Every other weekend, I review a cookbook in an attempt to lend
some guidance in a field that has become overrun. These days everyone is
writing cookbooks and it’s incredibly upsetting to buy a dud and have
it sit on your shelf for years – staring at you, mocking your poor
judgment.
If there is one cuisine that I’m probably most
unfamiliar with it’s the Southeast Asian cuisine. Every time I see a
recipe that comes from that region, there are probably more ingredients
that I
don’t recognize than ingredients I do recognize.
It’s
not that I don’t try. I really am starting to learn some basics, but I
think it’s kind of hard unless you’ve actually been to the region in
question. Luckily, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, the authors of “
Hot Sour Salty Sweet”
spent enough time there to become regional experts. Even if you’ve
never been there, if you have any interest in learning about some of the
magical dishes and culture of Southeast Asia, this is the book for you.
The River Road
When
the authors decided to set out on the journey that became this book,
they were searching for some unifying trait that could link the cuisines
of all of the Southeastern regions. Much like countries in the
Mediterranean area have distinct elements to them, they found something
similar.
As they got more into their trip though, they realized
that the journey wasn’t exactly what they thought it would be. They kept
coming back to one centralized thing: The Mekong River.
“So,
our initial goal of eating our way through Southeast Asia evolved into
the somewhat specific goal of exploring the food of the Mekong region by
eating our way along the river, from Yunnan to Vietnam. Like students
in a life drawing course, instead of drawing the entire model, we found
ourselves drawing only an arm, an elbow, a hand.”
Journey through Photos
One
thing I loved about this book before even really getting into the
recipes, was the photos. As the two authors traveled along the river
they took stunning photos of the people and the geography. Of course,
there are photos of the food, but the photos of the region were more
interesting I thought.
As someone who has never been to this area
of the world, I found myself just leafing through the book looking at
all the great photos. Rice fields, street vendors, lush river deltas and
near-third world streets give the entire book a very unique feel. Even
if you never cook a recipe out of this book, it would be a fantastic
coffee book and is really fun to page through.
Hot Sour Salty Sweet
You
figure out how the book got its name very early on. Those are the
flavor profiles that each dish will balance. Even beyond each individual
recipe, each menu will try to balance those flavors. Once you start to
identify which ingredients in Southeastern cooking give each of these
traits, it becomes easier to adjust a recipe to your liking. Fish sauce,
for example, will add a salty background to any dish. So by adding a
few drops of fish sauce to something, you can bring out a salty element.
The authors do a good job of walking you through different recipes and how those recipes balance these four tastes.
Sauces, Chiles, and Salsas
The
chapters in this book are organized by food. I love that they start the
book with these items because they seem so integral to that cuisine. I
don’t think I’ve ever had Southeast food without some sort of dipping
sauce or chile paste or something to enhance the flavors of the food.
It’s fun and flavorful and one of my favorite parts of the meal.
Some
of these sauces are incredibly simple (like the fresh chile-garlic
paste which has 4 very standard ingredients) and some will require a bit
more effort. What shocked me though was that all seemed fairly doable.
None of the sauces or pastes required days of cooking and I think the
most ingredients one had was around 10, but most were in the 4-6
ingredient range.
It was demystifying and encouraging to see the
recipes laid out in such a straight forward manner. It made me want to
make some of them right away!
As a note, each recipe is also
classified by the region where the authors found it. They also provide
the original names for all of the dishes so you’ll see something like:
Thai Fish Sauce with Hot Chiles
[ prik nam pla – Thailand, Laos]
This
is probably helpful for some people, but since I’ve never been to any
of these places the extra classifications were a bit lost on me. You do
come away from it though with a feeling that towns hundreds of miles
from each other have a lot of cuisine elements in common.
After this chapter there are two fantastic chapters covering soups and salads, each chapter having about a dozen recipes.
Rice and Noodles
The
next two chapters really embody what I think of when I think of these
dishes. As the authors say, if rice is the bread of the Southeast then
noodles are the potatoes. They are basically a part of every meal, even
breakfast and dessert in some cases. One recipe that I definitely
earmarked was a fairly elaborate, but traditional Pad Thai – one of my
personal favorites. At 22 ingredients, it’s a substantial dish and some
of the ingredients may be hard to find, but nevertheless, you may see it
on Macheesmo in the future.
Meats and Veggies
There
are entire chapters that follow the rice and noodles chapters on
vegetables, seafood, poultry, beef and pork. This is when you start to
really get the impression of how thorough this book is.
The authors leave no recipe unwritten it seems. You have to love that!
Street Food
Maybe
the best chapter in the book, in my opinion, is one of the last ones
which discusses all of the interesting street foods available in a
typical Southeastern village. The recipe that I must make immediately is
the pork dumpling recipe. The authors finally shed some light on the
dough that’s used to get that great texture (Asian tapioca!). Again, I’m
not sure where to find that, but I can probably hunt it down.
This
book is a work of art in my opinion. It’s visually stunning, very
well-written, and includes hundreds of recipes. Coming in at around 350
pages, the authors really take the time to take you along with them as
they traveled along the river in search of great food.
If you are at all interested in Southeast Asian cuisine, this is one of the best books I’ve seen on the area. “
Hot Sour Salty Sweet”
would be a great addition to your cooking library if you want to start
experimenting with Asian food and can’t afford the plane ticket and
decades it would to replicate their experiences.