midweek gems #7

Charleston gems + Buon Ma Thuot flashback + vegan ramen & aloo tikki recipes for global plant-based cooking

Greetings from Charleston!

We’re here until Friday, then we’re off to Raleigh for the annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium. This is my first time at the Atlantic Ocean. At Folly Beach (below), the sand is fine and the surfing is low-key.

💎 Visits: Charleston

We’ve been in Charleston for 48 hours. This handsome, historic, and hospitable city has some remarkable food and sites. Highlights thus far:

82 Queen has been around since 1982 (surprise!) to serve lowcountry cooking. Ladies and gents leisurely lunch on terrific dishes like she crab soup, quiche-like tomato pie, and crab cakes with Carolina red rice and black-eye peas.

Fig is one of the best restaurants in Charleston and quickly books up. However, there are last-minute cancellations, which explains how I scored last night’s 9:15pm table for 2. The food pleasantly surprised. Burnt eggplant was suave and light. Bouillabaise included Carolina rice, butterbeans, squash and fennel can be split for two. Tomato tart tatin showcased the last of the tomato season’s tangy sweet umami-ness on a crisp puff pastry base.

She crab soup, eggplant and cottage cheese, bouillabaise, Russell home dining room and commode, McCleod plantation, us looking dorky (audio tour shot).

The area is loaded with urban and rural plantation history. The beautifully restored Nathaniel Russell House offers a sense of how the wealthy lived, including an upholstered commode(!) that enslaved servants regularly cleaned.

The McCleod Plantation presents plantation life from the the perspective of the enslaved. The tour is excellent for a fast 500-year history lesson in 90 minutes.

Gadsden’s Wharf, a major ports of entry for enslaved Africans, is now the new International African American Museum. The Old Exchange and Dungeon is also worth checking out.

💎 Buon Me Thuot: 1975 backstory

Following up on last Sunday’s travelogue about Vietnam’s central highlands city, Buon Me Thuot, I found a very interesting March 12, 1975 article in the New York Times’ archives. Reported by an anonymous person, the story provides a sense of life in that city before the Vietnam/American War. It also centers the experiences of the indigenous peoples in the region, who back then were categorically lumped together as Montagnards. Read the NYT piece as a companion to my travel tips on Buon Ma Thuot. (Yes, the city’s name is spelled many ways!)

💎 Origins: Vegan and plant-based

For your next party conversation (and to segue into a new book I like):

• “Vegan” was coined in 1944 by Donald Watson, an animal rights activist who combined the first 3 letters + the last 2 letters of the word “vegetarian”.

• “Plant-based” dates to 1980, when biochemist Thomas Colin Campbell wanted a non-political term to frame his research on a non-animal product diet. The term plant-based has evolved to mean no meat or low-meat (flexitarian). What holds true is prioritizing plants.

💎 Book : Global Plant-Based Cooking

Eating healthy, delicious food does not require going whole hog, so to speak. Joe Yonan, the food section editor of the Washington Post, just released his latest cookbook -- a tome titled, Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking.

It’s the first vegan cookbook that I’ve been interested in because Joe is undogmatic. He has contributors to the book who prescribe a vegan lifestyle but that’s not Joe. Like me, he wants to urge cooks to experience the transformation of vegetables into marvelous foods. There are so many “A-ha!” moments.

In 2023, at the Smithsonian in D.C., he and I discussed my plant-based book, Ever-Green Vietnamese as well as his new book project. I was interested in how he would present global vegan cuisine and now it’s here. We recently chatted about it at Omnivore Books in San Francisco.

Me and Joe at his book event in SF! I asked pointed vegetable-driven questions!

Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking is about 500 pages long, with hundreds of recipes so you’ll get lots of mileage from the volume. The food stylist who worked on the shoot told me Joe’s recipes are solid. (Not all books are solid and sometimes food stylists perform triage to fix the recipe.)

I’ve only begun to dive into Joe’s book and here are two standouts for you to try:

Ramen and aloo matar tikki -- photos: Erin Scott, from "Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking" by Joe Yonan (2024)

Sunflower Ramen showcases innovative vegan cooking. The recipe is a clever take on rich tonkotsu ramen using sunflower seeds and sprouts. Pork-based tonkotsu can be a gut buster so the vegan take is a welcomed change. Get the recipe!

Aloo Matar Tikki with Cilantro Mint Chutney reflects traditional vegan cooking crafted for all eaters. Who doesn’t love well-seasoned fried potato-pea patties and a spicy fresh herb sauce? Meat does not have to drive the deliciousness bus. Get the recipe from Joe’s new book.

For the next Sunday Special, I have a question to ask you about you.