Mãn by Kim Thúy Read Free Book Online Page B

He never turned around, even when he heard them, sitting on their heels on soil dried by the pacing prisoners, crying from fear and hunger. He hoped that their innocence and their loneliness would allow them to be freed before him. His wish was granted. The children went back to the house, whereas he remained, even after the prison had been shut down for years.
    Hồng’s final memory of her father is a faded yellow plastic bowl filled with clear broth and a piece of tomato and a few bits of parsley stem. He had placed it in a corner of the yard, going past her brother, who had held on to the bowl in the circle of his folded legs and waited for Hồng to arrive at the fence to make her drink a little of the tomato water. She had never tasted anything so delicious. Since herliberation, she had been trying to re-create those tastes by making the soup at least once a week. No matter what variety of tomato she tried, she never managed to reproduce the indelible but elusive memory of those few sips. And so we immortalized the recipe in memory of her father.

    Ä‘òn gánh

    the yoke
    LA PALANCHE
was a resounding success across the province, so much so that a producer suggested a television cooking show. I wanted to broaden the experiment we’d worked on with Philippe, so Julie invited chefs to revisit or to reinvent our Vietnamese recipes on screen, with me. These collaborations confirmed for us that mainly we were creating the same balance of tastes in the mouth but by using ingredients specific to each chef’s region. The osso bucco was brightened up by gremolata, while the lemongrass beef stew was served with pickled daikon for its slightly bitter taste. In traditional Québécois cuisine, beef meatballs are cooked in a brown sauce whose consistency and colour resembles the one based on soya and fermented black beans that garnishes grilled Vietnamese meatballs. In Louisiana, fish is coated in Cajun spices to blacken it, while the Vietnamese use lemongrass and minced garlic.
    Of course, certain tastes have an exclusive identity and well-defined borders. For instance, none of the chefs I met knew what to do with the cartilage in chicken bones, while people in Bangkok go into ecstasies over those breaded lumps. It would be cruel of me to impose fermented shrimp paste, intensely mauve and aromatic, on my guest chefs, as it would be to feed them green guavas drenched in salt with very hot peppers. Salmon, however, grilled or fried, goes well with a salad of green mango and ginger. Like friends of long standing, fish sauce goes perfectly withmaple syrup in a marinade for spareribs, while in a soup made with tamarind, tomatoes, pineapple and fish, celery is a worthy substitute for the stems of elephant ears. The two vegetables absorb the flavours and carry the broth into their porous flesh as submissively as a servant, at the same time as present as an aspirate
h
. Oddly enough, the leaf of the elephant ear, unlike its porous stem, could provide shelter from rain because it is impermeable, like the leaves of water lilies and lotus blossoms. Julie, charmed by the two facets of those plants, had a pond dug in the restaurant’s backyard for floating tropical flowers. As soon as the first bud appeared, Maman would recite a popular traditional song that every Vietnamese knows by heart:
    Trong đầm gì đẹp bằng sen
,
    Lá xanh, bông trắng lại chen nhụy vàng
,
    Nhụy vàng, bông trắng, lá xanh
,
    Gần bùn mà chẳng hôi tanh mùi bùn
.
    What is lovelier than the lotus in the swamp,
    Its green leaves compete with white petals, with yellow pistils,
    Yellow pistils, white petals, green leaves,
    Near to the mud but without its stench.

    thÆ¡

    poem
    WE PRINTED HUNDREDS OF copies of both versions of this poem to offer to our customers, who came to bask in the garden on canvas beach chairs. Students, often aspiring writers or poets,