Fish

Use any salsa you like in this dish: mild, medium, or hot. For the best flavor, buy the fresh variety sold in the refrigerator section of grocery stores. To add more heat, cook 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes with the corn and garlic in step 3.

Experiment with different combinations of your favorite herbs to coat the snapper, but remember to balance strong herbs, such as dill and thyme, with milder ones, such as parsley.

This pasta features a few flavors of the season—mint and peas—along with lemon and ever-popular salmon. It’s just the thing to hit the spot on a crisp spring evening.

Niçoise salads are usually made with tuna, but we substituted fresh salmon in this version. You can, of course, make the salad with a couple of cans of tuna; look for Italian oil-packed tuna, which has the best flavor.

Cod is a lean fish that is available year-round and can be baked, broiled, or poached. Its mild taste pairs well with sharp flavors. Other firm, mild fish, including halibut, sole, or haddock, can be used in place of cod.

The combination of lemon zest, raisins, and pine nuts was inspired by condiments popular in Southern Italian cooking. Try the lemon relish on chicken or pork, or even as a topping for steamed broccoli.

This steamed fish recipe, given to our family by our Chinese Vietnamese friend Uncle Su, is special. During cooking, the bold seasonings mix with the sweet fish juices to create a wonderful sauce for flavoring the flesh and a bowl of hot rice. Fresh salmon steaks or fillets are a fine substitute for the heads, which my parents prefer. You can also try the sauce atop other moderately flavored fish that have some richness to their flesh, such as sablefish. Avoid lean, dense fish, such as halibut or swordfish, which dry out and toughen when steamed.

Smooth, well-seasoned meat and seafood pastes have many uses in the Vietnamese kitchen. Here, a pinkish orange salmon paste is shaped into small cakes before undergoing a two-step cooking process: an initial steaming to cook the cakes, followed by broiling, grilling, or frying to crisp the outside. The cakes are sliced and served as an appetizer or dunked into Simple Dipping Sauce (page 309) and eaten with rice for dinner. If you have enjoyed Thai fried fish cakes (tod mun), these will remind you of them. When my mother came to the States, she substituted salmon for the rich-tasting tuna she had used in Vietnam. I have since prepared the cakes with the ahi tuna available here, but the results were too firm and dry. The fattier salmon is superior. If you can’t find skinless salmon fillet, buy 2 1/3 pounds of skin-on fillet and remove the skin before you cut the fish into chunks. The cakes can be frozen after they are steamed and then thawed and crisped for a good last-minute meal or snack. The recipe is also easily halved, but I advise you to make the whole batch and tuck away the extras for when you need a quick dish.

Presented on a platter just moments out of the steamer, a whole steamed fish reflects the cook’s care and attention to obtaining the freshest ingredients possible. Ideally, the fish was plucked live from a tank at the market. Barring that, it met its end shortly before the cook selected it from a bed of ice. This recipe, with its mixture of pork, ginger, onion, mushrooms, and cellophane noodles, is one of the classic Viet ways to steam fish, with the various flavors and textures melding beautifully during cooking. The flavorings are light, so select a mild-tasting white-fleshed fish to complement them. I like striped bass, which is readily available and has delicate flesh, as well as bones that aren’t troublesome; a whole trout weighing about 1 1/2 pounds is another good option. The dish is perfect for entertaining because most of the work may be done hours in advance. Add White Tree Fungus in Clear Broth (page 76), a simply seasoned stir-fried vegetable, and rice for an elegant meal.

In Vietnam, the delicate anchovies (ca com) used for making fish sauce are also fried and enjoyed as a snack like a Spanish tapa or as part of a meal along with a simple soup, boiled or stir-fried vegetable, and rice. Even though these small fish are sold frozen at Viet markets, I like to use smelts, which are the perfect North American substitute. Delicate and sweet, they have soft, edible bones that allow you to “eat them like French fries,” as a fishmonger once told me. And the batter remains crispy long after the last fish is fried. Use the freshest smelts you can find or substitute other small fish available in your area, such as fresh anchovies.

Whenever our family gets together for dinner at my parents’ house, this dish is usually on the menu. To make it, catfish fillets are cut into pieces and panfried to a golden crisp. When the fish is removed from the pan, the oil that remains is used to sauté onion and ginger into a heady mixture that is finished with fish sauce and water and then served like a relish. Most catfish sold today are farm-raised and thus lean, so don’t skimp on the oil. Also, the fish splatters during frying, so you might want to use a splatter guard and/or put newspaper on the floor around the stove to speed cleanup.

This recipe was inspired by a grilled tuna steak that I ordered at a sleepy roadside restaurant in Vietnam. Working tableside on a small charcoal brazier, the young waiter cooked a half-inch-thick tuna steak with care and patience. Back in my home kitchen, I decided to adapt the recipe to the stove top. I find that pan searing allows greater control than grilling over the doneness of the lean, meaty steaks, yielding juicier results. There are no tricks here. The tuna steaks are coated with the same seasonings used for Grilled Shrimp and Squid (page 111), and the gingery dipping sauce offers a good contrast to the richness of the fish. Serve with Chicken Dumpling and Chrysanthemum Leaf Soup (page 61), boiled gailan (Chinese broccoli) or regular broccoli (which are both good with the dipping sauce), and rice.

These hand rolls are a simple and healthful do-it-yourself meal: you assemble the ingredients and invite guests to do the rest. It is a relaxing experience, with everyone making their own hand rolls, eating, sipping cold beverages, and chatting. In Vietnam, freshwater ca loc (snakehead fish) is often used for this dish, encased in clay and roasted in rice straw, wrapped in banana leaf and grilled over charcoal, or just placed directly on the grill. I prefer the simplicity of the last approach. Trout is the perfect substitute for ca loc, as its sweet flesh stands up well to grilling. The skin crisps wonderfully, too.

Most people are introduced to galangal, a relative of ginger, by way of Thai curries and seafood soups. The rhizome is seldom used in Vietnamese cooking, but when it is, it is paired with other bold-flavored ingredients. Here, its pungent heat brightens a northern fish kho, with the bittersweet caramel sauce tempering its fire. Use the smaller amount of galangal if you want a dish with less intensity. Although salmon isn’t native to Vietnam, it takes on the robust flavors of the kho remarkably well. Fresh side pork (pork belly), which you can find at Asian markets, is the stealth ingredient here, enrobing everything with its richness to create a unique surf-and-turf combination. The result is spicy, savory, and a touch sweet.

In this classic southern Vietnamese kho, catfish steaks are simmered for about an hour, which turns them a mahogany brown and gives them a deep savory flavor tinged with sweetness. You may enrich the dish with oil, though I prefer the old-world technique of my mom’s friend Mrs. Ly, who renders pork fat and simmers the cracklings with the fish. Buy a whole fresh catfish (about three pounds, gutted weight) at a Chinese, Southeast Asian, or Latin market and ask the fishmonger to cut it into one-inch-thick steaks. Use the center-cut steaks for this recipe and save the head, collar, and tail pieces to make Sour Fish Soup with Tamarind, Pineapple, and Okra (page 66), in place of the fillet. Serve the kho with the soup, a boiled green vegetable or Crunchy Pickled Bean Sprout Salad (page 193), and rice. For the best taste, combine a little piece of the fish, some rice, and a bit of sauce in each bite.

Here is a soup that my father taught me. In a ceviche-like approach, raw fish is marinated with onion, ginger, and cilantro. The semicooked mixture is then placed in the bottom of soup bowls, and the final cooking is done by the hot rice soup. When brought to the table, the seemingly plain white soup conceals a pleasant surprise of fish. Pair it with one of the salads in Chapter 1 for a Vietnamese soup-and-salad meal.

Rich with contrasts, this soup is easy to like. The tamarind and pineapple provide a sweet-and-sour edge, while the okra, tomato, and bean sprouts offer spongy, soft, and crunchy textures. The catfish and cumin ground the dish with their pungent, earthy qualities. If rice paddy herb (rau om) is available, use it for a citrusy accent. Sour fish soups are eaten throughout Southeast Asia. The Viet version often includes sliced taro stems (bac ha), a flavorless ingredient known for its ability to absorb other flavors. I generally omit the stems because they don’t contribute much to the soup, and instead increase the amount of okra, which is added at the end. If you can’t find fresh okra, use frozen whole okra, thawing it and slicing it before you add it to the pan. When fresh or frozen pineapple isn’t around, don’t resort to canned. It is not the same. The soup will be a bit tangier but equally sensational without the pineapple.

When riêu is brought to the table, expect a full-bodied soup laced with rich-tasting seafood and tangy tomato. Viet cooks prepare a fish riêu like this one as an everyday canh, or the more extravagant crab and shrimp riêu noodle soup (page 215) for a special occasion. Carp is the fish typically used in this soup, but since it is not commonly available at regular markets, my family switched to salmon, which has the fattiness to pair perfectly with the tomato, dill, and garlic of a classic riêu. We used salmon steaks for years because the bones and skin enriched the broth. But steaks can be difficult to handle during cooking and later on in the bowl, so I now use salmon fillet. In the classic northern Vietnamese tradition, the fish is seared first to firm its flesh. The searing not only helps the fish hold its shape, but also provides a nice textural contrast in the finished soup.

This Northern Vietnamese boodle dish hits all five major taste sensations: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami (savory). The unusual ingredient combination includes galangal, shrimp sauce, sesame rice crackers, and sour cream, the last standing in for me, the same mash of fermented cooked rice traditionally used in mock turtle stew (page 153). For many Vietnamese, the definitive cha ca is the rather complicated version served at the landmark Hanoi restaurant Cha Ca La Vong. There, the fish is cooked partially on a grill and then finished at the table in a skillet of oil, scallion, and dill. While that restaurant rendition is delicious, my family takes an easier path to making the dish. We broil the fish and then enrich it with scallion and dill seared in hot oil. The fish can also be grilled over a medium-hot fire, but the small pieces can be difficult to manage on a grill.

My Dad and I used to catch small perch at the local harbor for this soup. Amid the sailboats and cabin cruisers, we would lower our poles, the lines baited with thawed frozen peas, to catch the three- to four-inch-long fish, the American equivalent of Vietnamese ca ro. We would bring home about a dozen fish, and my mom would gut them for this classic Viet combination of sweet fish, sharp mustard greens, and ginger. One day, Mom protested that cleaning the fish took too much time, so we stopped catching them, and the soup didn’t grace our table for years. On a trip to Vietnam, I saw a fishmonger at Ben Thanh market in Saigon cleaning ca ro, which reminded me of how good this soup is. Back home, I decided to use whole tilapia, which is sometimes identified as ca ro in Viet markets. It worked just like traditional ca ro in this soup, but its larger size made it much easier to prep and cook. Now, this brightly flavored soup is back on my table as an ideal balance for bold, rich foods like Grilled Lemongrass Pork Riblets (page 145). Whole tilapia is sold at Asian and Latin markets.