LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Nite Yun is a celebrated American chef known for bringing the flavors of her parents' ancestral home, Cambodia, to the United States through her restaurants. The one she has now is Lunette in San Francisco. She grew up in Stockton, California. And her parents never talked about their life in Cambodia and what they escaped, a genocide.
NITE YUN: I learned about my parents' past by traveling. When I went to Cambodia, my goal was to meet my relatives. And I learned that over food, they would open up about my parents' past. I learned that my mom was a beauty queen in her village and my dad fixed motorcycles for the Japanese.
FADEL: Her late father never found a way to truly open up to her, but her mother did.
YUN: Traveling to Cambodia and learning how to cook food was how my mom opened up about herself. Cooking Cambodian food has been a way of storytelling.
FADEL: Now Yun is sharing those stories and her recipes with the world in her debut cookbook called "My Cambodia: A Khmer Cookbook." And I know we typically say Khmer, but Yun says it's actually pronounced Khmer.
YUN: "My Cambodia" is my story, my parents' story of resilience and strength. And I also wanted people to not forget, like, the good times in Cambodia, when my parents were growing up, when there was Cambodian rock 'n' roll music playing, when art was thriving. And I want to just put that in a time capsule and celebrate it.
FADEL: And that's what she does in her cookbook. She recommends rock 'n' roll playlists to dance to as you cook.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHNAM OUN DOP-PRAM MUY (I'M 16)")
ROS SEREYSOTHEA: (Singing in Khmer).
FADEL: And before we get to the stories she shares in the book, we've got to start with the food. On the day we chat, Yun walks me through one of her favorite weeknight recipes, a chicken stir fry.
YUN: This is so exciting for me. You don't even know.
FADEL: Yun is in San Francisco. I'm in D.C., so we connect by Zoom. And I perch my laptop on the kitchen counter so she can walk me through the dish.
YUN: So cha kroeung, I get very excited about this dish.
FADEL: (Laughter).
YUN: It's just very (laughter) - because I grew up eating it. It's something that I still crave.
FADEL: We start with the most important part of this cooking process, making something called kroeung.
YUN: Kroeung is one of the foundations in Khmer cuisine. Kroeung translates to ingredients.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISH CLINKING)
YUN: You pound, like, thinly sliced lemongrass. There's turmeric, lime leaves, shallots and galangal. And you turn that into this beautiful paste.
(SOUNDBITE OF PESTLE KNOCKING)
FADEL: I mash everything with a mortar and pestle, which is an arm workout because there's so much smashing. I feel like I have a new right bicep, basically.
(LAUGHTER)
YUN: Yes. And what I recommended in the book, too, was to have a kroeung-making party. Like, invite all your friends to help make a big batch. And then the kroeung is also very versatile. You can use kroeung to marinate, to make soups and stews and curry. It's the base for a lot of our traditional Cambodian dishes.
(SOUNDBITE OF INGREDIENTS SIMMERING)
FADEL: At Yun's instruction, I begin to saute my kroeung in a pan along with sugar and an ingredient you may need to find in a specialty Asian grocery store.
YUN: Prahok, which is the star in Cambodian cooking. It's, like, our fermented fish paste.
FADEL: It's smelling so good.
YUN: Yeah.
FADEL: It's not ginger that we used. It's galangal?
YUN: Yes, it's galangal. Galangal is not as spicy as ginger. It has a much more, like, nutty, earthy taste.
FADEL: So I can smell that. I can smell the lemongrass.
YUN: Lemongrass, OK.
FADEL: The garlic. All kind of...
YUN: Nice.
FADEL: ...Mingling together.
Next, I add sliced chicken thighs and a mixture of fish sauce before turning down the heat. I chop up some red onions and chiles.
I get nervous when, like, a real chef watches me cook (laughter).
YUN: This is fun. Seeing you go around the kitchen, grabbing, like, the onions and working (laughter).
FADEL: It's amazing. And I'm excited because it's so delicious. But it's also something that can feel intimidating. And then, like, looking through your cookbook and going and shopping for the ingredients, everything feels more accessible now, like, oh, I can do this.
YUN: I cannot wait for you to try it (laughter).
FADEL: I stir in my onions and just a pinch of the chiles because I'm a heat wimp. Then I top it with basil and get ready to serve by scooping the jasmine rice I prepared earlier into a bowl.
YUN: Sometimes, when I would miss home, I would just cook a pot of rice and have that. Sometimes I wouldn't even eat it, but just to fill my room with, like, the aroma of, like, steamed rice. It was just very comforting to me.
FADEL: And my kitchen has that aroma, along with the garlic and lemongrass and the stir fry, which is done.
YUN: Yay, you did it (laughter).
FADEL: And it has such a depth of flavor that is so different.
YUN: That depth of flavor you're talking about is basically from the kroeung and the prahok together, which makes Khmer food so good.
FADEL: Now, Yun didn't grow up cooking Cambodian food, as she mentioned. But the recipes in this cookbook include the flavors of her childhood from the recipe for a bright cabbage salad to...
YUN: Kuy teav phnom penh, which is the pork noodle soup. When my mom would make a big pot of soup, we knew she was going to make it ahead of time because she would start prepping, like, the fried garlic. And she'd pull out the biggest pot. So it was, like, a very joyful time.
FADEL: And her book is full of both the joy and the trauma of her parents' history.
Your parents are genocide survivors. You were born in a refugee camp. You came here when you were 2.
YUN: Yeah, so my parents fought for their lives when they fled Cambodia around 1978. My parents, like, dodged land mines, survived starvation to, like, forced labor camp, walked under the hot, hot sun to safety so my brother and I could have a better life in America. I didn't learn this as a child at all. But I knew something, like, there was this mystery that, you know, they hid from my brothers and I. But I've always, like, looked up to my mom. Like, I just knew her strength and her determination came from somewhere.
FADEL: Khmer cooking, Cambodian cooking, sharing it with the world in this cookbook, in your restaurants, why was it so important?
YUN: I wanted to share my story. It's something that not a lot of people talk about or know about. And I think that's why Cambodian cuisine is so in the shadow of, like, Thai and Vietnamese food, because we were in the civil war and everything was lost during that time. So people who held on or, like, you know, who knew how to cook Cambodian food, they just kind of perished. And people who do know Cambodian food now hold it in their memories. I just wanted to share the beautiful side of Cambodia. So this book is a way for me to kind of compile all the recipes that I learned from my travel and from my mom, to honor their stories and to make the food accessible.
FADEL: And as Nite Yun writes, if you want to connect with your parents, grandparents, friends - anyone, really - I hope this book will help you create the space for conversations both loving and difficult. Her debut cookbook is called "My Cambodia."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHNAM OUN DOP-PRAM MUY (I'M 16)")
SEREYSOTHEA: (Singing in Khmer). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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