A novel that’s all in the seasoning

The summer after her junior year at Yale, Monique Truong, the ambitious daughter of Vietnamese emigres, found herself drawn, like many a curious undergraduate, to “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.”

“I’d heard about the hash brownies and I just wanted to check out the recipe,” recalls Truong, now 34 and the author of an intoxicating first novel called “The Book of Salt.” “So I bought the book, looked up the recipe and” -- her voice breaks into a gentle laugh -- “it just wasn’t doable.”

To Truong’s dismay, Toklas’ version of the gooey, time-honored stoner treat turned out to be more like a wholesome dried-fruit bar. But leafing through the book’s gossipy pages, Truong was sucked into something even more perniciously compelling: the improbable expatriate world of Toklas and her lifelong companion, Gertrude Stein. She was amazed to find, in a chapter titled “Servants in France,” an affectionate reference to two “Indochinese” cooks in Stein and Toklas’ employ during the ‘20s and ‘30s.

“The Book of Salt,” out this month from Houghton Mifflin, takes this passing mention as its inspiration, spinning out the hidden saga of Binh, a fictional Vietnamese cook who, much like Truong herself, stumbles into the lives of Stein and Toklas at their famous Paris address, 27 rue de Fleurus.

On a recent day at the American Museum of Natural History, Truong and a guest visit the museum’s current exhibition “Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit,” co-sponsored by the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi. She makes her way to the show, strolling past mid-century dioramas depicting growing seasons at upstate apple orchards, friendly meetings between pilgrims and Native Americans, and a particularly striking forest-floor tableau in which a giant millipede encounters an acorn the size of a medicine ball.

The enhanced, staged reality is a felicitous backdrop. Much like these dioramas, “The Book of Salt” is an irresistible, scrupulously engineered confection that weaves together history, art and human nature. And it’s every bit as voyeuristic too.

As Binh, Truong’s roiling, pent-up narrator, prepares such dishes as boeuf Adrienne and creme renversee a la cevenole for the woman he refers to as “GertrudeStein” -- a single word -- and her loyal helpmeet, Truong gives us eye-opening glimpses out the kitchen door. We see Stein and Toklas, the odd couple of modernism, cooing the pet names “Lovey,” “Pussy” and “Fattuski” at each other; registering their delight with the ubiquitous phrase “this is so Spanish!”; clinging to their home-grown love of meat loaf and apple pie; and doting upon Basket and Pepe, their beloved poodle and Chihuahua, whom Binh also cooks for. (“I would rather serve them than serve them,” he tartly observes.)

“They were so wacky,” Truong notes with a tinge of glee in her voice. “They’d never call each other Fattuski in front of Hemingway, you know. But, of course, they’d say it in front of Binh.” Binh’s proximity gives the reader a portrait of Stein and Toklas that’s as amusing as it is disarmingly intimate. But as much as Truong delights over the couple’s abundant idiosyncrasies (revealed through careful research and repeated savorings of Stein’s writings), “The Book of Salt” is not all sugar and spice.

Escape from the past

Binh’s story is an immigrant tale without the reassuring cliches of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It’s about a guy -- gay and troubled -- who escapes his home and language, only to have the recriminations of his caustic father (“the Old Man”) ringing in his ears. There’s a salt sting to Binh’s inner monologues, which, for an asiatique who can only speak a teaspoonful of French, are fluent exercises in storytelling, nostalgia, self-deception and bitter truth: “I lie to myself like no one else can.... What else am I to do, revert to the truth and admit that I am a 26-year-old man who still clings to the hope that someday his scholar-prince will come?”

Salt, as Truong explains inside the Vietnam exhibition, is a multifaceted presence throughout the book. It shows up not only in food, but also in the sweat of sex and labor, in tears and in sea voyages.

Truong’s own voyage is just as complex. Born in Saigon in 1968, she moved with her parents -- a comfortably middle-class, multilingual couple -- to the tiny outpost of Boiling Springs, N.C., where young Monique picked up English by watching “Sesame Street” the summer before starting school. “I thought ‘Sesame Street’ was actually in a different country,” she says. Home was suddenly a trailer, the only rice was Uncle Ben’s, and the Truongs would trek to Washington or Atlanta to stock up on familiar goods -- and to see other Vietnamese faces.

After moving to Ohio and on to Houston, Truong was accepted to Yale, where she was pleased to find, in the library’s vast Asian American collection, copies of books by her grandfather, a bookseller and writer. After Yale, Truong earned a law degree at Columbia and went to work as a trademark attorney at the Manhattan firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed. How did she ever find time to write?

“I didn’t. But it wasn’t so much about time, it was about not having the emotional energy to do it because I was just being pummeled. Your first year of practice is supposed to be pretty bad, you always hear that, but it was really bad.”

Somehow, in her spare time, Truong managed to work on a short story called “Seeds,” which appeared in an anthology (that she co-edited) of Vietnamese American writing. It helped her break free of a law career and eventually morphed into “The Book of Salt,” the novel inspired by her long-ago brush with “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.”

According to Truong, who now lives with her husband in Brooklyn, working in a law firm helped her imagine the fear and servitude in Binh’s life. It also, apparently, gave her a taste for precision, telling detail and illuminating exposition. Binh’s would-be “scholar-prince” is an African American ex-pat who champions a quack science known as iridology (diagnosing disease by patterns in the iris) while attempting to pass as white in Parisian society. It’s a complex yet concise encapsulation of the messy issues of race and progress in the West.

There’s much in “The Book of Salt” that lies just under the surface, including a cameo by Ho Chi Minh in the guise of a traveler Binh bumps into on a bridge over the Seine.

The meeting was inspired by an actual event Truong read about and, in her research, she discovered that, like Binh, the future North Vietnamese leader had also worked as a chef (under Auguste Escoffier, no less).

Truong herself is an avid cook. Taking in the exhibition, which highlights Vietnamese holidays, she helpfully explains the bottles of New Grain vodka, a pomelo fruit whimsically sculpted into a furry puppy, and the multiple heads of Ong Tao -- fittingly enough, the kitchen god. Truong can’t help but notice some overlap between creating in the kitchen and on the page.

“I think a lot about both acts before I actually go into it. You really have to think about what you want to write, and the same goes for cooking. I often think about a recipe for a really long time before making it.”

Truong, after all, began creating her piece de resistance seven years after her initial brush with Stein and Toklas. Her caution, care and foresight are reminiscent of a passage from “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”: “To cook as the French do, one must respect the quality and flavor of the ingredients. Exaggeration is not admissible. Flavors are not all amalgamative. These qualities are not purchasable but may be cultivated.”

In “The Book of Salt,” Truong has, after much deliberation, cultivated a veritable feast.