Ever-Green Vietnamese

Andrea Nguyen wants her recipes to become your recipes.

On any given Wednesday afternoon, rain or shine, you’ll find longtime Santa Cruz resident Andrea Nguyen surveying fruits, vegetables, meat and fish at the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market. Making frequent visits to markets isn’t new for Nguyen. Growing up in Vietnam, she often accompanied her family’s cook to the lively open-air market near her family home in Saigon. It was there that her “supermarket obsession” began.

“Those market visits seeded my interests in food, cooking and grocery shopping,” she says.

Today Nguyen is a renowned cookbook author, food writer and James Beard Award winner, and is regarded as a leading authority on Asian and Vietnamese cuisine in the United States. For most of her readers, her books are their only reference point for Vietnamese food, history, culture and current affairs—a responsibility that Nguyen takes very seriously.

“The word author is the root of authority, and authority comes with responsibility,” Nguyen says.

To date, she has published six cookbooks, including the James Beard award-winning The Pho Cookbook. Her newest book Ever-Green Vietnamese comes out on April 25. In this latest work, Nguyen focuses on the fundamental use of vegetables, herbs, fruits and plant-based proteins in Vietnamese cooking.

Along with cookbooks, Nguyen writes a weekly newsletter called Pass the Fish Sauce and articles for magazines and newspapers. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sunset, Bon Appetit, EatingWell, Cooking Light and Saveur.

Although Nguyen earned her bachelor and master’s degrees in business and communication management from the University of Southern California, remarkably she has no formal culinary training and never attended cooking school.

Rewind to 1975, when Nguyen and her family fled Vietnam as refugees and resettled in the coastal town of San Clemente in Southern California. The first American supermarket they visited, Albertsons, was within walking distance of their apartment. Nguyen was astounded and thrilled by it, but Albertsons did not carry Vietnamese ingredients. So shopping there meant her mother had to substitute non-Vietnamese ingredients when preparing family meals reminiscent of those she made with Vietnamese ingredients back home.

To Nguyen, those meals gave her a sense of heritage, identity and grounding.

“Working the phone lines and sharing tips with other refugees, my mother co-opted non-Viet ingredients for Viet dishes,” Nguyen writes in her book Vietnamese Food Any Day.

She attributes her resourcefulness with ingredients to her mother and those meals that continue to motivate her to think on many different levels—knowing that, for whatever reason, people don’t always follow recipes.

To give her recipes context, Nguyen uses her exceptional storytelling skills that incorporate the narrative styles of memoir, historical writing, cultural narrative, DIY, travel and humor. She believes the recipes inherently taste better because they are conceptualized. Many readers report her cookbooks are as satisfying as a juicy novel, even without making a single recipe.

“At the age of 10, I’d read and study cookbooks as if they were novels,” Nguyen recalls.

In her two latest books, Vietnamese Food Any Day and Ever-Green Vietnamese, Nguyen bases most of her recipes on ingredients sourced at local Santa Cruz supermarkets and farmers markets. And with that same determination that drove her mother to ensure her family didn’t forget their culture, Nguyen brings Vietnamese and Asian ingredients to the American table—making the point that Vietnamese food isn’t exotic and should be part of people’s daily repertoire.

Of all her books, Ever-Green Vietnamese is the most personal. Written during the COVID lockdown, it reflects how Nguyen eats now.

“When I reached mid-life, I realized I needed to change my diet, and plants have given me so much joy,” she says. “Vietnamese people celebrate vegetables from land and sea and how vegetables are the true roots of the cuisine.

When you start cooking with vegetables, not only do you get a sense of their possibilities and their power in the kitchen, but it also allows you to understand what true Vietnamese food is about.”

In her newsletter, she shares recipe development trials and errors from her kitchen in Santa Cruz and offers out-of-the-box tips for tackling tough orders. For example, in the issue “How to Blow up a Duck” she explains how to get crispy skin on a Peking duck, by using the plastic foot pump from her exercise balance ball to separate the skin and flesh, allowing the fat to melt away during roasting. Insights like this have earned Nguyen a robust social media following, in addition to worldwide recognition as an exceptional cookbook author.

If writing cookbooks, contributing to magazines and newspapers, plus self-publishing a weekly newsletter isn’t enough. Nguyen also runs her Viet World Kitchen website and co-hosts the weekly podcast Everything Cookbooks, where Nguyen, Kate Leahy, Molly Stevens and Kristin Donnelly discuss how to go from idea to publication. Nguyen has also taught cooking classes on dumplings and pho-making at New Leaf Community Markets.

When asked how she maintains a breakneck pace, Nguyen reveals, “My lifelong curiosity about food, cooking and culture fuels my work.”