Lien Vu Hong. Rice and Baguette: A History of Food in Vietnam

London: Reaktion Books, 2016. — 256 p.: 110 illustrations, 60 in colour. — (Foods and Nations series).The once-obscure cuisine of Vietnam is a favourite of many people from East to West. After millennia of adaptation and innovation with a pervasive Chinese influence, today’s Vietnamese food is, surprisingly, a mixture of Vietnamese and French dishes, with the baguette the most cherished part of the French culinary legacy. Introduced into Vietnam in the mid-nineteenth century, the baguette is now second only to rice, the wonder grain the Viêt discovered thousands of years ago and made their staple food.Drawing on archaeological evidence and a wealth of oral and written history, Rice and Baguette reveals the journey Vietnamese food has traversed through history to become a much-loved cuisine today.Vu Hong Lien is a Vietnamese-British historian, and a guest lecturer at SOAS based in London, UK. She is author of Royal Hue, Heritage of the Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam (2015) and co-author of Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger, a History of Vietnam (Reaktion Books, 2014).