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Jul 16, 2024 | 
saveur.com | Chantha Nguon
“When I’m cooking or eating, it’s less painful to remember,” writes Chantha Nguon in the introduction to her book, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes. After an idyllic childhood in Battambang—a life of simmering stews and the aroma of rice cooking over a fire—an encroaching war left her with nothing but the memories of her mother’s cooking.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
saveur.com | Chantha Nguon
Fish sauce, garlic, and lime juice provide savory brightness to this Southeast Asian showstopper. Serves4Cook30 minutesIngredients2 Tbsp. fish sauce1 Tbsp. fresh lime juice1 tsp.
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May 10, 2024 | 
thebanner.org | Chantha Nguon
In her riveting, gut-wrenching memoir, author Chantha Nguon relates how she fled from Cambodia to Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1970 when she was 9 years old. Nguon was the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and a Khmer man. Because of burgeoning discrimination against Vietnamese people living in Cambodia, she and her family began to feel at risk, so they became refugees. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge under the dictator Pol Pot claimed that the Cambodian people had no history or culture.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
worldliteraturetoday.org | Chantha Nguon |Kim Green
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to signin or get access. Escaping the Khmer Rouge, Chantha Nguon’s family moved to Saigon, where they lived as refugees. There, restoring flavor to the drab palate of their lives felt like a tiny act of rebellion. Lemongrass-fried fish lives on as a frequent dish, a simple and exquisite homage to Nguon’s mother. When I was nine years old, in 1970, I fled Cambodia with my older brother and sisters.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
worldliteraturetoday.org | Chantha Nguon |Mihaela Moscaliuc |Pádraig Ó Tuama |Karlos Hill
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
bismarcktribune.com | Chantha Nguon |Laurie Hertzel
BOOKS | REVIEWS'Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes'By Chantha Nguon, with Kim Green (Algonquin, 292 pages, $29)Food is at the heart of this poignant memoir of war and displacement — food prepared, food shared, food longed for. It is a symbol, a memory and a hope. Chantha Nguon recounts her journey from a coddled childhood in Cambodia to life on the run, enduring the terror and confusion of war.
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Mar 2, 2024 | 
bookreporter.com | Chantha Nguon |Kim Green
At various critical moments throughout this remarkable memoir co-written with Kim Green, Chantha Nguon reflects on the protracted but satisfying process of preparing and cooking handmade noodles the way her mother did. You couldn’t shorten or hurry the method. If you did, the end product would betray a lazy cook in both its taste and its texture. Hence the title SLOW NOODLES, a lifelong metaphor for patience --- often unimaginably extreme patience --- amid a life of danger and uncertainty.
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Feb 20, 2024 | 
cntraveler.com | Chantha Nguon
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Upon reaching Phnom Penh, our first act was searching for dinner. I will never forget my first meal that truly tasted like home, after fourteen years in exile: It was fitting that it should be prahok—our defining (and aromatic) national condiment.
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Feb 20, 2024 | 
readinggroupguides.com | Chantha Nguon |Kim Green
A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen. RECIPE: HOW TO CHANGE CLOTH INTO DIAMOND Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone.
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Sep 28, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Chantha Nguon |Stephanie Johnson |Brandon Stanton |
A moving book that mixes horror and hope, disaster and good food, creating a poignant, fascinating read. In an evocative, haunting memoir, a survivor of Cambodia’s “Year Zero” generation recounts how memories of her culinary heritage have sustained her. Some tragedies are almost too large to describe.
