Product Description

Much more than a collection of authentic recipes from successful Vietnamese restaurant Red Lantern, this book is the honest, difficult story of the Nguyen family as told by daughter Pauline - documenting their escape from Vietnam and eventual resettlement in Australia. At the heart of this story is a love of food - it helped to placate homesickness, became central to their early success in Australia, and was sometimes the only language the family could use to communicate with each other. In the end, it was this shared passion for food that reconciled the family and help create Red Lantern's success.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72958 in Books
• Brand: Books
• Published on: 2007-10-15
• Binding: Hardcover
• 344 pages

Amazon.co.uk
Most recipe books promise (as a matter of course) sumptuous recipes, but Secrets of the Red Lantern (subtitled Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart) really does deliver that, and a lot more besides. Pauline Nguyen's parents presented these recipes night after night at the highly successful Vietnamese restaurant The Red Lantern, and these were recipes which had been perfected and passed down over many years. The great majority of these recipes are easily achievable, utilising a relatively small range of ingredients; they include such delights as Pho Bo Tai Nam, a beef soup with sawtooth coriander and Vietnamese basil, or pork belly (Thit Ba Roi). All are presented here in a concise and accessible fashion.

But recipes are not all that Secrets of the Red Lantern has to offer. This is more than a cookbook: it is a candid and often moving story of Pauline Nguyen's family, beginning with their dangerous escape from Vietnam during the war and their ultimate settling down in Australia. The love of food is something more than a professional necessity for this family: it helped to assuage their home sickness, and even reconciled differences within the family (these personal passages are quite as beguiling as the more practical cookery aspects of the book). Most of all, though, this is a feast of the most tantalising of foreign recipes, burnished with food and personal photography -- and it is the latter which conveys the very individual nature of the food so resplendently on offer here. --Barry Forshaw

Synopsis
Much more than a collection of authentic recipes from successful Vietnamese restaurant Red Lantern, this book is the honest, difficult story of the Nguyen family as told by daughter Pauline - documenting their escape from Vietnam and eventual resettlement in Australia. At the heart of this story is a love of food - it helped to placate homesickness, became central to their early success in Australia, and was sometimes the only language the family could use to communicate with each other. In the end, it was this shared passion for food that reconciled the family and help create Red Lantern's success.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Stunning
"Secrets of the Red Lantern" is an absolutely stunning book, the recipes are scrumptious and so is the food photography. The story behind the recipes and the story of the author's family history are amazing and gut wrenching. What a wonderful mix of family history and Vietnamese recipes, truly one of the most beautiful and unique "recipe" books out there. From the material cover of the book, to the personal photography and candid memoirs this is definitely one to add to your collection.