David Thompson's Thai Food and Thai Street Food

David Thompson's Thai Food, published in 2002, is a work of the Thai kitchen written in English by an Australian-born cook who studied the cuisine at length in Thailand. Its anchor is the cooking of the central plains and the royal and aristocratic households of Bangkok, the tradition preserved in palace cookbooks and in the cremation volumes that Thai families print to commemorate the dead. Thai Street Food, which follows it, turns from the household and court table to the markets, stalls and roadside cooking of the same country.

Thai Food is arranged as a work of reference as much as a book of recipes. It opens with a long account of the history of the cuisine, its ingredients and its customs, and then sets out the dishes in the manner of a Thai meal, in which curries, relishes, salads, soups and fried dishes are eaten together with rice and balanced against one another. Thompson presents the Thai table as a composition, not a sequence of courses, and his recipes are written to be read within that frame. The dishes are given with their Thai names and their English meanings. The book draws on the written record of Thai cookery, and its debt to the older Thai authorities is open. Among them is the work of Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong, whose cookbook preserves the cooking of a noble household, and the tradition of cremation volumes, in which families set down the recipes of the departed. Thompson reads these texts as a cook, testing what they describe, and he restores to the English reader the idea that Thai cooking at its best is a refined court art, not only a rustic one. That emphasis on the palace kitchen, with its fine knife work, its careful pounding of pastes and its patience, runs through the whole book. The method of the book rests on the mortar and pestle. Curry pastes are pounded, not blended, in sequence from the driest and hardest ingredients to the softest, so that the aromatics release their oils and the paste takes on a smooth, cohesive body. Thompson also gives particular attention to the balance of salty, sour, sweet and hot, and to the quality of the ingredients on which that balance depends, among them galangal Alpinia galanga, makrut lime Citrus hystrix, holy basil Ocimum tenuiflorum and fresh coconut cream pressed from the grated flesh. Thai Street Food, the later book, widens the view to the food sold and eaten in the open: noodles, grilled meats, rice dishes, sweets and snacks prepared to order by cooks who often make one dish only. It is a different register from the first book, more concerned with the energy of the market than with the order of the household table, yet it keeps the same attention to the Thai name of each dish. Together the two books give the English-reading cook a view of the Thai kitchen from the palace and household on one side and the market and roadside on the other.