When NHA Magazine asked what Thanksgiving meant to a Vietnamese cook like me, I drew a blank. In first grade, my teacher asked me this similar question; same feelings. I learned about American holidays and traditions at school, on the streets, not from my immigrant parents. I’ve never had a real Thanksgiving meal.

On Thanksgiving Day, we still gathered as a family and wholeheartedly embraced the idea of eating straight through an entire four-day weekend but the food served was always a traditional Vietnamese meal and, celebrating in Little Saigon in Southern California, many dishes came purchased from local restaurants and bakeries. We always had cha gio (fried eggrolls) and banh beo or banh cuon (savory steamed rice flour treats) and someone would always make an attempt to incorporate the classically traditional: a random mashed potato dish, stuffing from a box or macaroni and cheese. We all would sigh in relief, as if these few traditional staples validated us and our way of celebrating Thankgsiving. Only once did we have turkey—it was a dry, coma-inducing bird that few of us found palatable. Instead, we would serve steaks, or a giant steamed or fried fish. One year it was a hot-pot night; another year, delivered pizza. Different? Perhaps. In the end, we still celebrated together as a family, gave thanks for our plenitude and over-indulged to the point of engorgement, like only proud Americans do.

This year, in honor of the publication of my first cookbook, I announced to my family that I would make Thanksgiving dinner. I warned them that it would be a fusion of some basic Vietnamese ingredients with the traditional Thanksgiving meal. There were a number of questions from the family: Will we have to eat the dreaded turkey? Will there be pumpkin pie? Will we drink a lot and throw things at each other? Will we have to watch football? This new Thanksgiving meal both frightened and excited everyone at the same time. But this wasn’t a revered holiday like Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, so I was given carte blanche to do what I pleased. But a good question was asked: why do we need to experiment and try new dishes and variations at all?

When it comes to holiday entertaining, the gourmet revolution has more and more of us leaving the traditional and entering the modern globe, where ingredients from all over the world are served together in harmony on the same plate.

So we leave Puritan Plymouth for a moment, and travel to modern day Orange County; specifically Little Saigon, home of the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam where my family now resides. If a cuisine today can be classified and appreciated by looking at borders on a modern map, how should we incorporate the Viet Nam coastline with New England?

The secret behind a successful fusion of the familiar with newer, less well-known, ingredients is to take similar ingredients and gently stir and fold to augment a dish. We take traditional Vietnamese ingredients like lemongrass, coconut milk, ginger, dozens of fresh Vietnamese herbs and fish sauce and use these flavors to enhance a traditional, holiday meal the same way it highlights a Vietnamese meal. Coconut milk replaces cream in a root vegetable gratin to alter the taste and texture delightfully; ginger is added to sweet mashed yams to give it a zing.

The following recipes celebrate the quintessential flavors of Vietnamese cuisine and incorporates them with our Thanksgiving classics:

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