Tenderheart: Everyday vegetables take centre stage in Hetty Lui McKinnon's fifth cookbook

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Our cookbook of the week is Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds by Hetty Lui McKinnon. To try a recipe from the book, check out: ginger and cilantro noodle pancake, tingly “cacio e pepe” snow peas with rice noodles and soy-pickled tomatoes with silken tofu.

For cook and food writer Hetty Lui McKinnon, going to produce markets feels like home. “Even though I’m a vegetarian, it feels like it’s deeper for me. It’s part of my soul, cooking this way and being surrounded by vegetables.”

Vegetables have been at the heart of Lui McKinnon’s culinary career from the start, when she established the now-closed salad-delivery business Arthur Street Kitchen in her hometown of Sydney, Australia in 2011. After writing her fourth cookbook, To Asia, With Love (Prestel, 2021), the timing felt right for a vegetable book that reflected who she is as a person.

“I wanted to almost write a manifesto: This is the way I see vegetables as a Chinese girl who grew up in an immigrant household in Australia with so much influence of multicultures around me, and now having lived in other parts of the world. I wanted to bring all of that influence together and show people the types of vegetable recipes that define who I am.”

Tenderheart (Knopf, 2023), a moving and playful 525-page tome, ended up being a means of self-discovery. Inseparable from the recipes is the story of Lui McKinnon’s family and the influence of her late father, Wai Keung Lui, to whom she dedicated the book.

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In her fifth cookbook, author Hetty Lui McKinnon features 22 of her favourite vegetables in more than 180 recipes.Photo by Knopf

Once she started thinking about where her love of vegetables came from, Lui McKinnon soon realized it was rooted in the world her dad had created for them at home. Lui worked at Flemington Markets, Australia’s largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market (now known as Sydney Markets). For the first 15 years of her life, Lui McKinnon “only ate the most seasonal of fresh produce,” which her father brought home each day from work.

“We didn’t think it was anything extraordinary growing up, it was just our lives. But since I lost him, since he passed away (when I was) a teenager, it was almost bittersweet to remember him so much. So, a big part of writing the book was that I forced myself to remember him and to think about him. Think about who he was as a person. Think about his influence on my life.”

She resisted these thoughts for decades, says Lui McKinnon; yielding to them in Tenderheart had cathartic power. “Once I got to that point of giving myself permission to remember him and to miss him, to grieve the loss of him, what came out in the recipes was just a feeling of utter joy.”

Commemorating someone in words, recipes and flavours is a nearly impossible task, adds Lui McKinnon. So, she set out to mirror the love her father had for food and life. “Every recipe has that sense of fun and that sense of freedom and being wild, and just letting yourself experiment with flavour. And for me, that’s how I honoured my father in this book.”

Tenderheart’s more than 180 recipes span 22 chapters, each devoted to one of Lui McKinnon’s favourite vegetables, presented alphabetically from “Asian greens” (categorized together to highlight their interchangeability) to zucchini. She wants to write an entire book about Asian greens and enjoyed the opportunity to break them out of their box — pairing choy sum with feta in a galette, drizzling charred gai lan with soy tahini, and grilling baby bok choy bathed in miso-gochujang butter.

“I started to think, ‘Why do people only steam them or stir fry them?’ There are many other ways. I wanted people to really look at Asian greens through a different lens and to see how much more they can get out of these vegetables. You can use it like spinach, for example. You can use it like kale. You can stir fry it. You can char it.”

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Hetty Lui McKinnon’s ginger and cilantro noodle pancake makes creative use of instant ramen noodles, pan-fried until crisp and brightened by ginger-cilantro oil.Photo by Hetty Lui McKinnon

Choosing which vegetables to feature was easy, she says: Practical, reliable and versatile, these are the ingredients she cooks most often at home in Brooklyn, New York, where she and her husband and their three children have lived since 2015. Some, such as taro, hold special significance for her as someone who grew up eating mostly Cantonese food.

“I know that a lot of people in the West don’t eat taro every day — in Hawaii, they do. But I wanted to include it because it is a vegetable that’s really meaningful to me and my relationship with my parents and my mom in particular.”

When Lui McKinnon became a vegetarian at 19 years old, her mother, Lindy, started adapting the foods she grew up eating. Many of these dishes are in To Asia, With Love, such as mapo tofu, one of the first dishes Lindy showed her how to cook.

When her father passed away, her mother went through an “enforced reinvention,” which Lui McKinnon chronicles in one of Tenderheart’s essays. Living together through her university years was a seminal time, she says. “Being at home with her taught me so much about food — and without me even being interested in it. It was just because we ate together. We ate lunch together a lot of days. We would just be together a lot.”

Among the many changes in their lives after Lui passed away, for the first time since moving to Australia roughly 20 years earlier, Lindy travelled by bus or train to buy her own produce at greengrocers or supermarkets. They still tried to eat seasonally, Lui McKinnon recalls, but it wasn’t always possible.

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“This is a flavourful, satisfying no-cook dish, a great option for when tomatoes are plentiful and the days are long and too leisurely to contemplate ‘cooking,'” Hetty Lui McKinnon says of her soy-pickled tomatoes with silken tofu.Photo by Hetty Lui McKinnon

Today, this experience is reflected in her egalitarian attitude towards sourcing vegetables. She shops mostly at the supermarket and chose not to arrange Tenderheart seasonally because she doesn’t always eat that way.

“I am lucky, because I live in a spot where I have two farmers’ markets close to me on the weekends. But during the week, I will go to my local supermarket because my kids love broccoli, and they’ll eat it all year round. And if there’s a vegetable that they love, they can eat it all year round,” says Lui McKinnon, laughing. “It doesn’t matter if it’s in season or not.”

An appreciation of broccoli runs in the family. Years ago, making a chargrilled broccoli salad with chickpeas, chilies, capers, mint and lemon inspired Lui McKinnon to launch Arthur Street Kitchen in her Sydney neighbourhood of Surry Hills. The success of the solo endeavour eventually led her to share her approach to vegetables with the world. (The recipe for the salad is in her first cookbook, Community, which she self-published in 2013; Lui McKinnon features a soup version in Tenderheart.)

Though Lui McKinnon has been vegetarian for nearly 30 years, her relationship with vegetables is dynamic. It deepened in her community kitchen, where she created inventive salads inspired by her travels and her mother’s Cantonese home cooking and continues to evolve.

“Arthur Street Kitchen was all about showing people what I eat at home. It was a rediscovery of flavours that I knew and allowing them to manifest in a different way. So, that was really, really fun. And now, as my kids get older and their palates are a little bit more sophisticated, and they love big-flavoured food just like I do, I’m able to experiment a bit more — go back to my origins a little bit. That’s why I see (Tenderheart) as, in many ways, my vegetable origin story.”