What I Learned From N’Gao

East first met West in my life in France more than 50 years ago. I was a thin little bit of a girl with the spindly legs and pale face of all undernourished children, for it was the fall of 1942 and World War II was devastating the lives of those around me.

One place remained in France where peace and happiness might still be experienced: school. Even so, it was with inner trepidation and even a trace of fright that on one October day full of gusty winds and whirling leaves, I took a suburban train to the lycee (the French public secondary school), which was to become my spiritual and intellectual haven for the next seven years.

How strange it was! The lycee was nothing like my cozy elementary school, where all the children had worn garb ranging from indifferent to drab; this school was a microcosm of French society, with representatives from all walks of life. The children of aristocrats wore beautiful wool coats with gold buttons over chic English-style plaid jumpers, their long, mostly ash-blonde tresses hanging in braids; the store owners’ daughters, a little more fancy in dress, wore what seemed to me outrageous hairdos, and occasionally flashy earrings. And then there were the girls from overseas.

What was once called the French Empire was still in existence then, and many of the older students from the colonies who had been studying or teaching at metropolitan French universities during the late 1930s were unable to return home at the onset of hostilities. Some of these so-called “colonial” children gathered by themselves in one corner of the school yard. Below the hems of their coats, their exotic full-length wraps showed the colors and patterns of their lands of origin: Africa, India, Martinique and Indochina.

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I received my first Latin lesson sitting beside N’Gao, an ever-so-calm young woman from Indochina (the part that is now Vietnam), who wore a bright-yellow embroidered silk gown that made her look regal. In the seven years that we faithfully sat at the same double school desk, she evolved into my friend from the heart and was probably the most beautiful woman I have ever known. Her beauty was not physical; it came from deep inside and expressed itself in an extreme quietness that contrasted strikingly with my own constantly bubbling enthusiasm.

I called her “Buddha” because she had the serene smile of the gold-inserted jade Buddha pendant that hung around her neck. Except for a few remarks cast on the abysmal food we received in the school lunchroom, she was a lake of tranquillity.

Indeed, eating lunch at school during the war years was dreary beyond belief. Nothing appeared on our plates but old carrots, Jerusalem artichokes turned saccharin sweet from repeated freezing and thawing in the ground, and pretend sausages made of old, bug-infested rice. There was not a trace of meat for two long years until, in October of 1944, the captain of an American Army unit stationed in the city donated four cases of Spam, of all things, to our dining room. I still recall it fondly, and the memory of its sweet, salty taste surfaces faithfully every time I pass the Spam shelf in the supermarket.

N’Gao’s mother was as serene as her daughter and always smiled peacefully. More than once, I was invited to her table to share some rice, which I had never tasted at home, where nuoc mam (Vietnamese-style fish sauce), hot peppers and the delicious galangal root were unknown, even unheard of.

Every so often N’Gao’s father, an officer in the International Red Cross who traveled often to Switzerland to tend to the problems of refugees, brought back a piece of meat well hidden in his suitcase, and so it happened that several times I came back home from N’Gao’s with nice restants d’Indochine , leftovers from those Indochinese meals that my mother studiously tried to “Frenchify.”

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Once my mother matched two potatoes and three turnips with leftover honey-lacquered pork from N’Gao’s mother. Another time she gloried in transforming a handsome Indochinese chicken rice soup redolent of nuoc mam and dried lemon grass into a true-blue leek potage . These marriages worked somehow; they always tasted quite grand, with that little je ne sais quoi that left you hoping for more, even when you knew there was nothing left to look forward to.

One day the favor was reversed. My father caught (for the sake of truthfulness I really should say poached) six large eels at Eastertime in 1944, and then it was my turn to send a little care package to my friend’s home in the form of a perfectly cleaned eel, accompanied by a bottle of Cabernet Franc from my grandfather’s small plot of grapes in the Touraine. I never thought that the sight of an eel could give someone such a rush of adrenaline; N’Gao literally went into ecstasy.

I failed to understand her intense pleasure until the following day, when her mother rescued us from the school dining room and prepared for us a lunch of a wonderfully flavorful eel and rice soup, enriched with what, years later, I finally realized were precious dried Chinese black mushrooms. Mixed in with the Chinese mushrooms was a shredded, 100% French-raised cabbage; it took the place of the unavailable Chinese cabbage.

In retrospect--and at this wine-oriented stage of my life--the most interesting feature of the lunch remains the Cabernet Franc, for wine was indeed part of the meal, and it was typical that even as children we would be allowed a very small half-glass to be flushed with a large glass of water.

No worries in those days about wine and food pairing! Red wine was served with fish without a second thought, for the simple reason that if red wine was made in the family, red wine was what you drank, and there was absolutely no necessity to go out and buy white wine. As for tea, on that day it came after lunch, with dessert.

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Desserts from the kitchen of N’Gao’s mother were equally interesting. In my home, with the little bit of rice that ration cards afforded us, my mother made a wonderful, ever-so-French rice cake coated with a caramel prepared from the bit of sugar we could spare from our meager rations. Even after the passage of so many years, I cannot help but laugh at the amazing concoction that resulted from the addition of that nice little caramel and the one rare and precious egg in our house to what N’Gao’s mother had sent home with me: a generous bucket of sweet, sticky rice cooked with finely diced salt pork and flavored with black sesame seeds and ginger. However weird it may have tasted at the time, I loved it so much that I told N’Gao very seriously how her mother might benefit from using caramel at home.

At last, August of 1944 arrived; France was liberated. I remember sprinting full speed to a bakery that offered the first loaves of white bread in four years, and to another one offering a yellow bread made partly with corn flour from the United States; it smelled delicious but it hardened fast, so that most of it ended up as pain perdu , the real French name for French toast. This tasted so good, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and a generous shake of five-spice powder from a colorful container that I had received from N’Gao as a present for my 14th birthday.

Then, almost like that, it was 1945 and, not even that slowly, life returned to normal. For the first time since N’Gao and I had shared all those school lunches together, the school dining room began to serve omelets and roast meats. Slowly, restaurants reopened; the restaurant of N’Gao’s aunt, where my friend and I both celebrated our 16th birthdays with spring rolls, imperial rolls and lotus-stuffed duck, reopened also.

Before we knew it, we had graduated from high school. N’Gao went on to nursing school and I pursued my passion for modern languages, but friends we remained until that day in 1953 when she returned to her own country. By 1954 she had become a nurse in the medical corps of some of the units of French troops at Dien Bien Phu. Years later, N’Gao and her two little children were tragically lost during the fall of Saigon.

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When, in the born-again gastronomy of the United States, East met West more recently, the memory of the gifts of N’Gao and her mother made it easy for me to blend cuisines. I became most creative with several dishes of noodles and duck and a number of very Asian-looking salads. Probably out of nostalgia, I prepared the old honey-lacquered pork again, replacing the two potatoes and three turnips of my mother’s penurious kitchen with deep-fried slivered shallots and ginger.

N’GAO’S PORK ROAST

6 cloves garlic, finely mashed

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon five-spice powder

1 (3-pound) rolled boneless pork shoulder or pork loin roast (tied into regular round roast, even in size and shape)

3 tablespoons honey, at room temperature

2 tablespoons nuoc mam (Vietnamese-style fish sauce) or light soy sauce

1/2 pound shallots, thinly sliced

Flour

Oil

1 1/2 cups peeled and finely julienned ginger root

Fresh cilantro leaves

Blend garlic, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper and five-spice powder. Spread mixture evenly over surface of meat. Place roast on rack of roasting pan. Cover loosely with plastic wrap. Refrigerate and allow to marinate 3 hours. Bring roast to room temperature, about 30 minutes.

Combine honey and nuoc mam in small bowl. Brush roast all over with some of honey marinade. Roast at 400 degrees 20 minutes to start glazing. Reduce oven temperature to 325 degrees and continue to bake, brushing every 10 minutes with honey marinade during next hour of roasting. Continue to roast until internal temperature of meat reaches 170 to 180 degrees, 1 to 1 1/2 hours more.

Combine salt and pepper to taste with shallots and enough flour to coat in bowl. Heat oil for frying in skillet. Add handful of shallots at a time to hot oil and deep-fry until light-golden and still crunchy. Keep hot. Blanch ginger root slivers 1 minute. Drain and pat with paper towels until very dry. Mix salt and pepper to taste with ginger and enough flour to coat and deep-fry until just golden.

When roast is cooked, slice and arrange on large oval dish surrounded with mixed shallots and ginger and dotted with cilantro leaves as garnish. Makes 6 servings.