Swinging Wide Open
An exploration of salt, and its wildly varied meanings, with novelist Monique Truong. By Tien Nguyen
By Tien Nguyen
Photos by Yudi Echevarria
Styling by Caroline Hwang
In The Book of Salt, author Monique Truong builds a world almost hidden by a shadow. The shadow is a long one, cast by legendary literary couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Living together in Paris, the duo struggled to find a suitable live-in cook. As Toklas recounts in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book: “Trac came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in a newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: ‘Two American ladies wish—’”
Toklas says the search yielded “insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese.” But other than Toklas and Stein’s evaluations—at once patronizing and affectionate, admiring and exoticizing—we know little of these cooks. With The Book of Salt, Truong recenters the narrative to imagine the life of a fictional cook, Binh, whose father, for reasons I won’t spoil, essentially throws him out of Vietnam. In Paris, Binh answers Toklas’s ad and is hired to cook mostly French meals for two American ladies who wish. It’s the 1920s to 1930s, mind; he is a colonial subject. But in Truong’s book, he is not a subject overshadowed by his employers or the empire. It is, rather, the other way around.
Since its publication in 2003, The Book of Salt has entered many literary canons (Asian American, postcolonial, queer, food, all combinations thereof). I thought it’d be apt to talk to Truong for this issue of Synonym, though I realize salt is not a spice. But, as Truong points out, sugar was once treated as a spice on account of its scarcity, then losing its status when enslavement and the English industrial revolution enabled its mass production. “What I’m trying to say is,” she says, “these things can go on a trajectory, depending on how a particular era uses and thinks of it.” The slippery nature of classification is one of many topics we discuss.
Do you have a particular approach to describing food?
It varies from novel to novel. My first question is, How would this character approach their relationship to food? How would they praise it? Or want you to crave it?
In Bitter in the Mouth [Truong’s second novel], I often thought of flavors as an architectural space that you can enter into. [The narrator, who has synesthesia] would describe, for example, lemon juice. We’re talking about tartness and acidity and brightness. Those would be the words that we would use as food writers. But how to convey that in terms of the whole body experience that this person is having with a flavor like lemon juice? I thought of her being in a space where there’s a high window with sunlight streaming in.
In The Book of Salt, there’s one description I love. Alice describes salt to Binh as the “hinge that allows the flavors of the other ingredients to swing wide open.”
Even that, I think, is a way you can see where I use the same kind of thought processes of the architectural space: Salt is this hinge that opens. If you just try to describe flavors using the usual words, you’re kind of in a small box. What I think of as good food writing, first and foremost, is that food is subjective, so if you write about food in an objective way, I don’t know how that can work.
Salt is a common ingredient in all kitchens. I was curious about how salt places and displaces Binh: These kitchens can feel like home, because he’s familiar with the kitchen, but they’re also foreign, because they’re not his kitchens.
Definitely. I don’t know when it finally occurred to me in writing, but there was a point where I realized that for someone who is so lonely and so isolated, when he goes into these kitchens, the ingredients can be, for lack of a better word, his friends. His companions. I suppose I was thinking that it provided him with solace and a way in, as it were, to each of these spaces—where he has to, in the amount of time that he occupies these kitchens, make it his own.
And we all need that. How do we enter into a space, into a community, even a relationship? Salt, again, is the hinge that opens the way for other flavors to do their thing in the dish. I thought that it would also be kind of the way for Binh to enter into these spaces and feel for that moment, like, Okay, I know this.
There’s a moment at a restaurant where he tries a watercress dish. He can’t quite place its saltiness; he says, “It was not salt quarried from the earth.” He learns it’s fleur de sel. Why fleur de sel specifically?
