Forging a Postmodern Palate: Vibration Cooking and Book of Salt

The Postcolonial Critiques of Vertamae Smart Grosvenor and Monique Truong

Filled with movement, dislocation, relocation, wars, and conquests, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book inspired books by Vertamae Smart Grosvenor and Monique Truong that explore the effects of culinary colonialism, dealing respectively with the slave diaspora and with the French colonization of Vietnam. Impressed by the unconventional nature of Toklas’ Cook Book, Grosvenor crafted her own autobiographical cookbook in order to challenge the racist stereotypes that haunt the African American woman in the kitchen, articulating what scholar Doris Witt describes as a “diasporic aesthetic.” In so doing, she parodies the cookbook as a genre and deconstructs its configuration of white middle-class domesticity. After reading Toklas’ recollection of two Vietnamese cooks who worked for her in France, Monique Truong found herself drawn to write a novel narrated by a Vietnamese exile who works for Toklas and Gertrude Stein. In so doing, Truong deconstructs parts of Toklas’ cookbook and reconfigures them within a twenty-first century novel in order to refract their meaning through a postcolonial lens. The novel, Book of Salt, not only illuminates the dynamics of culinary colonialism but also foregrounds cooking as a means of articulating a postcolonial identity, one that interrogates and reconfigures the very notion of home.

Vibration Cooking

            Like Toklas’ Cook Book, which employs a genre and gender-blending form that challenged and reconfigured the domestic bounds of women’s food writing, Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking “stands out from many contemporaneous African American cookbooks in its attempt to disrupt normative categories of racial identity and textual genre alike” (Witt 229). Just as Pennell simultaneously parodied and participated in the male-authored genre of gastronomic literature, Grosvenor parodied, mocked and yet adopted the cookbook genre in order to flout and to reconfigure its conventions. As Witt explains: “Part autobiography, part travelogue, part culinary anthropology, part social history, part political commentary, Vibration Cooking undertook the paradoxical task of attempting to parody the genre of the standard cookbook even as it emulated Toklas’s famous text” (231). Both Pennell and Grosvenor used parody to undermine the ideological foundation of the genre that they simultaneously emulated. Pennell did so in order to challenge the misogyny and egocentrism that denied women access to the gastronomic realm and its literature. Grosvenor did so in order to write against the white cookbooks that elided African Americans and to confront an openly racist society. Taking part in the Black Power movement, Vibration Cooking mobilized the culinary memoir toward political engagement. The deployment of food writing as a means to effect political change can be traced all the way back to the founding work of gastronomic literature. Thus, ironically, Grosvenor’s politicization of food writing harkens back to Grimod’s invention and deployment of gastronomic literature to critique the post-Revolutionary French state and its censorship of his political expression.

            As Witt has documented, Grosvenor payed tribute to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in an interview published in Ebony shortly after Vibration Cooking was first published in 1970. In the interview, Grosvenor explains:

While reading the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, I’d been impressed with the way she had captured the feeling of her times in Paris during the 20s and people she had known, of Gertrude Stein, the salon and Picasso. So I thought I’d do a little cookbook for the people I knew in Paris, New York, and even back home in South Carolina and Philadelphia (quoted in Witt 231).

Whereas the mobility in Toklas’ Cook Book stems, in large part, from her gastronomic adventures with Gertrude Stein, the mobility in Grosvenor’s cookbook is largely reflective of the African diaspora. Grosvenor does recount her travels to Paris, Rome, Venice, and London as well as her struggles as an artist. Her primary goal in writing the cookbook, however, is inarguably political. She works to construct an identity that simultaneously celebrates the culturally rich foods of the African diaspora and confronts racism head on. Just as Toklas refused to separate the recipes housed in her gastronomic cookbook from the memories that surround them, Grosvenor refused to separate the recipes housed in Vibration Cooking from the friends and family that nourished them or from the racism she and her loved ones face on a daily basis.  

            In place of the travelogue of French provincial restaurants housed in Toklas’ memoir, Grosvenor recounts the racist responses that she has met with during her travels. Grosvenor recalls that  “[t]he Venetian women were the worst. They just out and out laughed. It was funny to them to see something in the shape of a woman with black skin. You know how people laugh (uncomfortably most of the time) at chimpanzees” (140). Grosvenor likewise recalls the countless New York City taxis that have refused her a ride and the particular driver who called her a “nigger bitch” (97).  She recounts the story of a man who, seeing her dressed in “African clothes” asked her if she spoke English. When she said, “I sho do honey,” he responded “Well, why are you wearing those African clothes, you are a Negro.” I said, “I am who I think I am. I am free and free to define myself” (128). In Vibration Cooking, Grosvenor defines herself, or her literary persona, with gusto.

            In keeping with the fierce confrontation and brazen humor that infuses the project, Grosvenor begins Vibration Cooking with the following reflection:

In reading lots and lots of cookbooks written by white folks it occurred to me that people very casually say Spanish rice, French fries, Italian spaghetti, Chinese cabbage, Mexican beans, Swedish meatballs, Danish pastry, English muffins and Swiss cheese. And with the exception of black bottom pie and niggertoes, there is no reference to black people’s contribution to the culinary arts (3).

Here Grosvenor simultaneously announces her drive to challenge the silence on “black people’s contribution to the culinary arts,” to rewrite the recorded history that omits African Americans, and to mock the language that perpetuates racism.[1]

            Vibration Cooking took part in a larger movement to “recontextualize the foods most commonly associated with slavery” by configuring “soul food” in relation to the “culinary history of colored peoples around the world” (Witt, Black Hunger 15, 161). Tellingly, as Witt recounts, in 1986 Grosvenor

disavowed the influence of Toklas on her initial conceptualization of Vibration Cooking, asserting in the new introduction: ‘The only thing I have in common with Alice B. Toklas is that we lived on the same street in Paris’ (xv). She repeated this disclaimer in the 1992 edition (xvi)” (232).

Scholar Rafia Zafar addresses Grosvenor’s turnabout, surmising that her “reluctance to admit kinship with Toklas stems not from an inability to admit a connection with a white predecessor—she does refer to her after all—but from her much greater desire to form of chain of Black women forebears” (253). It also expresses her intent to write an autobiographical cookbook that details a decidedly African American heritage as well as an African American palate.

            Whereas Toklas played with the cookbook genre, Grosvenor aggressively parodied those conventions of the cookbook through which it defined the properly contained and domesticated white, middle-class female. She dismisses exact measurements as the fallback for cooks who have no soul, who can’t cook by “vibration.” Grosvenor tells her readers: “It don’t matter if it’s Dakar or Savannah, you can cook exotic food any time you want. Just turn on the imagination, be willing to change your style and let a little soul food in” (4). With imagination, she suggests, foods can be transformed to express the cook’s own tastes and cultural identity. Grosvenor figures cooking by vibration as a form of self-expression and self-construction. For example, she reflects that “Salade Niçoise is a French name but just like with anything else when soul folks get it they take it out into another thing” (66).

            Throughout her cookbook, Grosvenor juxtaposes the imagination, flavor, and cultural richness of soul food with the artificiality and sterility of white cooking. For example, she explains that her friend

Dorothy was the one who hipped me on how to prepare myself before eating at white folks’ houses. They invite you to dinner and when you get there at 8 p.m. (which is already much too late to eat) they act surprised to see you and start giving you a bunch of whisky. I think it is so you can act the fool (everybody knows about niggers and Indians and firewater). Around 10:00 they start asking in a weird voice, ‘Anybody hungry?’ So Dorothy says before you leave home on such an occasion eat some collards and rice (117).

Here, as she does in several other places in her book, Grosvenor foregrounds the lack of sustenance found at the white table, suggesting that the only way for an African American to meet such an encounter and return home unscathed, unhumiliated, and unfamished is to arrive pre-fortified by soul food. In this configuration, soul food provides the nourishment needed to combat a racist dynamic.

            Grosvenor likewise mocks the artificiality of etiquette and formality along with the racism that often undergirds it, observing:

Europeans can really be unnatural. Like one thing that used to gas me is in European restaurants people ate fruit with a knife and fork. It didn’t take me long to adapt…. [B]eing the granddaughter of a slave who adapted to the unnatural ways of his master, I, too, soon caught on and there I was eating fruit with a fork. How unnatural can you get! (72-73).

By figuring white culture as sterile and artificial, Grosvenor underscores that it lacks the sustenance needed to nourish the African American identity. Such sustenance can be readily drawn from soul food. In order to celebrate the soul of African American cookery and to reclaim the souls and soulful self-expression maimed by racism and slavery, Grosvenor challenges her oppressors, both their actions and the language which misnames her “nigger bitch” and “Negro.” For example, she gives a recipe for “So-Called Okra,” following it with the explanation:

If you are wondering how come I say so-called okra it is because the African name of okra is gombo. Just like so-called Negroes. We are Africans. Negroes only started when they got here. I am a black woman. I am tired of people calling me out of my name. Okra must be sick of that mess too. So from now on call it like it is. Okra will be referred to in this book as gombo. Corn will be called maize and Negroes will be referred to as black people (82-83).

Inspired by the unconventional nature of Toklas’ Cook Book, Grosvenor crafted her own cookbook in order to challenge culinary racism. She did so by reconfiguring and parodying a genre that traditionally elided the African American voice and the African American contribution to American cookery. She also combats the racist stereotypes that haunt the African American woman in the kitchen. As Zafar notes, Grosvenor “regards modern Black cookery as an agent of change” (259). Toward that end, the recipes Grosvenor includes not only record the dishes prepared by her own family and friends as well as those acquired during her travels, but they also claim a distinctly African American identity and bear witness to the diaspora. Alongside recipes for “Cornmeal Mush,” “Steak with Beautiful Black Sauce” and “Stuffed Heart Honkey Style,” Grosvenor includes “Bamya from Egypt,” “Boeuf aux Gombos from Cameroons,” and “Northern Labajabaja, an adaptation of a Senegalese dish.”

            The history of women’s food writing clearly explains Grosvenor’s choice of an unconventional form to challenge racist stereotypes; each of the authors examined here challenged the traditional role of women and the limits on women’s self-expression by venturing into uncharted territory. In so doing, they fashioned innovative forms of food writing, which enabled them to celebrate their considerable appetites for knowledge and for a means of self-expression. Grosvenor’s diasporic aesthetic, in turn, inspired Ntozake Shange’s If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (1998), a blend of “history, literature, vernacular, culture, and philosophy, ‘long with absolutely fabulous receipts…meant to open our hearts and minds to what it means for black folks in the Western Hemisphere to be full” (Shange 3). Because Grosvenor adopted the innovative form of Toklas, deconstructed it, and reconfigured it to suit her political self-expression and “diasporic aesthetic,” Shange had an African American lineage to inspire her own project.  If I Can Cook/You Know God Can begins fittingly with a foreward written by Grosvenor herself, in which she reflects on the changes that occurred during the twenty-eight years between the publication of her own book and Shange’s:

For my generation, it was a mark of shame to be like an African. But all praises to the food goddess. Now we have If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, a creative culinary celebration that compels us to hear the words, taste the spices, and feel the rhthyms of Africa in the new world (xii). 

Book of Salt

            When Alice B. Toklas wrote her Cook Book in which she records the flavors and aromas of her life in Paris with Gertrude Stein, she payed tribute to the Vietnamese cooks who fed her and her lover. On first reading Toklas’ Cook Book and coming across the Vietnamese cooks, Monique Troung found that

By this point in the book, I had already fallen for these two women and for their ability to create an idiosyncratic, idyllic life. When I got to the pages about these cooks, I was, to say the least, surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence and such an intimate one at that in the lives of these two women. These cooks must have seen everything, I thought. But in the official history of the Lost Generation, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these "Indo-Chinese" cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded in that footnote.[2]

Thus, Truong fashioned the novel, Book of Salt, which is narrated from the perspective of Bình, a composite of the two Vietnamese cooks whom Toklas recalls in her memoir. Although a fictional creation of Truong, the contours of Bình’s life are given flesh in part from Toklas’ recollection of her time in France. The dishes Bình serves and that sustain some of his most poignant memories are created from the recipes Toklas  records in her memoir. By giving fictional life to a Vietnamese cook inspired by Toklas’ memoir and giving him voice in order to explore and articulate the complex relations between Vietnam and France as well as Vietnam and the United States, Truong skillfully interweaves and fulfills tasks that function on a variety of levels. On the political and cultural levels, she gives voice to the colonized Other and sheds light on the dynamics of colonialism and the longing of exile. On the linguistic and imaginative levels, Truong engages playfully with the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, filling in textual and cultural gaps in Toklas’ memoir. Such intertextuality allows Truong to carry bits and pieces of Toklas’ mid-century text into a twenty-first century novel, refracting them through a postcolonial lens.

            One particular passage from Toklas’ Cook Book undoubtedly informed Truong’s novel. In the passage, Toklas describes the cookery of Nguyen, a Vietnamese man who had worked for the French Governor-General of Indochina before taking up residence with her and Stein. Toklas recounts:

Nguyen cooked [Vietnamese][3] dishes and French dishes and to perfection, but objected to preparing a menu with both. It was his correct sense of balance that influenced him. Both our French and American friends disagreed with him, they considered a whole [Vietnamese] menu excessive. Finally he compromised. The first course­­—soup, fish or shellfish with noodles or rice—would be [Vietnamese]. What followed would be French. It was suspiciously a plot to enhance the quality of [Vietnamese] cooking. In the course of time Nguyen confessed that by its delicacy and unblended flavour [Vietnamese] cooking could be remembered, and French cooking following it could not (188).

Here Toklas explores cooking as means of subverting authority and restoring the balance of power. Whereas Toklas’ American and French friends felt that an entire meal of Vietnamese dishes was “excessive,” Toklas acknowledges that it was Nguyen’s “sense of balance” that led him to keep French and Vietnamese cuisines separated. Nguyen’s belief that the two cuisines should not mingle likewise suggests his resistance to the French colonization of Vietnam. Challenged to blend the two cultures, or to create a hybrid meal, Nguyen serves a Vietnamese dish that will overpower the French flavors that follow, symbolically restoring the balance of power to the Vietnamese. Toklas’ own playful and subversive sense of humor, which infuses the entirety of her Cook Book, strongly suggests that she not only approved of but even relished Nguyen’s anti-authoritarian gesture.

         Nguyen imported his mastery of French culinary techniques from his native land. As Vietnam scholar Erica Peters explains, because  “The French community in Vietnam wanted to make sure it was easy to differentiate colonizer from colonized,” they were troubled “when Vietnamese people incorporated French practices into their own lives” (23). Thus mastering French culinary techniques provided “one way for the Vietnamese to delegitimize colonial authority” (30). Wealthy Vietnamese who served flawlessly prepared French meals to colonial administrators demonstrated a cultural fluidity that challenged “rigid colonial hierarchies of cultural practices and identities” (5). As Toklas points out, Nguyen gained his cultural fluidity by working for the French Governor-General of Indochina. He, in turn, exported this mastery of French cuisine onto French soil, where it provided him with a means of economic survival in his colonizer’s homeland. Such mastery likewise enabled Vietnamese cooks living in France to subtly reconfigure the power dynamics of everyday practices.  If you are what you eat, then the French who dined with Toklas and Stein on Nguyen’s hybrid meals had their palates challenged by the flavors of Vietnam, which lingered on their tongues and overpowered the French dishes subsequently served.

            Toklas’ discussion of Nguyen’s subversive culinary techniques undoubtedly influenced Truong’s exploration of culinary colonialism in Book of Salt. Like Nguyen, the novel’s protagonist worked for the French Governor General of Indochina. Through Bình’s first-person narrative, we learn that he was fired from a position as garde manger in the French Governor General’s kitchen for sleeping with the French head chef and was subsequently disowned by his father for his homosexual desires. The dismissal jettisons the young lover out to sea—both literally and metaphorically. Bình reflects: “[T]o take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea, this for me is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it” (56). The French culinary skills Bình acquired under his lover’s watch eventually lead him to France, where he is hired by a succession of Parisian couples, many of whom, as Bình describes, “insist on stripping [him] with questions” in order to find out how he came to land on their “hallowed shores”  (16). Sometimes these couples hire Bình, yet their questions continue unabated until one day Bình finds “This [French] language that I dip into like a dry inkwell has failed me. It has made me take flight with weak wings and watched me plummet into silence” (17). Bình’s only means of communicating verbally with these collectors is through the colonizer’s language, a language that denies and negates his self-expression. Such silence inevitably ends with his dismissal.

Bình works for yet another type of employer, whom he describes as collectors who crave the “sea-salt sadness of the outcast” (19).  Each time he is taken in by such collectors, Bình finds that entering their kitchens

is a homecoming, a respite, where I am the village elder, sage and revered…. During these intervals I am no longer the mute who begs at this city’s steps. Three times a day, I orchestrate, and they sit with slackened jaws, silenced. Mouths preoccupied with the taste of foods so familiar and yet with every bite even the most parochial of palates detects redolent notes of something that they have no words to describe. They are, by the end, overwhelmed by an emotion they have never felt, a nostalgia for places they have never been (19).

Truong suggests here that Bình’s emotions are imparted by his embodied practices. In other words, the ingredients Bình chooses, the way in which he handles them, and the techniques he uses to combine them convey flavors and aromas that capture his nostalgia for Vietnam. Even though many of the ingredients Bình uses in the dishes he prepares hail from French soil, the embodied practices he uses to combine them speak of the climate, soil, and way of life of the land he left behind. The dishes these collectors taste convey Bình’s Vietnamese heritage and his apprenticeship in a French colonial kitchen. They also communicate Bình’s nostalgia for his homeland.

Each time Bình is taken in by such collectors, he inevitably finds himself “driven out by [his] own willful hands…. I forget how long to braise the ribs of beef… where to buy the sweetest trout.  I neglect the pinch of cumin, the sprinkling of lovage, the scent of lime. And in these ways, I compulsively write, page by page, the letters of my resignation” (20) Bình wanders from kitchen to kitchen, collector to collector until he happens on the following advertisement in a newspaper, the first two lines of which come straight from Toklas Cook Book:

LIVE-IN COOK

Two American ladies wish

to retain a cook—27 rue de

Fleurus. See the concierge.

On reading the advertisement, Bình reflects, with his usual  ironic wit, “Two American ladies ‘wish’? Sounds more like a proclamation than a help-wanted ad. Of course, two American ladies in Paris these days would only ‘wish’ because to wish is to receive. To want, well, to want is just not American” (11). With this one passage, Truong playfully delineates the economic, social and political power dynamics between Bình and his American employers. Throughout her novel, Truong fills in gaps that exist between Bình and his American masters as well as between the American masters themselves on a variety of levels. On the textual level, Truong fills the gap in Toklas’ text that might detail Nguyen’s and Trac’s departure from Vietnam as well as their lives before and outside of 27 rue de Fleurus. Truong fills the gap by giving us Bình’s life story narrated in his own words. On the cultural level, Truong fills the gap that exists between Toklas, Trac, and Nguyen by exploring colonized life in Vietnam as well as the life of the Vietnamese exile in France. In so doing, Truong responds to the “colonial inflection” in Toklas’ cookbook, one that figures Trac’s and Nguyen’s cookery as exotically Other.[4] She does so by familiarizing what remains exotic in Toklas’ text. Toward that end, Truong submerges her reader into Bình’s thoughts, his detailed memories of cooking in Vietnam, his time in the French colonial kitchen, even his reasons for marrying key flavors in the dishes he prepares. On a third intertextual level, Truong fills the gap that might provide emotional details of Toklas’ rapport with her lover Gertrude Stein, a gap around which Toklas’ text eddies but intentionally declines to enter. Truong fills the gap with Bình’s intimate knowledge of the couple’s lives and the ways in which they nourish and sustain one another. She also fills it with Bình’s nuanced interpretation of their rapport.

Once employed by the two American lesbians in Paris, Bình finds a place of safety and comfort for the first time in his life. He reflects on his relationship with the famous couple:

My Madame and Madame sustain me. They pay my wage, house my body, and I feed them.... The day to day is what I share with them.... These two, unlike all the others [I have worked for] extend to me the right to eat what they eat, a right that is...really a privilege when it is I who am doing the cooking (209).

Bình not only reflects on what his Mesdames have offered him, but also on what they offer one another. Toward that end, Bìhn describes the apartment where he resides with Toklas and Stein as a temple, not a home, reflecting: “My Mesdames live in a state of grace….Gertrude Stein feeds on affection, and Miss Toklas assures that she never hungers…. No man’s god can tell me that that is wrong” (71). In return for a room of his own, Bình feeds Toklas and Stein, who empathize with and take pleasure in his limited access to the French language.

Unlike the French, who “never tired of debating why the Indochinese of a certain class are never able to master the difficulties, the subtleties, the winged eloquence, of the French language,” Stein finds inspiration from Bình’s French voice and so, too, does Bình in Stein’s (13). He reflects on the exchange:

her French, like mine, has its limits. It denies her. It forces her to be short if not precise. In French, GertrudeStein finds herself wholly dependent on simple sentences. She compensates with the tone of her voice and the warmth of her eyes. She handles it with stunning grace. When I hear her speak it, I am filled with something close to joy. I admire its roughness, its unapologetic swagger. I think it a companion to my own….  She is a co-conspirator (34).

In Truong’s tale, Bình’s French words prove inspirational enough to Stein that she begins “wrapping them around her tongue” and eventually writes a book about Bình.[5] 

            Although Bình finds Stein a co-conspirator, his Madame has the time and wealth to play with language, fashioning her own native tongue into forms and structures that earn her tremendous acclaim. Bình enjoys no such luxurious relationship to the Vietnamese language; nobody in Bình’s daily life understands the words he speaks fluently. Whereas Stein nourishes a large reading public with her fresh approach toward language,  Bình has only his colonizer’s language with which to articulate himself in France. Language repeatedly fails Bình. It only erects distance and barriers, denying him intimacy and connection. Throughout the novel, Truong underscores the failure of the colonizer’s language to capture and convey the needs, desires, and wishes of the colonized body. Food, however, enables Bình an outlet for self-expression, a way to blend two seemingly disparate cultures, neither of which provide him a welcome home.

            Bình may not be able to fashion his desires into French words, but he can fashion them from the ingredients at hand, communicating in a medium that speaks eloquently to Vietnamese, French, and American palates alike. In particular, his culinary mastery pleases Toklas and, by extension, nourishes Stein. Toklas recognizes and respects Bình’s expertise in the kitchen, being herself a woman, as Bình describes who “can reach far beyond the foods of her childhood. She is a cook who puts absinthe in her salad dressing and rose petals in her vinegar. Her menus can map the world” (27). Trained in a professional kitchen, Bình respects Toklas’ educated palate as one that appreciates the cultural nuances contained in each of the dishes he prepares. He understands that Toklas’ innate skill and training as a gourmand enable her to understand the artistry of his cooking and to register the nuanced stories that his dishes contain.

            Bình explains the power of the culinary skills he gained in the colonial kitchen and the “aesthetic emotion” his dishes evoke in the temple he now calls home when he reflects:

Every day, my Mesdames and I dine, if not together, then back-to-back. Of course there is always a wall between us, but when they dine on filet de boeuf Adrienne, I dine on filet de boeuf Adrienne. When they partake of salade cancalaise, I partake of salade cancalaise…. When I place that first bite of boeuf Adrienne in my mouth and am brought to my knees—figuratively speaking, of course….I know that my Mesdames are on their knees as well. [As for] Salade cancalaise…. A shaving of black truffle covers all. The potatoes are there for heft and texture, but the truffle, ah, the truffle is a gift for the nose. Pleasure refined into a singular scent, almost addictive, a lover’s body coming toward yours on a moonless night. Even this my Mesdames have shared with me (209-210).

Here Bình underscores the pleasure his culinary mastery enables him to both give and receive, a pleasure forbidden him in the colonial kitchen where he could never become chef de cuisine. Truong explores the potential of this mastery to communicate the nuances of desire in a way that disrupts existing hierarchies. Bình’s mastery enables him to communicate with Toklas and Stein, to speak eloquently about physical desire and to convey aesthetic pleasures in a way not possible with words. Although a wall might separate the famous pair from their cook, thereby materializing the hierarchy of master over servant, America over Vietnam, the flavors, in effect, permeate the barrier, enabling them to share the erotic pleasures conveyed by Bình’s cookery. The French dishes Bình prepares enable him to achieve an intimacy with his Mesdames by speaking a language that momentarily dissolves the cultural barriers that separate their lives. In turn, Toklas’ and Stein’s ability to read the meaning of Bình’s dishes and to experience the sensual pleasure they communicate enables Bình to find a temporary room of his own. Truong suggests, on one level, that finding Toklas, a gourmand attuned to his cookery and the nuances it conveys, enables Bình to feel momentarily at home. The dishes Bình creates, in effect, contain the meaning that he cannot express in the French language and enable him to articulate a hybrid identity, fashioned in part from the colonization of his homeland and by his subsequent exile from it. In turn, finding two women who understand the language of his cookery, its elegant, at times playful, blend of Vietnamese and French flavors and techniques as well as the desire, longing, and nostalgia it conveys, provides Bình with a temporary respite.

            In Book of Salt, Truong sheds light on precisely why the French were so concerned with maintaining their own foodways in Vietnam, often disdaining Vietnamese cookery and discouraging the Vietnamese from eating French food (Peters 23). Eating the same dish as another is an intimate act—to taste the same flavors, to smell the same aromas, to ingest the same flesh allows for what might be termed an “existential equality.” How each eater experiences a particular food may vary, yet the stimulus does not. Thus partaking of the same dish unites the diners in an innately sensual act, one during which the hierarchies between self and other are momentarily dissolved and reconfigured. 

            By creating a novel narrated by a colonized other, albeit a fictional one, who articulates himself by blending French and Vietnamese culinary techniques and practices, Truong underscores the subversive power of food and showcases cooking as a medium though which rigid hierarchies can be challenged and reconfigured. She also illuminates eating as an intimate act through which we ingest flavors, textures, and aromas that, in turn, communicate lived experiences and the nuanced emotions these experiences inspire. Book of Salt not only pays tribute to the Vietnamese cooks who worked for Toklas and Stein by fashioning Bình from the few printed words that record their lives, but likewise pays tribute to Toklas and Stein by portraying their ability to taste the meaning of his dishes. By creating such a fictional dynamic, Truong interweaves cultures and cultural values into a poignant tale about the power of cooking to forge transnational identities and to express universal desires.

[1] See Doris Witt’s Black Hunger: Soul Food and America for an extensive bibliography of African American cookbooks, which were not as few and far between as Grosvenor may have believed at the time she first wrote Vibration Cooking. While the number of African American cookbooks published during the nineteenth-century may number as few as four, the twentieth-century saw a steady rise in these figures. After World War II these numbers boomed exponentially, in large part, due to the increasing interest in and commitment to documenting, celebrating, and recovering African American history and culture. Vibration Cooking reflects the growing post-war tendency of African American women food writer’s “to combine autobiography and creative writing with political and cultural history—as exemplified by Aldeen Davis’s commentary about black history in Soul—Food for Thought (1984) and the short tales included in Alice McGill, Mary Carter Smith, and Elmira Washington’s The Griots’ Cookbook (1985)” (Black Hunger 219).

[2] This quote appears in an interview conducted with Houghton Mifflin, which can be found at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/truong_salt.shtml.

[3] In her memoir, Toklas uses the term Vietnamese to describe Trac and Nguyen yet the term Chinese (referencing Indochina) to describe the cooking from their native land.

[4] Critic Sarah Garland uses the term “colonial inflection” in her analysis of Toklas’ cookbook, “‘A cook book to be read. What about it?’ Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the Kitchen.” In particular, she states: “When Toklas revels in recipes that are ‘romantic’ and ‘seducing’ the force of potential ravishment is translated into objects that are Other, and there is certainly a colonial inflection to this—to borrow bell hooks’s phrasing, ‘ethnicity becomes a spice’ just as historically desire has been given a material measure in the long and arduous trade routes behind sugar, coffee, sesame, and cocoa (hooks, 1999: 197)” (46).

[5] For a provocative analysis of intertexuality and collaborative autobiography in Book of Salt, see Y-Dang Troeung’s “‘A Gift or a Theft Depends on Who is Holding the Pen’: Postcolonial Collaborative Autobiography and Monique Truong’s Book of Salt.” Troeung’s essay addresses the intertexuality of Truong’s novel with Toklas’ Cook Book and Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in order to examine “how Truong uses the parameters of the historical Stein-Toklas controversy in The Book of Salt to extend a political project about postcolonial collaborative autobiography and Vietnamese American identity” (114).