Pacific and Southeast Asian Cooking

I collected all the hardcover Time Life Foods of the World books and while I have occasionally cooked from various volumes, I'm now actually reading them all cover to cover.

The author of this volume of this series (and unfortunately several others) has no real connection to the cuisine. The same author who wrote the Japanese volume did this one as well and was a white American man. He seems to have had a real love of the foods of Asia and an adventurous spirit for trying things that perhaps most Americans didn't have at the time (especially with spicy foods). However, he is not a great spokesman for the cuisines that he was sampling for the first time on a trip he took specifically to write the book. Unsurprisingly, this is the book show more that I cringed the most at in terms of insensitive and even racist writing of all the volumes I've read so far. This guy also felt the need to regularly note how hot the women serving him food were in various countries which was irritating. I'm sure he was a product of his time but it did diminish my enjoyment of the book.

There weren't as many recipes that I am excited to cook in this volume either but I suspect that if I sought out modern books on Thai, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, and the other cuisines covered I would find more things I'm willing to try. When this book was written in 1970 most Americans probably wouldn't have had access to a lot of what they would need for the recipes or a basic understanding of the foods being described and I think the recipes are written in an overly complicated way to account for that.

As always, of course, the photos in the book are really cool. It's worth having for the pictures alone. My favorites in this volume are of parties. They seem to have made a point of photographing the food at celebrations and gatherings in each nation covered and they're great. show less