One great cookbook: ‘Into the Vietnamese Kitchen’ by Andrea Nguyen

The resolute tango between the personal and the practical is a hallmark of a cookbook humdinger. Doing so merges two apertures — the narrow and the microscopic — into a wide-angle lens.

Andrea Nguyen’s 2006 debut, “Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors,” is a sublime example of that intermixture. She opens the book with the following scene: “We heard the plane coming in low and I was scared. Mom grabbed me, pulling me underneath the staircase as a bomb exploded nearby.