Customer Reviews

Ant Egg Soup: The Adventures of a Food Tourist in Laos

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From the moment she lands in Laos and asks a customs official for the most authentic place to eat in town I was hooked on the author's cultural odyssey into the country's gastronomic soul. It's beautifully written and I found it a brave, generous book, siffused with a passion for exotic cuisine and a genuine affection for the people she encounters. Her own illustrations and a glut of tasty recipes nestle with quixotic travellers' tales and stimulating insights into the history, politics and customs of a country that is little known to the West. There are also some apposite reflections on tourism and international development.Complex and, naturally, hunger inducing. I loved it.

This is a beautiful book about Laos, its people, and their customs. The descriptions of the food are spot-on and the recipes are a great bonus. As a transplanted Lao-American trying to recreate flavors of my past, this was quite a gem of a find. If you have any interest in Southeast Asian culture or tourism, you definitely must read this. The parts about Luang Prabang and the Plain of Jars will have you googling airfare to Laos in no time.

This is easily one of the most pleasurable so called travel books I have read. I am not even finished with it yet but am spurred to share its quality with everyone. Not too much history to be opaque and distant, not too much inward introspection to be self-indulgent, not too much about the people she meets to be foreign, not too much about the geography and the journey itself to be boring and not too much about food to be blind to the rest. Everything is related at just the right tempo and you feel as if you are right there with Natacha and her new friends enjoying the journey with little tidbits of insight into everything that is Laos not just food. To her immense credit, her style of writing here comes across as real down-to-earth which paradoxically comes across expertly, or perhaps I mean comprehensible to a non-professional chef like me (but a semi-professional traveler....trying to get to the pros.)

I now even have some recipes I can use...and they are good recipes put into the context of where she learned them. That is the best part. I love the way she sketches different things that she sees such as the vegetable gardens along the Mekong, the faces and garb of the hill tribe women she meets and the post slaughter image of a turkey that she later enjoyed. Her description of the children she meets in the countryside and their laughter is so spot on and haunting. The book is a contemporary masterpiece on Southeast Asian culture for foreign readers, like me. I have yet to read a book of the food/travel genre that tells part of the Southeast Asian experience any better than this.....especially for lovers of food and Southeast Asian culture like myself.

"Ant Egg Soup" is not merely food writing--my fear is that a lot of people who would love this insightful, fascinating description of a journey through Laos will not read it because, not being very interested in food, they will assume there's nothing in it for them. On the contrary by the time we finish this book art, politics, agriculture, all the essential features of human life will have been touched upon; mostly, however, it is the lives of the people the authoress met, sketched with wit and warmth, that one comes away from this book with. Miss DuPont de Bie seems to have been able to penetrate the interior life of the people she met; rarely have I read a travel book which felt less like peering dimly at the incomprehensible through frosted glass.

Of course food is the constant unifying theme of this book. I was moved by it to buy a fairly full set of Lao cookery and ingredients (possible, more or less, here in New York) and try out some of her recipes, and they really are great. But--and I'm really not exaggerating when I say this--the non-foodie reader who really wants to know about life in Laos today will get more from this book than from almost any other book on the subject.

This book is largely the record of a love affair: that of the authoress with a people, culture, and lifestyle she is clearly crazy about. But it is not naive: on the contrary there is throughout a very open and realistic description of all the evils she comes across. Litter, dishonesty, corruption, even, in one horrifying passage, an attempted rape, all put in an appearance: and it is because her love for Lao culture survives these encounters that we believe her, that we accept her overwhelmingly positive account as mature judgement rather than infatuation.

One last point: Ant Egg Soup is probably best read, like most books, from beginning to end, but it also lends itself very well to excerpting, so much will not be lost if you want to simply sample bits here and there.

Ant Egg Soup was the last book I read before departing for Laos after reading what few books I could find about Laotian history, customs and people. And it was the first book I read after returning. The writer captured the essence of the people, customs and food of Laos. Ant eggs were about the only food I wasn't able to find. As a Westerner, we are repulsed by the thought of eating insects and bugs. She inspired me to try a traditional Laotian dinner. Unbeknownst to me when I ordered it consisted of fermented fish, Mekong River algae crackers, fried tadpoles, rice paddy crabs, bee pupae in honeycomb, silk worm, grated dried water buffalo skin and dried water buffalo instestines to mention a few items. It all was amazingly good, as was all the other food to be found in Laos and Cambodia.
Well done and a must read for anyone heading off to SE Asia.