Rice and Baguette ─ A History of Food in Vietnam

The once-obscure cuisine of Vietnam is, today, a favorite for many people from East to West. Adapted and modified over thousands of years, it is probably best known as a particularly delicious result of combining traditional southeast Asian cookery with visible outside influences—notably, the crunchy baguette—from its French-occupied past. Drawing on archeological evidence, oral and written histories, and wide-ranging research, Vu Hong Lien, in this book, tells the complex and surprising history of food in Vietnam.
??????????? Rice and Baguette traces the prehistoric Vi?t’s progress from hunter-gathers of mollusks and small animals to sophisticated agriculturalists. The book follows them as they developed new tools and practices to perfect the growing of their crops until rice became a crucial commodity,which then irrevocably changed their diet, lifestyle, and social structure. Along the way, the author shows how Vi?t cuisine was dramatically influenced by French colonial cookery and products, which introduced a whole new set of ingredients and techniques into Vietnam. Beautifully illustrated throughout and peppered with fascinating historical tales, Rice and Baguette reveals the long journey that Vietnamese food has traveled to become the much-loved cuisine that it is today.
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Vu Hong Lien is a Vietnamese–British historian who has written widely on the history of Southeast Asia. She is a guest lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the author of Royal Hue: Heritage of the Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam and coauthor of Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger: A History of Vietnam, also published by Reaktion Books.
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