57 books like Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos

In 2000 I read a sentence in a guidebook stating that there was only one book in print on Lao cuisine written in the English language. The lone cookbook was called Traditional Recipes of Laos and was printed by Prospect Books, a tiny publisher of culinary academia and rare recipes. It was a real find, for it contained the recipes of the late king of Laos’s chef, Phia Sing – the recipes of the royal court of Laos! This book sent me to Laos to find out more and write my own book.

The story behind the publication of the book was extraordinary. The king’s chef had handwritten his precious recipes in two small exercise books, which on his deathbed in 1967, he gave to the Crown Prince for safe-keeping. In 1974, Alan Davidson, the British ambassador to Laos and respected food academic, happened to be chatting to his Royal… show more.

This is a cookbook documenting northern Lao food preparation, Lao ingredients, and Lao recipes by a couple, Dorothy and Kees, who worked in Laos as volunteers. They met with many people I knew and wrote about including the family who ran The Boat Landing guesthouse. This is an extremely well-researched book on the food of the Luang Namtha district, which includes excellent photography, precise recipes, ingredient explanations, and a clear glossary. The recipes are authentic to the core so you might not be able to source many of the ingredients outside Laos but it’s an important book for anyone interested in Lao cuisine.

A superb, illustrated coffee-table book describing the Hill Tribes and their relations to plants from cultivation and marketing, to nutrition and spiritual use. Though not specifically about Laos, many of the tribes are in Laos too and they cross borders. An important book for the conservation of tribal knowledge and food culture.

Many children of Lao refugees, who fled the communist take-over in the ’70s, are now coming of age and sharing their take on Lao cooking across the globe. Hawkers Fare details the story of James Syhabout who earned his spurs as a chef at hallowed restaurants such as The Fat Duck and El Bulli before opening his own Commis in Oakland and gaining two Michelin stars of his own.

Though known for fine dining this book is a homage to his Lao roots and his journey of discovery into his origins as the son of refugees who came to the US with nothing but their ability to work hard. He tells their story and returns to Laos himself where he picks up the flavours of his mother’s homeland with the scrupulous nose of a super-chef. It includes recipes that are both authentic but, unusually, measured out with pinpoint accuracy in… show more.

Historian Grant Evans does a thorough and highly readable if academic job to introduce remote, mysterious, landlocked Laos, the land of a million elephants from its distant beginnings as a conglomeration of waxing and waning city-states to its French colonial era and tragic role in the Vietnam War, its current post-revolutionary stasis and persistent refusal to become a nation serving its citizens. Anyone contemplating a visit to Laos should carry this book in their luggage as it touches on almost all aspects, cultural and economic, historical, and societal of one of the last communist nations surviving today.

From 1965 onwards, the USA, conducted a covert anti-communist war in Laos. While the CIA created a clandestine hilltribe army, the air support for these troops was provided by Air America, ostensibly a private airline that was owned by the agency. Small spotter planes flew to 100s of airstrips across Laos to distribute troops, aid and weapons while collecting vast amounts of opium grown by the mercenaries the US had hired, later refined into heroin and sold to US troops fighting in Vietnam. Robbins’ book, which is somewhat revisionist, nonetheless brilliantly tracks the history of the airline from its beginnings in 1950s Indochina and demonstrates the courage of its pilots who frequently flew under fire and whose motto was "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Professionally".

Holly High addresses a question that puzzles students of development studies: why do people engage in development programs when they have such a poor record of success?

It is not due to a lack of cynicism or suspicion. Rather High shows that rural Laos residents continue to hold both unconscious and social desires for development, producing a “shared delirium” that contains its own rationalities.

Notably, Fields of Desire brings Lacanian and Deleuzian theories to the anthropology of development: a welcome respite from Foucault.

It is also an evocative ethnographic account of the experience of poverty, and poverty reduction programs in a Lao village. 

George Marrett was in my squadron the year prior to me and we tell of some of the same people. Cheating Death is about search and rescue. Same airplane, different mission. A-1s were taildragger airplanes with a 2,700 horsepower engine, could carry 10,000 pounds of external ordinance, and had two 20mm guns in each wing. It was low and slow compared to a jet and could stay over a survivor for a long time until a rescue was made. The author tells of several exciting rescues of pilots who were shot down deep in enemy territory and explains how it was done.

During the CIA’s covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country, a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years and makes Laos, along with Cambodia, which shared a similar fate, is the most bombed country in the world. To this day, countless people, many of them children, are maimed and killed by unexploded ordinance that remains hidden in the country’s soil. Fred Branfman, a young American stationed in Laos in the late 1960s, discovered the bombing and exposed the CIA’s covert campaign of terror.

Branfman not only interviewed more than 2,000 refugees of the bombing but motivated many survivors to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. This book, an excellent antidote and companion piece to Air America, is the result.

This classic travel book, first published in 1951, is said to have inspired Graham Greene to travel to Vietnam and to write The Quiet American, the greatest piece of fiction on white men in Southeast Asia. It is also a charming and charmed eyewitness account of the dying days of the French colonial occupation of Indochina which makes A Dragon Apparent a document so much of its time that readers might it find quaint, patronizing, and perhaps a little racist. The locals don’t come away very well but neither does the author who barely speaks to them. That said, Lewis’ observations of Luang Prabang are worth revisiting.