After a couple of weeks in Vietnam earlier this year, I am a huge fan of that fragrant muddle of flavours and aromas that typifies the cuisine of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. More especially it is the steam-borne wafts of the smell of food cooking on the pavement, beside the road – right under your nose – almost anywhere you go, in any city throughout the country.

So it seems are the writers of this recently released delicious book which is jam-packed with so many of the street-side dishes we saw and tasted but had no idea how to prepare. 

Here, on one page, is the claypot pork with quail eggs we ate in Hanoi, there on another is the beef rice paper rolls we consumed by the handful anywhere we went. Turn a page and there are the baguettes of Vietnam which have successfully migrated to Cabramatta here in Sydney, as well as pho and stirfries and dipping sauces galore.

The frog with lemongrass and chilli, or the five spice eel, I may pass on, but I definitely want to attempt making the sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf, a favourite yum cha dish in Chinese restaurants that I always have to mime because I don’t know the name of it. I’ll give the green papaya salad a try too.

This book came about when the authors took a sabbatical in Vietnam after 15 years of running restaurants in Melbourne. There they met Jimmy Pham, a local restaurateur and philanthropist, who a decade or more ago founded the popular KOTO chain of local restaurants which provides training and employment to local disadvantaged youth.

Lister and Pohl worked in various capacities with KOTO during their break and now continue to live in Hanoi, where Tracey runs a successful cookery school, The Hanoi Cooking Centre.

Filled with do-able recipes and magnificent pictures of the food and life of Vietnam this book is for everyone – from someone who just wants to revisit this country and its people on the page, to those who just have to haul out the wok and cleaver and chopsticks and recreate a meal from one of the world’s best street-food destinations.

 -       Sally Hammond

Vietnamese Street Food, by Tracey Lister & Andreas Pohl, Hardie Grant Books, September, 20011, rrp $39.95, paperback, ISBN 978 1 742 701 424