The Original Thai Cookbook

You can't go wrong if you want to make Thai food. This is a great book

We spent six weeks in Thailand, traveling the country from top to bottom. We kept a daily diary based upon what we ate and where we ate it. Most of the places we ate at were tiny cafe-style shops with one person both cooking and running the place. Loving Thai food, I made copious notes of the ingredients I could identify by sight, and asked the cook to point to ingredients I didn't understand. If he/she didn't have the product, I would write out a phonetic pronounciation of the Thai word, then go to the local market and ask the merchants to show me this item. (Needless to say, the vendors had a good laugh at my wild gesturing and mis-pronunciation.) Thailand was a great adventure and a feast for the palate. I came home with a dozen recipes of my favorite foods and went straight to the bookstore to compare the ingredients of "my" recipes with those of the Thai cookbooks available. Jennifer was dead-on. Her recipes were almost identical in simple ingredient composition and perfectly replicated the fresh flavors we had so recently experienced. Simple, delicious, and always successful. Jennifer demonstrates that good Thai cooking can be easy!

I've travelled extensively and frequently in Thailand since 1972 and find this cookbook to be the single best authoratative guide to Thai cooking in English. It helps she gives the Thai spelling of ingredients, as you can take it with you to a Thai grocery store and be sure you are getting exactly what you need. She gives clear directions, especially for using ingredients new to a Western cook. And the recipes taste not only terrific, but 'right.'

First it contains practically all the recipes you could eat in Thailand while on vacation and some more. Second it not only uses original ingredients, but also think to indicate alternatives in a well-done glossary, so that you don't necesseraly need to get (at great cost) (all the) exotic ingredients. Third it also contains some valuable and interesting informations/background about Thailand and its cooking. I was delightfully surprised how much I could do with this little,affordable paperback and could only praised it. PS: the recipes taste great ... really ought to taste it.