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David Thompson

Thai Food Hardcover – August 27, 2002

by David Thompson (Author)

561 ratings

4.2 on Goodreads

1,439 ratings

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Renowned chef David Thompson first went to Thailand by mistake: a holiday plan had to be changed at the last minute, and he ended up in Bangkok, where he was seduced by the people, culture, and cuisine. Since that fateful trip some 20 years ago, Thailand has become David's second home. Working alongside cooks who perfected their craft in the Thai royal palaces, he began to document the traditional recipes and culinary techniques that have been handed down from generation to generation.

The result is THAI FOOD, the most comprehensive account of this ancient and exotic cuisine ever published in English. David writes about Thailand and its food with an easy erudition, encouraging readers to cook and experiment, while simultaneously fostering a respect for the food and its stewardship through the ages. Although all the classic, well-loved recipes are here, this magnum opus features hundreds of lesser-known but equally authentic and delicious Thai dishes that will inspire cooks to go beyond green curry chicken and Thai fish cakes. David's passion and conviction are infectious; complemented by Earl Carter's superb photography, THAI FOOD captures all aspects of the dynamic Thai culture and cuisine.

• Ten years in the making, this groundbreaking work is one of the cookbook publishing events of the decade.

• The author's London restaurant, nahm, received a Michelin star in 2002, making it the first Thai restaurant to receive such an honor.

• Photographed at David's restaurants in Sydney and London, and on location in Thailand, Earl Carter's superb images capture both the essence of Thai food and its rich cultural milieu.

Awards2003 James Beard Award Winner

2003 IACP Award Winner
Reviews
“Stands out, dauntingly massive, brilliantly magisterial, and, at the same time, bustling with charm, observations, life.”
—Saveur
“[S]et a new standard for Asian cookbooks.”—Saveur (Top 100 Home Cook Edition)

Print length

688 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ten Speed Press
Publication date

August 27, 2002
Dimensions

7.01 x 1.71 x 9.82 inches
ISBN-10

1580084621
ISBN-13

978-1580084628
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Thai cooking is a paradox," writes Australian restaurateur David Thompson in his comprehensive and thus aptly named Thai Food. "It uses robustly flavored ingredients--garlic, shrimp paste, chilies, lemongrass--and yet when they are melded during cooking they arrive at a sophisticated and often subtle elegance." Pursuing this transformation in depth, his book presents hundreds of recipes that celebrate the Thai meal while exploring its historical and cultural context. Readers will delight in the wide selection of authentic dishes like Duck and Spring Onion Soup, Grilled Beef Salad, and Green Chicken Curry with Baby Corn, and relish Thompson's vast appreciation of his subject. Though the recipes are straightforward and workable once ingredients are assembled and techniques understood, those new to Thai cooking may want a less rigorous introduction to the subject. However, anyone with an appetite to explore it on Thompson's terms will benefit immensely.

Beginning with an exploration of Thailand's history and culture, the book then presents an extended section on rice, the centerpiece of the Thai meal. The "cookbook" follows, with a systematic introduction to the Thai kitchen, ingredients, and equipment. The chapter "Food Outside the Meal" is devoted to Thai snacks and vendor food, such as Stir-Fried Crisp Fish with Holy Basil. Noodle dishes include an exemplary pad thai, and sweet dishes like Grilled Bananas with Coconut Cream and Turmeric are also offered.

Readers should know that the recipes, published primarily for an Australian audience, give ingredients in a mix of metric and American measurements and/or with nonmetric equivalents, and that nomenclature is also sometimes foreign ("minced" for "ground" meat, for example). With photos throughout, the book sets a standard for Thai cookbooks to come while helping many cooks achieve the true, richly exotic cuisine. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of Thai cooking lore, history and recipes can be as daunting as it is comprehensive. A description of the country, its various socioeconomic groups (called muang) and its culinary history is lengthy and perhaps a little too in-depth. While Thompson's enthusiasm for his subject is palpable, readers may be anxious to get to the actual recipes, but the first one does not appear for nearly 200 pages, after an essay on Thai superstitions and a glossary of ingredients such as bai yor, a tobacco-like plant, and dried lily stalks. The recipes are thorough and authentic, and while they call for many items that may be hard to find, Thompson good-naturedly provides alternatives to most of them. Thailand's signature strong flavors are in evidence in dishes such as Bream Simmered with Pickled Garlic Syrup and a Salad of Pork, Young Ginger and Squid. Recipes are divided sensibly into soups, curries, salads and the like, but one chapter simply titled "Menus" contains various dishes that work together to form a traditional Thai meal (menus such as one that includes Prawn and Lemongrass Relish; Egg Mousse with Pineapple, Corn and Salted Duck Eggs; and Deep-Fried Bean Curd with Crab, Pork and Spring Onions are intriguing). A chapter on snacks and street foods offers additional tasty choices such as Rice Cakes with Chili, Prawn and Pork Sauce and Egg Nets, lacy crpe-like wrappers created by drizzling beaten egg into a hot wok that are stuffed with a pork and shrimp mixture. The dessert chapter also provides instructions for creating Smoked Water, flavored using a special candle with a wick on both ends.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ten Speed Press; 1st edition (August 27, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1580084621
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1580084628
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.01 x 1.71 x 9.82 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #100,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Bangkok Travel Guides
- #10 in Thai Cooking, Food & Wine
- #636 in Celebrity & TV Show Cookbooks

Customer Reviews:
561 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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E.M.

Thorough exploration of Thai Cuisine

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 25, 2022

Verified Purchase

I like the thoroughness of this cookbook. You would be able to pour over this book for hours and get an understanding of Thai food, ingredients, etc. And then you can work through recipes. Although many obscure ingredients are mentioned in this book, most of the recipes seem to call for ingredients that you can find in an Asian grocery store.
I saw one review that mentioned the small portion sizes, but i suspect that is because, in Thai cuisine, there is not one main dish, but several dishes served together, with rice. Small individual portions of of ingredients like shrimp paste can be frozen after a jar is opened, so that is not wasted.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Alexander Kobulnicky

Practically unusable

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is such a tempting cookbook. Over six hundred pages of Thai recipes, discourses on the theory of Thai cooking and dining, and every indication of being “authentic”

But it’s barely useable.

One problem is that it’s Australian. You might not think that would be a big issue for this American reviewer, but lots of ingredients are available in Thailand and Australia (which has a large Thai community) and not America. Every second recipe calls for hog plums, long-leafed coriander, bottle gourd or Siamese cassia.

But that’s a problem with a lot of foreign cookbooks, and I can make substitutions (although you wind up making so many substitutions, what was the point of buying a cookbook?)

A more unnecessary problem with the book is the scaling. Every recipe makes a *tiny* portion. And if you try to scale them up… it becomes clear that something is wrong. Take the coconut noodles. I like coconut noodles and I make them a lot. Here’s the ingredients:

1.5 C coconut milk
1 T yellow bean sauce
1 T palm sugar
1 T tamarind water
3 - 4 T fish sauce
4 uncooked shrimp
2 oz minced pork
2 oz silken tofu
2 red shallots (no weight given, grr)
Large pinch of roasted chili powder
Pinch of sugar
2 oz of rice noodles
1 T Chinese chives

So, do you see what’s wrong? Nobody is going to make *two ounces* of noodles at a time. If you try to scale it up to 8 oz, the minimum I would consider a reasonable meal, you are suddenly using a quart and a half of coconut milk. Nobody is going to eat (drink?) 8 ounces of noodles swimming in an ocean of coconut milk. Maybe in Australia, I don’t know.

This phenomenon is repeated over and over again. A recipe sounds tempting, you go over the ingredients, it looks normal, you get set to scale it up, and suddenly you’re using 20 shallots.

I’ve done a fair amount of Thai cooking in my day, and maybe I’m not prepared for such a cosmic level of authenticity, but I have a hard time believing that this is how Thai people enjoy their meals.

Before you spend $45 on this cookbook, if you’re not prepared to go down the rabbit hole with Mr Thompson, make sure you’re prepared to rewrite all the recipes yourself.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Geoff Puterbaugh

This is the "bible" for Thai cooking

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is almost 700 pages long and goes into detail about every aspect of Thai cooking. I haven't finished reading it yet -- that may be a few years away! -- but I have read enough to see that it is solid and extremely well-informed. This is NOT an amateur effort.

For example, one thing that may seem "backwards" to foreigners is the very idea that when you are eating, you are eating RICE. Those other dishes that go with the rice -- the curries, soups and salads that people rave about -- are generically known as "kab khaaw" -- "with rice." The author gets this point absolutely right.

Another point of distinction: where other books may mention sticky rice and jasmine rice, this book has a CHAPTER devoted to the history and cultivation of rice.

The only downside is that the recipes can be extraordinarily complex and time-consuming, not such a swell idea if you are cooking for one. On the other hand, if you're a member of the royal family, or simply very rich, you can have it all done for you. It's one of the reasons food is getting simpler these days: you have to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. And is it worth working ten hours to enjoy ten minutes of wonderful food?

Still, all this says nothing against this book, which is a flat-out masterpiece. And some of the recipes are so tempting that I'll probably give them a go, sooner or later. At the very least, the author has written down true Thai recipes for future generations, and deserves huge credit for that.

The photographs are superb as well.

For those who only occasionally aspire to the summit, I still recommend Real Thai: The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking for everyday use. This would be for people who actually buy their curry pastes ready-made at the market, rather then whomping them up at home. In any case, if you have these two books, it's very hard to go wrong.

Highest possible recommendation!

18 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

O. J. Townend

The definitive guide to cooking real Thai food at home

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

If you are looking for the authoritative guide on how to prepare proper Thai food then I would say look no further. After years of owning this book there have been a myriad of 'oohs' and 'aahs' as we've enjoyed a variety of Thai dishes cooked at home.

If you are looking for a very simple introduction to Thai cooking (and just want to whip up a quick Thai green curry), then this is probably not the best place to start, as many of the recipes involve some quite specific and time-consuming preparation.

Whilst some of the other reviewers have mentioned a number of hard-to-find ingredients, you should be ok if you have either an asian/international/large supermarket nearby. Most of the time, the large majority of ingredients will revolve around galangal/palm sugar/tamarind etc, but I generally found that more often than not it was just one ingredient that ended up being hard to source; 'hydrolysed lime water' being one such memorable culprit!

This however is the necessary evil that comes with having such an authentic guide to Thai food and on that front it's an absolute winner. On more than one occasion in the last few years we've visited Thai restaurants and found that what we could cook at home was actually tastier, which is all thanks to this book. If you love Thai food, live near a good/large supermarket and know your way around a kitchen then I would heartily recommend this!

33 people found this helpful

J

Too many bad recipes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

Not one for lengthy reviews, so: I'm a competent home chef who enjoys complex cooking, and thought this book would be right up my street. Having tried three recipes, I'm very disappointed though. If followed by the letter, it has produced 2 unpalatably salty dishes (the source of which I guess is the fish sauce, but it's not an ingredient I'm particularly familiar with, so look to the recipe for guidance), and one that was so rich (I think the coconut cream was the problem) as to be inedible.

I suspect there are some partially-correct excellent recipes in here - but also suspect that it will take a fair bit of trial and error through modification to make them palatable.

4 people found this helpful

Rebecca

Authentic recipes that are simply too complicated

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 30, 2018

Verified Purchase

I really wanted to love this book. After much research on the quintessential Thai cooking book, I found this one. David Thompson not only has owned Thai restaurants in Bangkok, Australia and London (one of them from memory may have even been awarded a Michelin star or two), but put together recipes that are certainly authentic. The issues with this cookbook are too many difficult to find ingredients and too long to make the dishes. Perhaps that's what's needed with traditional dishes, but it's not user friendly for the most of us.

3 people found this helpful

Nak Muay

Wonderful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

Great cookbook, easy to follow authentic recipes that are well presented.

The ingredients are now easily available in the UK. I will never buy another paste ever again.

Normally I tend to cook the same recipes which instantly appeal to me, with this book I just randomly select dishes. So far I've yet to be disappointed.

10 people found this helpful

J

Detailed Authentic Recipes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

It's refreshing to explore recipes that have been researched extensively, written with care and passion. The recipes do ask for more ingredients, time & patience but the end result is authentic thai food. David explains the historical background of many of these dishes, so it's clear this book is a lifetime of research and I'm glad he's been able to put these into a book that helps celebrate and preserve the recipes. Many modern day cookbooks corner cut with an emphasis on speed, this book doesn't so that extra step or two or another ten minutes prep make all the difference.

This will be a book that I will use for years to come.

One person found this helpful

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