[SweetJames]

i was at an asian market today.
saw all sorts of things i've never seen before.
salted snake heads in a jar, all sorts of different rice papers, soy bean pastes, dried and picked fish parts, pickled quail eggs in a jar, etc.

are there any good books dealing with authentic asian cooking? utilizing some of this stuff is a mystery to me at this point, and i need some guidence.

[phatch]

You might also have stumbled into the homeopathic aisle which can be fairly odd.

But for cooking, books by these authors are quite good.

Chinese:
Grace Young,
Eileen Yin Fei Lo
Yan Kit So
Kenneth Lo, mostly out of print now but used book sites on line have quite a selection at reasonable prices.
Bruce Cost wrote a guide to pan-Asian ingredients that too is out of print but readily available used.

Vietnamese
Mai pham ( I think was the author, I'll have to check my notes on another PC) Yes, but it's only one book, Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table.


Martin Yan has written many books on this region. The newer ones tend to be using the odder ingredients but he also simplifies a lot which is reasonable for many cooks with still good results.

These authors produce food rather unlike what we see in Chinese restaurants for example as that food tends to be fairly hybridized to US palates


I don't cook much Korean or Japanese. I have a few Thai cookbooks, but nothing I consider exceptional.

[bernardin]

I echo loudly the Chinese authors recommended and would add Fuschia Dunlop to the list.

I just purchased Bruce Cost's book "Asian Ingredients" so I assume it is available again. Good thing too.

[phatch]

There are many people at this forum that can help you with your questions as well.

And I particularly enjoy a food blog about Asian food, Rasa Malaysia: Asian Recipes and Cooking Great photography and recipes as well as guest bloggers.

[pastrycake]

For vietnamese, I have several from Mai Pham. I try to find authors that are of that origin. For chinese, martin yan. For Thai, I have the beautiful book thailand.

[Arianna]

Try asking the sellers at the market - you may get great recipes that are hard to find in books. If you do it enough you can publish your own!

[Jesse1211]

Hi there. I have two suggestions if you want to learn more about Thai cooking. The first is a wonderful book called Thai Food by David Thompson, an Australian who fell in love with Thai cooking when he visited the country. This book is great not only for the very authentic, although labor-intensive, recipes, but for the beautiful photography and the mini-history at the beginning of the book on the Thai kingdom, its various regions, and how the history and geography of the country shaped the cuisine. This book contains pretty much every Thai recipe you've ever heard of and then some. The only things working against it are these: first, the recipes are a little more difficult for the North American home cook because they require lots of obscure ingredients and often work-intensive techniques. This makes the food itself a bit inaccessible, and means that cooking a meal out of this book is more of a fun weekend-long project and less of an everyday practice--which is a shame, because Thai cooking can (and I think should) be enjoyed often and with little fuss.

Luckily, Nancie McDermott--who learned to cook Thai food when she served there in the Peace Corps--wrote Quick and Easy Thai in order to accomplish exactly that. She skillfully adapts Thai food to Western home kitchens without sacrificing authenticity, and the recipes are delicious and wonderfully simple to make. She emphasizes the street food and the food most Thai people cook at home, where Thompson's book emphasizes palace- and restaurant-style cuisine.

These books complement each other perfectly and (I believe) constitute the only cookbooks you'll need to learn all about Thai cooking and food, so I would suggest getting your hands on both of them. Thompson's is quite a chunk of change (~$50), but it's fairly easy to find used, while McDermott's is less than $20 and worth every cent.

Hope this helped and good luck!