Real Thai Cooking by Chawadee Nualkhair, photographs by Lauren Lulu Taylor (Tuttle Publishing)

When I first began using cookbooks, way back in the dark ages of mid-century Alaska, they weren’t embellished with photographs. Some had a few pages of garish colored photos bound into the middle of the book, others quite dismally still offered black and white pictures of a few of their dishes. Food photography wasn’t yet a category. What was in place were snapshots of completed recipes.

Maybe that’s why two of my favorite cookbooks have no photographs at all. MFK Fisher and Laurie Colwin provided something better. They wrapped their recipes in essays instead and as a greedy reader, I was enthralled. It wasn’t until 1982, when Christopher Idone came out with the stunning coffee table book, Glorious Food, did I begin to think that cookbooks could be objects of visual delight.

However I never cooked anything from Glorious Food because I was terrified that I would mar its pages. And I infrequently used recipes from MFK or Laurie, although I picked up their books often. Several hours later I’d pull myself away from their stories and slap together a meatloaf, just in time for supper.

It wasn’t until this year that I found the perfect ménage à trois of essays,  photographs, and recipes. Real Thai Cooking has it all.

I can hear the yawns now. Another Thai cookbook? Really? Why?

Here’s the flaw in that rush to judgment. This is a pioneer in the cookbook arena, because every portion of the trinity that lies between its covers is perilously close to perfect. 

I dare anyone to look at Lauren Lulu Taylor’s food photographs without immediately feeling hungry. But they aren’t just appetite snares--her thumbnail photographs turn the ten pages of essential Thai ingredients into a guide to shopping in Asian grocery stores and her shots of street food vendors are bright, evocative, and an irresistible invitation. This is food photography at its best.

And it has to be because those photographs exist side-by-side with some of the best food writing ever done about Thai cuisine and some of the most enticing--and often surprising— recipes. 

Chawadee Nualkhair is a food explorer. Yes, she tells how to make Pad Thai but she first gives the reason why it exists. (Hint: it’s a political creation, not a culinary masterpiece.) She gives two recipes for Som Tum but neither are the version most beloved by visitors to Thai restaurants in America or in Bangkok, where som tum, Chawadee says, is a form of fusion, adapted to the palates of that city’s residents. She provides a recipe for Tom Yum Goong which is elevated by ingredients used in the dish made by Michelin-star-winning street vendor, Jay Fai.

The stars of her recipe collection illuminate Thailand’s multicultural underpinnings: Jalebi that has Persian ancestry; a pumpkin custard invented by an enslaved Portuguese aristocrat who headed a palace kitchen;  Oxtail Soup that’s descended from Arab traders who brought Islam to Southern Thailand; a pork pâté that came to Thailand when Vietnamese fled French colonizers in the 1880s to settle into Thai towns along the Mekong. These culinary surprises coexist happily with a recipe for Chiang Mai’s famous sausage, Sai Oua, which may require a meat grinder, a sausage stuffing machine, and over two hours of prep time. And just in time to combat the U.S. Sriracha hot sauce shortage, she  comes to the rescue with a recipe for the real thing, calling for fermented chilies,  as it was first invented and still made on the Thai coast in Sriracha.

Not only are these recipes clear and undaunting, they’re fun to read. When using a Thai mortar and pestle, “pound like you have a grudge against the ingredients.” If you’re brave enough to mash Thai chilies in that fashion, protect your eyes from flying chili bits by covering part of the top of the mortar “with your other hand as you pound, like watching a horror movie through your fingers.” When making salt-encrusted fish, encase it in salt “like you have murdered it and are trying to hide the evidence.” Even making a humble omelet becomes high drama when the drops of egg “bubble up like the villain in an acid bath in a James Bond movie.”

If you gather from these phrases that Chawadee Nualkhair knows how to write, you’re absolutely correct. A former journalist for Reuters and for years the writer of a delightful food column called Bangkok Glutton (bangkokglutton.com), she has studded this cookbook with a bounty of essays that have turned it into a painless and pleasurable tutorial on food in Thailand. 

She explains the differences of Thai regional cuisine, along with the history behind it all. As an ardent champion of Bangkok’s street food, she tells how it came into being and why it must survive. In a frank and possibly controversial explication of “Thailand’s Fast-developing Drinking Culture” she hazards a debatable theory as to why drinks aren’t paired with Thai food: “That is because Thais simply drink to get drunk.” In another piece about eating larb prepared with raw beef, she presents a kinder reason for drinking while consuming this dish. The consumption of alcoholic beverages “are supposed to help kill any germs.”

Her voice is as seductive as her recipes and her recipes are as easy to enjoy as Chawadee Nualkhair is herself. Even readers who may never go to Thailand can immerse themselves in the country’s food, as it’s prepared and eaten within its borders, in the company of a woman who knows it well.~Janet Brown