The cookbook author who got canceled for cultural appropriation taught me how to make proper pho

I was at a cooking class in Portland 3 years ago and the instructor was a white woman who had just published a Vietnamese cookbook. She showed us how to char ginger and onions for the broth, which most recipes skip. I asked her about the controversy and she said 'I'm just sharing techniques I learned from my neighbors.' I still use her method every time I make pho. Has anyone else found useful stuff from a canceled creator that you can't get elsewhere?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicecooper19d ago

And that's the thing, people are SO quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The david37 example is PERFECT because that gardening woman probably knew more about those specific techniques than 90% of people in the field, but because she didn't fit some arbitrary mold of who gets to talk about native plants, she got written off. I've got a bread baking book from a guy who got roasted for using "non traditional" fermentation methods and guess what? His sourdough starter instructions are the ONLY ones that ever worked for me, even after trying recipes from actual French bakers. The internet acts like canceling is this clean eraser but it's more like a chainsaw that takes down the whole tree instead of just trimming the bad branch. You can disagree with someone's approach or background but still admit they taught you something REAL.

david3719d ago

Used to think canceling was always the right call, but I found this gardening channel on YouTube hosted by a woman who got dragged for "not being authentic" about native plants. She was just sharing her backyard experiments, not claiming to be some elder. Her method for companion planting corn and beans totally changed my garden. Still use it every summer and I get way better yields now.