My CambodiaA Khmer Cookbook
with Tien Nguyen
Celebrate Khmer and Cambodian American cuisine with award-winning chef and restaurateur Nite Yun, featuring over 100 recipes for her favorite dishes.
Khmer recipes and culinary techniques are traditionally passed orally from generation to generation, and in My Cambodia, Nite takes special care to preserve these dishes. Filled with the historical context of Cambodia’s Golden Era, cultural fun facts like the rules of rice, and introspective anecdotes on using food as a tool to connect with community, My Cambodia aims to make Khmer American cuisine accessible to all.
With recipes organized by different times and places throughout Nite’s life, this cookbook takes you on a journey from her childhood in Stockton, California to Cambodia to Nite’s popular Bay Area restaurants Nyum Bai and Lunette. Discover her take on dishes such as Kuy Teav Phnom Penh, the fragrant pork and noodle soup that started it all for Nite; Nom Pachok Somlar Khmer, a delicate, rustic chowder filled with rice noodles; andAmok, fish tucked into an aromatic mixture of kroeung and coconut milk and steamed until it puffs up like a souffle. For dessert, try the decadent Nom Kong, donuts glazed in palm sugar and topped with sesame seeds.
Whether you are new to Cambodian food or have a bowl of kuy teav every morning for breakfast, My Cambodia will inspire you to connect with your own communities and stir up new, joyful creations.
Tien Nguyen has been writing about food and culture for over a decade. She is the co-author of several cookbooks, including the New York Times bestseller L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food with chef Roy Choi, and The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook, one of NPR’s Books We Love. She also has written for the Los Angeles Times and Lucky Peach, among other publications, and her work has been honored by the Association of Food Journalists. She lives in Los Angeles.
“Cambodian cuisine is woefully underrepresented in cookbook format, but Nite Yun, the daughter of Cambodian refugees and chef-owner of Lunette Cambodia in San Francisco, California, is out to change all that with her deeply personal tome.”—Saveur
“All cookbooks are love letters of a kind, but what Nite is putting out into the world with My Cambodia is a completely unfiltered look into her heart and mind. Our stomachs will be so much better for it.”—Caroline Glover, co-owner and chef of Annette and Traveling Mercies
“But for fans of Yun, My Cambodia is also a beautifully written, vulnerable portrayal of a chef who rose to fame so fast that she could barely comprehend what was happening. In essays that organize the book’s recipes by chapters in Yun’s life, she explores big topics around identity, family, pride, connection and loss.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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