Every time I cook, I’m quietly translating — reaching for something in a French kitchen that does the job of an ingredient from my mother’s kitchen in Vietnam. This little Vietnamese French ingredient pairing tool is my attempt to share those translations honestly, mismatches and all.

Some pairs land close: sweetened condensed milk made its way from French colonial trade straight into Vietnamese coffee culture, and it’s still the same product today, just poured differently. Others are only cousins in spirit — nước mắm and anchoïade both bring salty depth from fermented fish, but one is built on months of patient fermentation, and the other is a milder paste you’d spread rather than splash.

That’s really the point of this tool. It’s not a list of Vietnamese pantry ingredients and their French equivalents in the strict sense — it’s a way of noticing where two food cultures overlap, and where they stubbornly don’t. If you’ve ever wondered what to reach for in a French supermarket when a Vietnamese recipe calls for rau răm, or wondered why your bánh mì never tastes quite like the baguette down the street, this is for you.

Shuffle through as many pairs as you like — each one gets “stamped” into your own little passport as you go, and once you’ve seen all twenty, you’ll have a fuller picture of just how much (and how little) these two cuisines actually share.

A question I get asked often:

Is there a real French equivalent for tamarind? Not really — that’s one of the fun mismatches. Redcurrant comes closest in pure tartness, but tamarind’s sticky, fruity sourness is genuinely its own thing.