By Leslie Brenner

Award-winning cookbook author Andrea Nguyen was the featured guest at a Cooks Without Borders Culture-Dive panel discussion yesterday — joined by special guest An-My Lê. Both natives of Saigon, they shared food memories of Vietnam with CWB design director Juliet Jacobson and myself, and talked about what cooking the dishes of their heritage has meant to each of them as immigrants.

The live event was attended virtually by Cooks Without Borders Premium Members.

A little orange notebook filled with handwritten recipes was one of the few things her mother brought with her when her family was evacuated from Saigon in 1975, recalls Nguyen. Three decades later, Nguyen published her first cookbook — Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

Nguyen’s mother gave the book — a beautiful, 344-page volume subtitled “Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors,” to all her friends. “You give this to your children,” Nguyen recalled her mother telling them. “Because they’re not writing the recipes down. And you’ll need something to give them for their wedding.”

Nguyen, now one of the most respected authorities on Vietnamese cooking in America, went on to publish five other books. She talked, at our panel, about the new book she’s working on now. We profiled her last month.

Lê, a renowned photographer and MacArthur Fellow whose works are in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and other top museums, is an accomplished home cook, and a fan of Nguyen's cookbooks.

Food was the one aspect of being an exile that was not problematic when she first came to the United States as a 15 year-old, Lê told the panel. “Growing up during the eighties. you associated Vietnam with the war and the vets, and it was so controversial. My default was always to grab onto food because it brought so much pleasure, so much comfort.”

The video replay of the event is available on Cooks Without Borders YouTube channel. You’ll find previous events — with The Woks of Life’s Sarah Leung; cookbook author Tara Wigley; and Masienda founder Jorge Gaviria and chef Olivia Lopez there as well.

To attend future Cooks Without Borders Culture-Dive events live, join CWB Premium Membership.