Writer Kim Thuy introducing her book in an interview with Canada's radio (Photo: CBC News)
“My mother always said that there are two kinds of people who can cook. One group really knows how to cook, and the other group knows how to eat it, and if you can taste it, you can imitate its flavour." She said on CBC Montreal channel.
When she was 10 years old, the writer, born in 1968, and her family left Vietnam to live in Quebec, Canada. “Ru”, her first novel in French, published in 2009, was a resounding success and has been translated into 25 languages.
Her latest work is a book about how to cook Vietnamese dishes named "Le Secret des Vietnamiennes" (Secret of Vietnamese). Kim Thuy said that cuisine is always an important part in her works and even life. Before writing, she opened a restaurant in Montreal to earn living. A special feature of this restaurant was that it served only one dish per day.
"When I opened the restaurant, I did not know how to cook. What the restaurant served – the day before I had to learn to cook it from my mother, so I just followed my own understanding," the writer recalled.
The love of cooking really began when she visited Vietnam. She found that the dishes made in her hometown were not exactly the same as Vietnamese food in Montreal
The book “Le Secret des Vietnamiennes” is divided into many parts, each part begins with a portrait of one of her uncles or aunts, and a paragraph introducing about their characters.
“Many families lost their relatives on the way to the new land. I feel lucky because I still have uncles and aunts,” she said.
The writer said that the recipes in the book are not strange to Vietnamese people, so readers she targets are foreigners.
"I would like to introduce Vietnamese cuisine to non-Vietnamese people, to those who have never fully cooked Vietnamese food," she said.
Talking about the difference between Vietnamese cuisine and cuisine in Quebec, she said that Vietnamese cuisine does not focus on seed spices but it mainly uses herbs. She also emphasized that the special point is not in materials, but in the way materials are combined./.