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For so many of us, Asian cuisine beckons like a beautiful tropical pool. And yet, the most we ever do is test the water with a tremulous toe or two. But now Corinne Trang, award-winning author of Authentic Vietnamese Cooking, has taken on the prodigious task of being both swimming teacher and siren, lifeguard and fearless mariner, to lure us into the deep water with her Essentials of Asian Cuisine.
At 590-plus pages, this is a big book. It is beautifully illustrated, for those who need to see where they are headed, and just as beautifully thought out, for those who want to get where they are going. The destination is the food of Asia, with China as the wellspring. The territory Ms. Trang has mapped includes Indonesia and the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan and Korea--as well as greater China. She does not pretend to be definitive--that would take an encyclopedia. Rather, Ms. Trang assures the reader that much of what they know of western cooking applies to the east. She begins with familiarity then builds in self confidence, chapter by chapter, recipe by recipe.
There are detailed sections on the Asian pantry, the basics of tools and techniques, an overview of the working fundamentals of building a dish or a meal. Then the book breaks out into chapters on "Condiments, Stocks and Starter Soups," "Rice, Noodles, Dumplings, and Bread," "Vegetables and Herbs," "Fish and Seafood," "Meat and Poultry," and "Sweets and Drinks." She ends her book with notes about Asian food rituals and sample menus and sources. The recipes are refreshingly short, concise, and to the point. A reader could begin by cooking what is already familiar, then expand into the many delicious alternatives Essentials of Asian Cuisine has to offer. Before you know it you'll be swimming like a natural without a second look back. --Schuyler Ingle
From Publishers Weekly
There are some books you never knew you needed until they appear, and then you can't imagine how you did without them. Trang's newest (after Authentic Vietnamese Cooking) is an encyclopedic summation of the history, techniques, ingredients and recipes of the major Asian nations (China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines). It's an ambitious undertaking, but Trang delivers and shows an astonishing mastery of the often subtle differences among the cuisines. (For example, she clearly differentiates between three kinds of hot pots-Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese.) In this vast catalogue, some recipes are relatively familiar, like Bibimbap, Tempura, Hot and Sour Soup, Chicken Adobo; Curried Conch Shells, Fish and Coconut Custard and Oxtail braised in Peanut Sauce are more exotic. While some staples have not been included (such as Kungpao Chicken), the book can hardly be accused of brevity. A true instructor, Trang spends 60 pages on fundamentals before offering any cooking instruction. She fills out each chapter of recipes with an extensive essay on the different permutations taken by shared ingredients-there are 140 pages on "Rice, Noodles, Dumplings, and Breads" alone. The protein chapters are somewhat less impressive; still, this volume should be a first port of call for home cooks eager to undertake a serious study of Asian cooking. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Though she now lives in New York, food writer and former Saveur magazine editor Trang grew up in Vietnam as well as Paris, and she has traveled widely throughout Asia. In her impressive new cookbook, she explores the "continuities" among the centuries-old Chinese culinary tradition and the cuisines of the rest of Asia, from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand to the Philippines. She starts with a detailed, illustrated pantry section and another on equipment and techniques, followed by an overview of the "fundamentals," the guiding principles of Chinese cooking, along with brief introductions to the foods of the other Asian countries. The following chapters, from "Condiments" to "Rice, Noodles, Dumplings, and Breads" (the longest one and, to a certain extent, the heart of the book) to "Sweets and Drinks," offer more than 250 recipes. Trang's readable and informative headnotes provide provenance and explore the connections among similar dishes found in the various cuisines; she also includes useful tips on using unusual ingredients and suggests substitutions if necessary. The lengthy chapter introductions are equally impressive, serving as mini-encyclopedias in themselves. Authoritative and thoroughly researched, this will be invaluable as both a reference and a cookbook. Highly recommended. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Despite its bulk, Corinne Trang's Essentials of Asian Cuisine offers just that: fundamentals, not exhaustive completeness. She has produced a volume covering the cooking of the Southeast Asian peninsula's nations, China, Japan, and Korea, ignoring India and some other countries whose cuisines are hard to distinguish from those of their larger neighbors. For those unfamiliar with Asian cooking, Trang opens with a discussion of the cuisines' shared cooking techniques and the importance of using all one's senses when preparing a meal. Even sound plays a part by determining a dish's doneness by its bubbling or by the timbre of the steam emanating from a pot. The exhaustive inventory of recipes methodically treats soups, starches, meats, fish, vegetables, and sweet dishes. Her recipes for Chinese dumplings, Philippine lumpia wrappers, and Korean pancakes will attract many a cook. Trang's meat recipes show how the same cut of meat may be differently handled from one nation to the next. A brief list of sources for Asian ingredients and a bibliography aid cooks eager to try out some of these recipes. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Grace Young author of The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen This remarkable cookbook is packed with information and tempting recipes. Any fan of Asian cooking will savor it as an "essential" for replicating the great dishes of this historic tradition.
William Woys Weaver contributing editor, Gourmet magazine There are a great many books on Asian cooking, but very few of them come to us from the pen of a true teacher. This one walks you through the essentials of raw ingredients, proper cooking techniques, and, best of all, well-tested, fail-safe recipes which explode with unusual tastes and textures, for truly dazzling menus anyone can make at home. The Fish Steamed with Beer was so delicious I had to make it twice for the same dinner -- it disappeared that quickly!
Martin Yan author and host of Yan Can Cook As ambitious as its title, this book captures not only the basic essentials of Asian cuisine but its very essence. Within these beautifully written pages Ms. Trang links the intricate and far-reaching roots of different Asian cuisines. It makes a most fascinating culinary journey for its readers.
Review
Cook's Illustrated Essentials of Asian Cuisine has the beauty of a coffee-table book, the depth of an encyclopedia, and the regional information and landscapes of a travel guide.
Body & Soul
"Trang has the cooking credentials to produce a tome like this one."
Grace Young, author, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen
"Any fan of Asian cooking will savor it as an 'essential' for replicating the great dishes of this historic tradition."
William Woys Weaver, Contributing Editor, Gourmet
"From a true teacher. This one walks you through the recipes which explode with unusual tastes and textures..."
The Cincinnati Enquirer
"...Trang organizes...Asian cooking by grouping together similar dishes that highlight the common elements as well as the variations."
Metropolitan Home Magazine
"At over 600 pages, the book is overflowing with recipes that are easier than you think."
The Indianapolis Star
"Asian food is all the rage...Trang brings intimidating [Asian] cuisines home in simple language for the Western cook."
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
"Trang shows an instructional bent in explaining ingredients, techniques and how the cuisines evolved."
Review
Cook's Illustrated Essentials of Asian Cuisine has the beauty of a coffee-table book, the depth of an encyclopedia, and the regional information and landscapes of a travel guide.
Book Description
With eight major national cuisines, and dozens of regional variations, a comprehensive exploration of Asian cuisine might seem too daunting to present in one volume. But with Essentials of Asian Cuisine: Fundamentals and Favorite Recipes, award-winning author Corinne Trang successfully brings the fundamentals of Asian cooking into the home kitchen in a collection that includes both contemporary and time-honored recipes. Trang takes the reader on a journey of Eastern culinary discovery as seen through a practiced Western culinary lens. Explaining how and why Chinese cuisine is at the root of all Asian cooking, she describes in familiar terms the techniques that incorporate the five senses and embody the Chinese yin yang philosophy of balanced opposites. Trang uses Asian ingredients commonly found in supermarkets and through mail-order sources -- such as fish sauce, lemongrass, and rice noodles -- to guide home cooks through the preparation of healthy, sensual meals. She illuminates the mysteries of authentic Asian cooking, explaining the aromatic herbs and spices that make Asian cuisine vibrant, colorful, and distinctive. Trang brings together more than three hundred traditional and cutting-edge recipes for condiments, appetizers, main courses, vegetables, and sweets and drinks from China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Mouthwatering items include Chinese Scallion Pancakes, Filipino Fried Spring Rolls, Spicy Indonesian Crab Fried Rice, Japanese Miso-Marinated Black Cod, Japanese Spring Water Tofu with Sweet Sake Sauce, Stir-Fried Leafy Greens, Chinese Pork Ribs with Black Bean and Garlic Sauce, Green Tea Ice Cream, and Thai Coffee. In organizing the book by type of food, Trang allows cooks to see both the common elements and the distinctive individualities of Asian national and regional cooking. Trang explains the roots of major recipes and discusses where they appear in various guises in different countries. Vietnam's Canh Ca Chua (Hot and Sour Fish Soup), for example, can also be found in Cambodian, Indonesian, and Thai cuisines; Trang provides the recipes for both the master soup and its variations. Trang includes a comprehensive glossary of Asian ingredients, plus a detailed list of resources for purchasing special ingredients and equipment. She offers sample menus, including a Chinese Dim Sum, a Filipino Dinner, and a Japanese Lunch. A special section on feng shui demonstrates how to organize and beautifully present a meal. In this lavishly designed and illustrated volume, more than eighty-five original black-and-white and color photographs bring to life the ingredients, dishes, and people of Asia. The book is rich with personal anecdotes and intriguing information about Asian culture, and nowhere else will you find such a clear, comprehensive, and accessible treatment of Asian cuisine. More than a cookbook, Essentials of Asian Cuisine is a celebration of exotic culinary delights.
About the Author
Corinne Trang is the award-winning author of Authentic Vietnamese Cooking (1999). She has written for numerous publications, including Organic Style, Saveur, and Food & Wine. She has also been a guest on such radio and television shows as Bloomberg Radio's Executive Dining Guide with Peter Elliot, and TV Food Network's Cooking Live and Martha Stewart Living. Trang has lectured internationally and currently teaches in the Culinary Arts program at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction Growing up among wonderful home cooks in the kitchens of Southeast Asia, the expatriate Chinese communities in Paris, and traditional provincial cooks in the Loire Valley of France; then expanding my circle to include chefs and restaurateurs throughout Europe, the United States, China, and East Asia, I came to see continuities between and among the great cuisines of the East that could be expressed in Western terms. This book is intended to explore those continuities. In seeking out the basic principles of China's regional kitchens, I believe it is possible to establish a way of bringing to life all of the great cuisines of Asia for any cook who cares to learn. Western cooks are easily intimidated by Asian cooking. Ingredients seem alien, techniques unfamiliar, and languages impenetrable, even to professionals well versed in international cookery. It needn't be that way. Perhaps because I came to know both Eastern and Western cooking naturally, absorbing them as I grew up, the connections have always seemed obvious, the techniques manageable, the language issues inconsequential. The more one looks at the cuisines of Asia, the more one realizes that they are closer than not to what we know in the West. Historically, trade routes and land bridges linked Europe, Southwest Asia, India, and Southeast Asia. For example, the Indonesian island of Java had for centuries closer ties to the cultures of Iran and, by inference, Rome than to China, which was only a few hundred miles to the north. The Dutch, English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish had as much influence as the Chinese, and the ingredients and cooking styles reflect these circumstances. Many of the most central ingredients to the cooking of China itself are of Western origin, having come by way of war and trade. Corn, peanuts, sesame seeds, potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes, and chili peppers were transplanted from Western Europe and the Americas. Indeed, for centuries the Philippines had closer ties to Spain, Mexico, and to the United States than it did to neighboring China. The most important lesson I took from French cuisine was its notion of structure in cooking. When one learns the "architecture" of a cuisine, the rest will follow. (Indeed, France's first chef and one of its most important culinary pioneers, Marie-Antoine Carême, was an amateur architect!) Despite the fact that there are dozens of preparation and cooking techniques, hundreds of ingredients, and thousands of traditional Asian dishes, I believe strongly that the basics of Asian cuisine can be gleaned through an understanding of Chinese cooking, and that Southeast Asian and East Asian cooking can be seen as an extension of the Chinese kitchen, colored by local traditions and Western influences. This book is intended to set down what I feel are the fundamentals that bind all Asian cuisines, to provide a way of seeing and understanding what may have at one point seemed inscrutable to the average Western cook. Essentials of Asian Cuisine contains references to both Asian and Western cooking techniques, ingredients, culinary history, and cultural context, but it is not intended as a scholarly work. Rather, I hope that the enthusiastic cook will use it as a handy tool, and find it as much in sync with today's kitchens, supermarkets, and other culinary resources as with the culinary cultures it embodies. The basics and organizing principles of Asian cuisines can be learned. The book includes, for example, a discussion of feng shui, the overarching principle in living a harmonious life that extends to cooking harmoniously, as well as the principle of yin yang, the art of balanced opposites that is central to Asian cuisine. There are brief overviews of Eastern culinary histories and cultures, so that the reader may better understand how foods evolved over time, and the whys and wherefores of ingredients and techniques. Fusion, which is a basic principle of all world cooking, is a subject of much interest to many contemporary chefs. In the best sense, fusion means that ingredients and techniques, flavors and textures, backnotes and overtones develop and evolve as cultures rub up against one another and people move around. This notion has held true for the peoples of Asia for millennia. Asia's history is the story of migration, displacement, population shift, colonization, and empire. Partly out of a need to survive, partly out of a need to belong, and out of a need to accept, foods are fused. And out of all these needs, wonderful dishes evolve (the best of these having developed slowly), both through trial and error and for well-thought-out reasons. Also in the best tradition, flavors and combinations of foods are understood through the process of creating a meal, rather than simply as discrete items. Fusion is not a fad; it is an essential process in the evolution of human culture, and the cooking of Asia demonstrates this wonderfully. It is hoped that this book may provide some insight into the processes and aid cooks who are interested in the use of unfamiliar ingredients. A caveat and an aspiration: It is important to keep in mind that this book is intended as a guide to cooking principles and not an exhaustive compendium. It points the way but does not describe every culinary nook and cranny along the way. It encourages personal discovery and experiment based on understanding. While I have touched on what I believe are the principal historical cuisines of Asia, I have not gone into great depth relative to the cooking of a few countries. This is because as political boundaries have changed, cultural connections have remained intact, and cooking traditions do not acknowledge political borders. Laotian cooking largely reflects the principles of Vietnamese and Cambodian cooking, for example. Burmese cooking reflects that of Thailand. Malaysia was, for centuries, tied to the traditions of Sumatra, Java, and the rest of Indonesia. And -- with author's emphasis -- the cooking of vast and ancient India is best seen as a separate subject entirely. Nonetheless, where Indian influences are felt, they have been included and described. And in the cases of Laos, Burma, and Malaysia, a few recipes have been included to illustrate the particular color and tone of their national cooking. Every recipe in this book stands on its own, so that the reader may simply select an item on impulse. At the same time, the book can be approached as a pleasurable course of study. In addition to hundreds of recipes, there are also sections on essential ingredients, equipment and technique, food rituals, seasonal menus, and mail-order sources. From there, I encourage the adventurous cook to relax into improvisation and experimentation. In time, the essentials of Asian cooking will seem a potential part of any culinary foray. Opportunities for your own brand of fusion will arise. I hope my Asian kitchen will become part of your own. Corinne Trang New York, 2003 Text, recipes, and black-and-white photographs copyright © 2003 by Corinne Trang
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