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The Asian Julia Child
By Pauline Uchmanowicz . Photos by Corinne Trang and Roy Gumpel

Last month Newsweek ran a story lauding “the world’s greatest cookbooks,” including The Fannie Farmer Cookbook by Marion Cunningham (an update of an 1896 classic) and Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, credited with bringing French cuisine to America. Poised to join their ranks, the newly released Essentials of Asian Cuisine: Fundamentals and Favorite Recipes (Simon & Schuster) by Corinne Trang has already created buzz. Encyclopedic in range and content, the 600-page behemoth led a reviewer from the Washington Post to dub Trang “the Julia Child of Asian Cuisine".

“There’s more than meets the eye when you look at the food on your plate,” Trang told me over coffee and pastry at The New York Store, a gourmet shop in High Falls. “For centuries, cuisine traveled trade routes between Eastern and Western countries; ingredients, recipes, and cooking styles reflect those circumstances.” A part-time resident of Ulster County and the award-winning author of Authentic Vietnamese Cooking (1999), she aims in her latest book to educate readers about he cultural history of this movement. Tracing cooking basics native to countries of Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and Korea, Essentials of Asian Cuisine brings together 300 recipes along with insights into the history, traditions, and diversity of this bounty. An exhaustively researched gastronomic journey, it reflects Trang’s own multicutural legacy.

Born in France’s Loire Valley to a French mother and Cambodian-Chinese father, Trang was raised in Phnom Penh, Paris, and New York. This geographic lineage is traceable through her paternal grandparents, who escaped to Cambodia from China following the Japanese invasion of 1937. Her father, one of 24 children (the progeny of two mothers), later attended school in France, where he met and married his wife. After Trang’s birth, the couple returned to Cambodia while other Trang relatives fanned out across Vietnam and Indonesia.

The budding gourmet grew up surrounded by constant meal preparation among relatives. “Around my huge family, it was an assembly line. You didn’t do four covers—you did a hundred covers,” she recalled, reverting to restaurant lingo in the telling. With refrigeration limited, the country cooks also went to the market twice daily. Such habits were adopted by Trang, who maintained, “I still like to go fresh-food shopping every day.”

Trang’s immediate family immigrated to the United States in 1978. Fluent in English, French, and Chinese, she launched a career in marketing as a young adult, meeting her future husband, architect Michael McDonough, at a trade show. Soon reveling in the fact that his bride never made the same meal twice, he convinced Trang to pursue her talent for cooking. In 1995 she landed work at Saveur magazine as an Asian food consultant, though lacking in formal culinary training. “When you grow up in a family that cooks all day, you don’t need to go to cooking school,” Trang explained. Eventually hired at the magazine as a producing editor, she traveled on global assignments with food writers and photographers, directing content. Later she became director of Saveur’s kitchen, testing and tasting recipes from all over the world.

Trang, a contributor to Food & Wine, CITY, and Organic Style, initially embarked on cookbook writing to collect and preserve family recipes. “I subtitled my first book ‘Food from a Family Table’ to honor those traditions,” the author said. She likewise wanted to create a new paradigm for her chosen genre, merging traditional food writing with literary reportage. The resulting, critically acclaimed Vietnamese cookbook led Trang to a teaching position at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Working there on a regular basis, I decided to go ahead and formalize my vocation, earning a BA in Culinary Arts,” she admitted. Guest lectureships at colleges throughout the US and Europe followed, along with numerous radio and television appearances, including on KSRO’s “Good Food Hour,” NPR’s “Good Food,” CBS’s “Martha Stewart Living,” and the TV Food Network’s “Cooking Live” and “Sara’s Secrets” with Sara Moulton, whom Trang especially admires. For her next act, the celebrity chef wanted to demystify the art of Asian cooking more broadly conceived. “People should not be scared of Asian food; they should approach it the way they do Italian food,” Trang said. “It’s as easy as the first time you picked up garlic, but the flavor is different.” Summarizing a recommendation from the introduction to Essentials of Asian Cuisine, she offered the advice, “I tell people to go out shopping and pick five Asian ingredients and work with them for four or five months and then go learn five more. That’s how you build a repertoire. When you see and smell lemongrass for the first time, you get excited—and then you see another ingredient and you immediately get excited again. But I try to teach people to be patient and really absorb what they’re learning.”

Focusing on eight major national cuisines, Essentials of Asian Cuisine is organized by food type and course, featuring condiments, appetizers, vegetables, rice and noodles, main courses, sweets, and drinks. Extended discussions introduce each main section in order to explain the roots and evolution of food groups. For instance, Trang’s excursion into the history of the noodle explores its “overwhelming” and “daunting” number of varieties, including shape, texture, ingredients, and preparation methods. Listed in transliteration (approximating Asian symbols in English sounds) followed by translation, each individual recipe likewise begins with an insightful head note about the dish and its origins. For example, in describing gai tong (clay pot-steamed chicken soup), Trang writes that it “is a chicken and herbal infusion made in a special clay steamer from China’s Yixing region, from where the famous brownish-red clay teapots of the same name originate.”

The volume’s appendix includes both educational and practical information. A tour of food rituals, such as Chinese dim sum or “delights of the heart” (sweet and savory small-bite dishes originally served at teahouses) and Korean kimjang or kimchi (a harvest-time gathering of women to preserve food supplies for the winter), rounds out the book’s scholarly base. Sample menus and a comprehensive glossary of Asian staples and equipment follow. At the heart of Trang’s culinary philosophy lies “the notion of structure in cooking,” or “the architecture of cuisine.” It involves the idea of creating “layers of flavor,” building the ultimate taste and pizzazz of a dish one layer at a time. Chef Trang views this process as analogous to feng shui, or “the overall principle of living a harmonious life,” which extends to the harmony of food. “It may be as simple as setting a table or putting the food on the plate,” she said. Central to feng shui is the balance of opposites. “For example, if you have something crunchy, you want to complement it with something that’s tender.” Essentials of Asian Cuisine includes a discussion of how to apply these Eastern principles to organizing and presenting a meal for maximum enjoyment—for the host along with the guests.

Drawn to the Hudson Valley because of its resemblance to France, especially Burgundy, as well as to the region’s abundant harvest, Trang and McDonough are in the process of building a home with a state-of-the-art kitchen in Stone Ridge. Relying on feng shui to guide them, the chef, nevertheless, insisted that the first rule of the system “is that you must be comfortable in your environment; do not let anyone dictate what is comfortable to you. The energy flow is, after all, your energy.” She plans a sun-drenched indoor-outdoor kitchen that overlooks an orchard.

And what does Corinne Trang make of comparisons to the inimitable grande dame of French cuisine? “It’s an honor to be called ‘the Julia Child’ of my genre. She brought a whole new way of thinking to American food,” Trang said. Essentials of Asian Cuisine should inspire Western cooks to visit Eastern delights in a similar fashion.