Cookbook Review: Hot Sour Salty Sweet
Written by: Lasamee Kettavong
Edited by: Dary Dyer
Photo: Lasamee Kettavong, Hot Sour Salty Sweet cookbook
Whenever I visit Recycled Books, the largest indie bookstore in Texas, I visit three sections in particular. It’s the kind of bookstore you have to enter with a mission in mind since it’s enormous and housed in the historic Wright Opera House in Denton, taking up all three floors.
I pause at the Asian Studies section to try to find a book about Asians in Texas that I once saw years ago but didn’t purchase, and it haunts me to this day that I left it there. I spend time in the Vietnam War section looking for memoirs and perusing accounts from people who might mention Laos, and I wonder if it’s possible for me to rally for a shelf or two of books about the Secret War. And then I visit the cookbook section, where I have found many gems to add to my partner’s and my collection. This is where Hot Sour Salty Sweet, a culinary journey through Southeast Asia, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, beamed at me from a stand-up display on the shelves.
Hot Sour Salty Sweet is a hefty cookbook, in weight and in story. It’s twenty years old, and that adds to what a treasure this book is. I have another Southeast Asian cuisine cookbook that has no mention of Laos at all, but the authors of Hot Sour Salty Sweet thankfully and thoughtfully included history and recipes from my motherland.
The voice that the authors use to describe Southeast Asian history and cuisine is respectful and admiring; their experiences stir up a taste of envy because I haven’t yet been able to take this culinary journey on my own to experience eating Lao food at the river market or from a street vendor in town. I appreciated their musing that “[p]erhaps it is because we are foreigners and have so much to learn,” that guided their choices, desiring to eat and spend time in smaller towns and villages.
And Alford and Duguid offer up a sense-evoking analogy that I had never thought to combine, juxtaposing food and fabric:
Food and textiles are for us equally full of meaning. Both are art disguised as domesticity, personal expression woven into necessity, care and nurturing transformed into color, taste, and feel…there is a sense of tradition kept alive, and there is also beauty. (160)
If you have seen textiles from Southeast Asia, then you know of the intricate patterns, the mix of colors, and the vibrancy of the fabric that some would say is also what the food from the region looks like. Bright, inviting, beautiful.
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This cookbook follows a similar structure to most: general information and background at the beginning and a brief description before each major section. Starting with describing “the river, the people, [and] the food,” the authors set the scene for the upcoming photographs, descriptions, and recipes to follow.
One section to note is the “dishes for every occasion” pages that feature the authors’ recommendations for particular situations and which dishes to serve at them. It’s relatable and allows the home cook or party host to peruse the cookbook for whatever kind of soiree they’re throwing. Though it’s subjective, I can’t help but agree with them that sai oua (spicy northern sausage) would be perfect “to be served with drinks, tapas style.”
Before each major section that focuses on a certain ingredient (rice and rice dishes, noodles, and so on), and sprinkled throughout, are brief narratives related to the recipes that will follow. Each section introduction is detailed, thoughtful, and appropriate.
Discovering recipes and cooking techniques that correlate with dishes my mother would cook but that I couldn’t identify or fully figure out was delightful. It’s something that I always hope to find within the pages when I pick up a more general cookbook on Southeast Asian cuisine. I partially thought that my mother was just “winging it” when she’d whip up something aromatic, spicy, and delicious that I’d never had before, and I now realize that she was taught in a similar way by her own mother.
Photo: Lasamee Kettavong, “Mom's hands making yum salat and slicing boiled eggs like a pro.”
Although I grew up speaking Lao with my parents and siblings, some words, food-related or not, still escape me. I appreciate that words and their synonyms for different dishes are written in Lao phonetically in Hot Sour Salty Sweet. I had a conversation with my mother about the differences between a tom (more like a clear broth soup) and a gaeng (more like a stew) while visiting with her and flipping through the cookbook. Though sometimes the photos on the pages on or facing a recipe don’t match with the words or topic on the nearest pages, they’re still beautiful photos that make Hot Sour Salty Sweet a rich and engaging cookbook. A part of me balks at the idea of calling Southeast Asian broth “basic” (though I realize that this has more to do with the base of the soup than with the associations with the adjective “basic”) and rejects the generalization, but it remains true: many soups start with the same ingredients.
One of the things that I like about this cookbook is that I’m able to compare notes: differences in word usage, subtle differences in flavors, which ingredients are used similarly or differently across cuisines. A flavor that doesn’t appear in the title but deserves an honorable mention is bitterness. In various recipes, there is an ingredient that gives the dish just a touch of bitterness, whether that’s bitter melon or greens. “There’s a certain acid-bitter aroma and taste that appears in at least one dish per meal and is strangely appetizing” (245).
Another notable part of Hot Sour Salty Sweet that warms me is the idea of morning market noodles. The authors give special mention to morning market noodles as a story in the cookbook, and perhaps I’m pleased about this because I want to justify my own desire to eat noodles for breakfast. It makes sense to me though, to awaken from one’s dreams and then seek comfort and nourishment from a steaming bowl of noodles and delicate but hearty broth.
Photo: Lasamme Kettavong, Morning Market Noodles
The cookbook is a collection of such stories and recipes that spans a few hundred pages, which is why I’m sure as I continue to use it, I’ll find more hidden gems. Some that stand out to me are the recipes that my mother had never written down but made familiar to me by feeding me this food, like yum salat (salad with a Lao and French influenced dressing). Other things that caught my eye from this cookbook were methods like reducing coconut milk (182) for use in khao poon, and special ingredients that distinguish Lao cuisine from its neighbors, like khai pen (165) and padaek.
Curiously, padaek is substituted with the milder, filtered fish sauce where it’s called for in recipes. The authors write “[a]s for foreigners, the assertive salty fermented fish taste of padek or prahok or pla raa or mama is more than many are prepared to take on. All of which is to say that we’ve left out the padek or prahok or pla raa or mam” (220). I can say this: I understand. But I think it’s important that moving forward, we include and celebrate padaek. Lean in to the unknown and what you might not feel prepared for, especially with Southeast Asian cuisine. You will be delighted.
Still: “What is it about fish sauce that makes it mildly addictive? We know it’s not just us. Whole nations feel the same way.”
Alford and Duguid do an excellent job at showing the connections and shared ingredients, flavors, and techniques in Southeast Asian cuisine while also underlining distinctions between regions and countries. They refer to the history of the land, the water, and the remnants of war embedded in the land delicately and make note of observances that speak to the perseverance of the people and tradition enduring. “The work of watering and weeding the riverbank vegetable gardens in Sangkhom, as elsewhere in northeast Thailand and in Laos, seems mostly to fall to the women in the family” (210). I would recommend this cookbook to someone who enjoys being able to see the bigger picture and then diving into showcased ingredients and the dishes that exemplify that ingredient for each region/country in Southeast Asia.