three copies left in that edition.