Here are 45 books that Hawker Fare fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been fascinated by Lao Food for more than two decades. When I first went to Laos, the communist regime had closed the country for years but the isolation had kept the food culture in stasis, uncontaminated by outside influences. It was virtually unknown outside the regional area and deserved to be better known and celebrated. Lao cuisine is a remarkable synthesis of a thousand years of history, culture, and, as the French would say ‘terroir’, that unique context of land and farming practice that results in regional flavour. I love that authentic food, and I admire the beautiful country, and the friends I have made in my exploration of both.
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…
This version reestablishes the Lao text and prints the English unchanged from previous editions. The notebooks are a precious resource for those wishing to cook Lao food: the 124 recipes were compiled to give a balanced view of the cuisine (albeit from quite a high-ranking perspective). In the thirty years since its first appearance, materials and ingredients have become easier to source, and the cooking techniques and styles more familiar to us. The dishes, therefore, are very cookable. There is a long prefatory section, written by the late Alan Davidson and his daughter Jennifer, which explains much about Lao cookery,…
I’ve been fascinated by Lao Food for more than two decades. When I first went to Laos, the communist regime had closed the country for years but the isolation had kept the food culture in stasis, uncontaminated by outside influences. It was virtually unknown outside the regional area and deserved to be better known and celebrated. Lao cuisine is a remarkable synthesis of a thousand years of history, culture, and, as the French would say ‘terroir’, that unique context of land and farming practice that results in regional flavour. I love that authentic food, and I admire the beautiful country, and the friends I have made in my exploration of both.
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.
Includes over 400 color photographs. "An encyclopaedic resource for lovers of Lao food everywhere!" The little known cultures and cuisine of Northern Laos (Lao PDR) are showcased in the recipes of its local ethnic groups and Luang Namtha Province's premiere ecotourism lodge. Eighty-eight dishes from Lao, Khmu, Tai Dam, Tai Yuan and Akha are presented in clear, simple recipes. The stunning photography of life and food preparation in village homes and at The Boat Landing Guest House and Restaurant ties the dishes to their indigenous setting. This unique cookbook includes: 80+ recipes from Laos, a 28-page photo-illustrated glossary of Lao…
I’ve been fascinated by Lao Food for more than two decades. When I first went to Laos, the communist regime had closed the country for years but the isolation had kept the food culture in stasis, uncontaminated by outside influences. It was virtually unknown outside the regional area and deserved to be better known and celebrated. Lao cuisine is a remarkable synthesis of a thousand years of history, culture, and, as the French would say ‘terroir’, that unique context of land and farming practice that results in regional flavour. I love that authentic food, and I admire the beautiful country, and the friends I have made in my exploration of both.
This is a reprinting of Alan Davidson's study of the fish cookery of Laos. It contains a catalogue of species, as well as a collection of recipes. This book is an invaluable companion to have in hand while you peruse the markets in Laos or the regions around it. However, like his seminal work The Oxford Companion to Food, Davidson’s meticulous empirical approach to research and his indomitable knack for finding an amusing anecdote makes it an excellent armchair read too.
This is a reprinting of Alan Davidson's study of the fish cookery of Laos. There is also much information on cooking materials and ingredients. This book has been out of print for more than two decades and its reappearance is eagerly awaited. The critical thing to remember about the fish dishes of Laos is that there is no seaside and that all the fish live in the Mekong river and its tributaries. That great stream runs from China in the north to the Falls of Khong to the south. It forms the border between Laos and Bhurma (Myanmar), and Laos…
I’ve been fascinated by Lao Food for more than two decades. When I first went to Laos, the communist regime had closed the country for years but the isolation had kept the food culture in stasis, uncontaminated by outside influences. It was virtually unknown outside the regional area and deserved to be better known and celebrated. Lao cuisine is a remarkable synthesis of a thousand years of history, culture, and, as the French would say ‘terroir’, that unique context of land and farming practice that results in regional flavour. I love that authentic food, and I admire the beautiful country, and the friends I have made in my exploration of both.
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.
For the half million people living in the remote mountains of northern Thailand, survival is dependent upon the forest. This study identifies more than 1000 plant species, with emphasis on medicinal plants and their uses.
Felicia Campbell is a food writer, editor, and author of The Food of Oman: Stories and Recipes from the Gateway to Arabia, the first English-language cookbook on Omani cuisine. She earned her masters degree in culinary anthropology from New York University with a specialization in Middle Eastern foodways. She has lectured on Omani food and food in zones of conflict at the Smithsonian Institute, Leiden University, New York University, and Arizona State University. She is currently developing a documentary series about endangered cuisines around the world.
Leela Punyaratabandhu doesn’t dumb things down in her cookbook, which is an ode to the city of her birth. Hers are Bangkok-style Thai dishes as they are cooked in Thailand. Through it we learn not only how to caramelize beef using jaggery (an unprocessed sugar), but also how to pair it with deeply savory and spicy dishes for a meal that harmonizes contrasting flavors and textures. The suggested meals in her book require cooking sets of dishes, often four or more. While not the makings of an easy weeknight dinner, if you follow her instructions, the results are truly transportive.
From one of the most respected authorities on Thai cooking comes this beautiful and deeply personal ode to Bangkok, the top-ranked travel destination in the world.
WINNER OF THE ART OF EATING PRIZE
Every year, more than 16 million visitors flock to Thailand’s capital city, and leave transfixed by the vibrant culture and unforgettable food they encounter along the way. Thai cuisine is more popular today than ever, yet there is no book that chronicles the real food that Thai people eat every day—until now.
In Bangkok, award-winning author Leela Punyaratabandhu offers 120 recipes that capture the true spirit of…
Thirty-two years ago, I got my start as a chef by cooking in a shoebox cafe in Boston that played with curious Asian ingredients. Ten years later, after using lots of Asian cookbooks, I was incorporating Thai and Vietnamese cooking into my menus at the restaurant I was running. A few years after that, I opened and ran a Vietnamese restaurant in Cambridge (unfortunately, after major success, it burned down after a year). After this, the tourism board of Malaysia sent me on a four-week trip to write about the street food for FoodArts magazine. It is these experiences that greatly influenced my interest in Southeast Asian cooking.
Written 35 years ago by a UCLA professor and a Bangkok-born female chef who owned a highly lauded restaurant near LA, this photo-less book explains Thai cuisine well, as well as the culture of food in Thailand, and its recipes never miss the mark and generally are short. This book is in no small part responsible for the success of Veggie Planet, a pizza restaurant I owned in Harvard Square, Cambridge, for 6 years. One of the most popular pizzas was called “Red Curry” pizza and was layered with coconut rice, broccoli, pan-fried tofu, and this book’s Red Curry Peanut Sauce. Never again will you use a curry sauce from a can. It’s been through 9 printings, and you’ll have to buy a used copy.
Rich, unusual flavors and hot and spicy combinations have made Thai cooking the newest exotic cuisine that is sweeping the country. Now 157 classic dishes from the authentic Thai restaurant Kamolmal have been collected and re-created into easy-to-follow recipes for American cooks.
I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.
Morgan illuminates and analyzes the visual culture of religion that scholars have neglected to consider seriously. His lyrical and incisive deep dive into the visual aspects and social contexts of a broad range of case histories, including religious Americana, opens up the “field” of visuality beyond the object itself and to the phenomenology of seeing.
'Sacred gaze' denotes any way of seeing that invests its object - an image, a person, a time, a place - with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, "The Sacred Gaze" discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret…
After retiring from a career in climate science, I reinvented myself as an English teacher, a yoga instructor, and a writer. I write personal essays about my life experiences, in particular my time teaching in Thailand. Before I traveled to Thailand, while I was there, and when I returned home to the US, I devoured every book I could find that could help me make sense of Thai culture and manage as a farang (foreigner, Westerner) in the Land of Smiles. Here are my five picks for helping other farangs understand Thailand.
Tom Crowley is an American writer who has experienced Thailand from many perspectives over many decades: as a soldier during the Vietnam War, as a corporate executive, as a US foreign service officer, and as a volunteer at Mercy Centre, a Catholic charitable organization.
This poignant memoir is a series of vignettes that focus on Crowley’s traumatic wartime experiences and the healing he found years later working with desperate children in one of Bangkok’s poorest slums. I picked this book because it shows a part of Thailand that most farangs never see.
In Mercy's Heroes, a Vietnam veteran battling with PTSD turns from the business world to life as a volunteer, helping to rescue and protect street kids in Bangkok's biggest slum.
Here Tom Crowley details the children's efforts to survive abuse and the struggle for dignity waged by the poorest of families. Interwoven throughout, the author's combat experiences and pain highlight the question of how to find personal reconciliation amid the struggles of abused children in the slums. In his efforts to help others, he gains a spiritual understanding worth much more than his financial loss. At the same time, he…
After retiring from a career in climate science, I reinvented myself as an English teacher, a yoga instructor, and a writer. I write personal essays about my life experiences, in particular my time teaching in Thailand. Before I traveled to Thailand, while I was there, and when I returned home to the US, I devoured every book I could find that could help me make sense of Thai culture and manage as a farang (foreigner, Westerner) in the Land of Smiles. Here are my five picks for helping other farangs understand Thailand.
The “many lives” in this series of linked short stories are those of eleven passengers who perish when a Bangkok-bound boat capsizes in a fierce storm.
I relished each story of each life, both as a literary gem and as an insight into something fundamental about Thai society, such as the importance of social class, the role of urban migration in altering provincial life, the potentially stifling aspects of intergenerational family obligations, and the overriding role of karma in Thai conceptions of life and death.
To me, Many Lives is to Thai culture what Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town is to American culture.
"That night, the rain poured and wind howled, raindrops crashing like solid objects onto the ground and water. A passenger boat from Ban Phaen to Bangkok, packed with people, pressed on through the current amidst the rising clamor of the rain and storm. . . ." The boat capsizes in the torrent, and washed up on the shore the next morning are the sodden bodies of the many passengers who lost their lives.
Thus begins M. R. Kukrit Pramoj's classic novel set in the Thailand of the early 1950s and first published in 1954. The life of each passenger who…
After retiring from a career in climate science, I reinvented myself as an English teacher, a yoga instructor, and a writer. I write personal essays about my life experiences, in particular my time teaching in Thailand. Before I traveled to Thailand, while I was there, and when I returned home to the US, I devoured every book I could find that could help me make sense of Thai culture and manage as a farang (foreigner, Westerner) in the Land of Smiles. Here are my five picks for helping other farangs understand Thailand.
I devoured Carol Hollinger’s 1964 memoir of her years teaching English in Thailand as I was preparing to do the same thing.
Though Thailand and the wider world had changed enormously in the six decades separating Hollinger’s adventure from mine, I loved this self-described American “matron’s” story about raising a family, running a household, fulfilling social obligations, and, oh yes, teaching English at one of Thailand’s premier universities.
With a refreshing openness of mind and spirit, and despite using some dated language, her observations about Thai people, culture, and customs still resonate today. And her title, Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind, really captures an essential and enduring aspect of Thai culture.
