Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America | Date: 28 April 2011, 08:36
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Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America
By Sami Scripter, Sheng Yang
* Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
* Number Of Pages: 309
* Publication Date: 2009-04-14
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0816653267
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780816653263
Book Description:
Simple, earthy, fiery, and fresh, Hmong food is an exciting but still little-known South Asian cuisine. In traditional Hmong culture, dishes are created and replicated not by exact measurements but by taste and experimentation—for every Hmong recipe, there are as many variations as there are Hmong cooks—and often served to large, communal groups. Sami Scripter and Sheng Yang have gathered more than 100 recipes from Hmong-American kitchens, illustrated them with color photos of completed dishes, and provided descriptions of unusual ingredients and cooking techniques.
Cooking from the Heart is the first cookbook to clearly set out the culinary traditions of the Hmong people as well as the cultural significance such traditions hold. The recipes are accompanied by anecdotes, aphorisms, and poems that demonstrate the importance of food and cooking in Hmong culture and offer a dramatic perspective on the immigrant experience. Scripter and Yang outline diet restrictions and taboos as well as how herbs and foods are traditionally used for healing purposes. The dishes featured in Cooking from the Heart range from well-known items such as egg rolls and green papaya salad to more unfamiliar dishes such as Nqaij Qaib Hau Xyaw Tshuaj (Chicken Soup for New Mothers) and Dib Iab Ntim Nqaij Hau Ua Kua (Stuffed Bitter Melon Soup).
The oral tradition by which these recipes have been passed down has meant that Hmong cooking has not yet reached a wide audience in the United States. While designed for an American kitchen, Cooking from the Heart encourages readers to seek out Hmong herbs and vegetables only recently introduced in the United States. After all, the authors say, the essence of Hmong cuisine is cooking with an adventurous and creative spirit—from the heart.
Summary: Great book
Rating: 4
I haven't gone through the whole book yet, but from skimming through the book, it is pretty complete with all the Hmong dishes and ingredients listed and most of the recipes are simple to make. The author also wrote about the history of the people and the dishes.
One thing that bugged me was there were no pictures to correspond with the dishes, although there is a picture section in the middle of the book, it is not complete.
I do recommend this book to those who want to try Hmong dishes, but if you're not too sure about the recipe, I would advise you to try it at a restaurant first before trying to make the dish yourself using this book.
Summary: Good cookbook, but could use some improvement
Rating: 3
I am Hmong and so I understand that many of the recipes in the Hmong culture have been borrowed from many other cultures throughout Southeast Asia. However, this cook book didn't really offer many traditional Hmong recipes (I also happen to know from personal experience, that many Hmong women, the traditional cooks in the family, are pretty stingy about sharing recipes to people outside the immediate family). While this book does offer recipes for a lot of the foods that Hmong people customarily eat, the book is lacking in detail about how to complete some of the tasks of cooking. To elaborate, there are few pictures and usually they are just depicting how the finished dish looks like, there are no photos for example, of how to actually roll an eggroll or how papaya should look after it is shredded for the spicy papaya salad dish. Fortunately, my wife is a good cook and she learned all these subtle but intricate details growing up. Unfortunately for the uninitiated, some of the recipes may prove hard to accomplish.
Summary: Very interesting..........
Rating: 5
The book reads more like a novel than a cookbook, but it is very interesting.
Summary: The best source of Hmong cooking ever.....
Rating: 5
I bought this book after years of searching for an accurate cooking guide to Hmong food as my partner is Hmong and I wanted to be able to cook authentic for him. Not only does this book contain delicious authentic recipes but it explains the traditions surrounding the serving of that food. I just made the Chicken Larb last week and even his father and mother said it was great and they came over from the camps in Thailand several years ago. If you ever want to cook traditional Hmong food buy this book, it is invaluable ! Thank you to the authors for bringing these spoken word traditions into the written world, I am forever in your debt.
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