Pok Pok Food and stories from the streets, homes, and roadside restaurants of Thailand

when the seasonal cookbook offerings include titles like "Fifty Shades of Kale" and an updated edition of "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook," choice is not a problem. The yearly avalanche includes something for everyone. There are books from star chefs and famous restaurants, the latest go-rounds from tried-and-true food writers, the now customary exercises in vegetable-worship, armchair-tourist cookbooks and one book that defies description. That's Heston Blumenthal's HISTORIC HESTON (Bloomsbury, $200), the one with the recipe for "ragoo of pigs' ears." Blumenthal is the culinary wizard behind the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and, more relevant in this context, the Hinds Head, a converted 15th-century tavern just down the road that specializes in historic English dishes. Indulging his antiquarian interests, he has taken a wandering route through history's byways, from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period, and recreated his own versions of forgotten dishes like meat fruit (a pre-Hidor bit of trompe l'oeil), the medieval cheesecake known as a sambocade and an alcohol-soaked Victorian "tipsy cake." No one is going to cook from this book. Not many will be able to lift it. "Historic Heston" is a headfirst dive down the rabbit hole, with Blumenthal as the Mad Hatter, pleased to offer you, as it happens, his recipe for mockturtle soup. Years ago, when star chefs and great restaurants began turning out cookbooks, the approach tended to be educational and high-minded, with an emphasis on techniques and the secrets behind the cuisine. Now everything is personal. The chef wants to be your friend, to share his or her experiences. In DANIEL: My French Cuisine (Grand Central Life & Style, $60), Daniel Boulud, the celebrated owner of Daniel in Manhattan and its many offshoots, conducts a guided tour of his life and the parts of France he knows best, beginning with the farm near Lyon where he grew up. From there it's a giant leap to the fearsomely complex, drop-dead elegant dishes from Daniel that take up about half the book. Boulud goes a bit Heston in the second half. With essays by Bill Buford, the book records Boulud's painstaking efforts to recreate a Lyonnais classic like pork leg cooked in hay or a turbot soufflé decorated with zucchini and ovendried tomatoes in a slanted checkerboard pattern. Relief arrives in a chapter devoted to humble seasonal dishes from Lyon, Alsace, Normandy and Provence. John Besh also has an interesting life story to tell in JOHN BESH. Cooking From the Heart: My Favorite Lessons Learned Along the Way (Andrews McMeel, $40). A native of New Orleans, he served with the Marines in Operation Desert Storm, then studied at the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he trained at a game-oriented inn in the Black Forest, at a small French restaurant in Lacombe, La., and in restaurants in Avignon and St.-Remyde-Provence before making his mark back in Louisiana with a highly distinctive reinterpretation of its regional cooking. His restaurant August is consistently rated one of New Orleans's finest. Not many readers are going to take the plunge and try the wild boar's-head pâté, a signature dish at the Spielweg in Münstertal, Besh's first stop as an apprentice, but schupfnudeln (long potato dumplings from the Baden region), slow-cooked rabbit with creamy rosemary turnips and the stuffed pasta known as maultaschen are well within reach. There are a few too many usual-suspect recipes, but Besh makes an engaging guide, with a rich fund of anecdotes, for his somewhat eccentric personal journey. Star-restaurant cookbooks face the same challenge as cookbooks by star chefs. How do you faithfully represent the place without recipes that require a full kitchen brigade to execute? Michael Anthony, the executive chef and a partner at Gramercy Tavern, starts with an advantage in THE GRAMERCY TAVERN COOKBOOK (Clarkson Potter, $50), namely, the restaurant's style of cuisine: clean, contemporary and not too complicated. In an interview with New York Metro, Anthony explained that he wanted his mother in rural Ohio to be able to use the book. Mom can probably handle the recipe for chilled corn soup, bright and fresh with squeezings of lime and a touch of honey, or the one for pickled Swiss chard stems, a minimalist gem. Recipes are organized by season. Slowroasted pork shoulder with bacon broth and corn bread, a winter recipe, feels just about right as the weather turns. There are many more like it. The abiding mystery is this: Why did it take nearly 20 years for one of the city's most beloved restaurants to put all this down on paper? Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, the chefs and owners of the cult London restaurant Ottolenghi, also manage to translate their style in ottolenghi: The Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, $35). This cookbook, their first, arrives belatedly from Britain, its way prepared by the runaway success of their second and third books, "Plenty" and "Jerusalem." Like Anthony, the authors hold a winning card with their cuisine, which emphasizes simplicity, freshness and seasonality, although rooted in different soil, that of the Middle East. The authors dazzle. This is a cookbook with no slack, just page after page of recipes with the kind of nifty twist that elevates humble ingredients - lots of fruits, grains and nuts - without feeling forced. There's a wonderful inevitability to dishes like cauliflower and cumin fritters with lime yogurt or the arugula and horseradish sauce the authors use to dress beef or their oxtail stew with pumpkin and cinnamon. The list goes on and on. Home cooks who want to branch out geographically are in luck. Japan, Thailand and Spain come into focus in unexpected ways in three highly attractive books that seamlessly blend pleasure and instruction. You can read them with profit, then cook adventurously. The few steps to a stove have always been the cheapest and fastest form of travel. POK POK: Food and Stories From the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand (Ten Speed Press, $35), by Andy Ricker with J. J. Goode, comes to the rescue of untold thousands of diners in love with Thai flavors but bored by what Ricker, the founder of the Pok Pok restaurants in Portland, Ore., and New York, calls the "pick-aprotein rainbow curries" and "sweet piles of phat thai" on the limited, highly standardized menus at so many Thai restaurants in the United States. As a tutorial on Thai cuisine and its principal regional styles, "Pok Pok" can't be beat. Ricker is enthusiastic, prodigiously well informed and full of colorful stories from his many trips to Thailand. Nearly every page brings a revelation. Loop meuang, the dark-brown minced pork salad served in northern Thailand, bears no resemblance to the mound of sweetish minced pork from central Thailand served in most American Thai restaurants. When he first encountered it, Ricker says, he didn't even recognize it as Thai. "It was fragrant, pungent, bitter - and wonderful," he writes. "There was no obvious sweetness, except from the crunchy bits of fried garlic and shallots scattered on top. There was definitely no lime or coconut milk." And here it is. The only snag in "Pok Pok" is ingredients. Many can be found, but many can't, or at least not easily. There are more than enough makable dishes, however. Some are disarmingly simple, like grilled corn with salty coconut cream. Others, like Burmese-style pork-belly curry, require many steps but deliver a whopping payoff. Jeff Koehler does justice to another regionally complex country in SPAIN: Recipes and Traditions From the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucía (Chronicle Books, $40). The author, a food writer who has lived in Spain for many years, focuses on roots cooking, the simple, flavorful dishes that warm Spanish hearts. Koehler is an expert guide, providing highly informative headnotes to each recipe, often explaining regional variations in the same recipe and suggesting some clever tips. In his recipe for clams with oloroso sherry, for example, he suggests substituting dry white wine with a little brandy if sherry isn't at hand. These pages abound in seductively rustic dishes like pork baked in a salt crust and served with fruit compote, chestnut purée or a blue cheese sauce. Japanese cuisine can seem chilly and aloof, an endless catalog of refinement. Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explode that stereotype in Japanese soul cooking: Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura, and More From the Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond (Ten Speed Press, $27.50). Spaghetti? Sure. Ketchup? You bet. Mayo on the side? Just try to make it Kewpie brand. Ono and Salat serve up dollops of fascinating food history, and some very good recipes, as they explore the vernacular dishes that constitute Japanese diner food. These are the popular fusion dishes - most dating from the late 19th century, many from the postwar period - that soothe the Japanese soul the way cheeseburgers and fries cheer Americans. With zest and an irrepressible you-can-do-it attitude, the authors explain and write the scripts for gyoza dumplings, curries, tonkatsu, the floured and deep-fried dishes known as kara-age, tempuras, soba, udon and other humble Japanese fare. The ramen chapter is especially rich, but toward the end, some really odd creations await, including hamburg (a ground beef, pork and panko-crumb patty covered in a ketchup-based sauce) and mentaiko spaghetti, a 1960s-vintage pasta tossed with spicy marinated pollock roe. Mollie Katzen leads the vegetarian pack with the HEART OF THE PLATE: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $34.99). It's been more than 30 years since her scribbled notes and recipes evolved into the groundbreaking "Moosewood Cookbook," and she's done a lot of cooking and thinking in the meantime, paring down, eliminating fat and developing a style she describes as "sharper, livelier, spicier, lighter and more relaxed than it used to be." About half the recipes in the book are vegan, without the pain. Some can go either way, like farfalle pasta and rapini in a creamy walnut sauce that becomes vegan when soy milk is substituted for cow's milk. Salads - bright, colorful and vibrant - are particularly well done. Many can do service as a main course, like her grilled bread and kale salad with red onions, walnuts and figs. Unreconstructed meat eaters will want to give a big bro hug to John Currence for pickles, pigs and whiskey: Recipes From My Three Favorite Food Groups (and Then Some) (Andrews McMeel, $40), a culinary rebel yell in a new key. Currence, the chef and owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss., does a lot of hootin', hollerin' and carryin' on. A lot of cussin' too, not something you normally find in a cookbook. Tune out the noise, ignore the idiotic music recommendations for each dish ("Cock the Hammer," by Cypress Hill, for ham stock), and you still have a book full to bursting with imaginative New Southern recipes. Or maybe New New Southern, in the case of Kentucky soycollard kimchi or rosemary-pickled lamb hearts. Currence really works the territory. Steen's cane syrup, a Louisiana classic, brings an earthy sweetness to pork belly braised in ham stock. Bourbon-braised pork cheeks was a dish just waiting to happen, and the recommended side dish - creamy garlic-Parmesan grits - is typical of Currence's approach. Pick a Southern staple and take it on a foreign trip, or make it even more Southern. We have him to thank for a double-Bubba treat: okra and green onion hush puppies, accompanied by Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Finally, two confidence-builders. Some cookbooks challenge. Others perform the neat trick of convincing even beginners that it's possible to make guest-worthy food in a small, ill-equipped kitchen, the french kitchen cookbook: Recipes and Lessons From Paris and Provence (Morrow/ HarperCoiiins, $35) comes directly from the cooking classes Patricia Wells gives at her homes in Paris and Provence, so the lineup includes plenty of uncomplicated dishes that have been tested within an inch of their lives. Most require only a handful of ingredients and a few simple techniques. Even hesitant amateurs can turn out seared duck breast with figs and black currant sauce or tomato tatins made with store-bought puff pastry. Lidia Mattichio Bastianich and her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, do the same thing with Italian food in LIDIA'S COMMONSENSE ITALIAN COOKING (Knopf, $35), based on the public television series of the same name. The cowardly cook might start with the surefire chicken breasts, sliced thin and sautéed and simmered in a pan with olives, red onion, and orange juice flecked with orange zest. It doesn't get any easier than this, or tastier. The authors don't include song recommendations. May I suggest "Acquerello Napoletano," by Claudio Villa? ? online: Still hungry for culinary inspiration? For a quick look at 25 more cookbooks, visit nytimes.com/books. william grimes, a former restaurant criticfor The Times, is the author, most recently, of "Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York."

In his introduction, Ricker makes the modest proclamation that his cooking knowledge is limited when measured against Thailand's vast cuisine. However, this limitation has had no visible effect on his success, given that his eatery, Pok Pok, was recently rated by Bon Appetit as the eighth most important American restaurant. All one really needs to know about Ricker, and this finely detailed cookbook and travelogue, comes at the start of his recipe for fish-sauce wings. Sounding like a gourmand Allen Ginsberg, he writes, "I've spent the better part of the last twenty years roaming around Thailand, cooking and recooking strange soups, beseeching street vendors for stir-fry tips, and trying to figure out how to reproduce obscure Thai products with American ingredients." He spills out his acquired knowledge here across 13 chapters and nearly 100 recipes. Lessons learned along the way include the beauty of blandness as exhibited in his flavor-balanced "bland soup" with glass noodles, and waste not, want not, as showcased in recipes for stewed pork knuckles and grilled pork neck. Ricker's prose, as aided by food writer Goode, is captivating, whether he is discussing America's obsession with sateh, or when profiling characters he's encountered in his travels, such as Mr. Lit, his "chicken mentor" and Sunny, his "go-to guy in Chiang Mai." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Foreword by David Thompson "One more plate of laap--please, Andy," was my plea. I needed more. I had just finished a plate of this Northern Thai dish of chopped meat (pork, in this instance) mixed with spices and herbs. I have eaten laap many times before--it is a regional classic. However, this rendition was irresistible. The minced pork was rich and smoky, the spices bitter and tangy, the herbs enticingly aromatic. The combination of all these flavors left a wonderful taste that lingered long after I'd finished my last bite. I simply just had to order a second plate. I confess I was surprised by how good it was; really, it had no right to be so delicious. After all, I was sitting in Portland, Oregon--a far, far cry from Chiang Mai, the Northern Thai city that is this dish's home. I guess I shouldn't have been astonished. Andy may have opened his first Pok Pok restaurant in Portland, but the food he cooks has deep roots in Thailand. It might seem strange that this six-foot-tall Vermonter is cooking Northern Thai food so well, until you understand Andy's love for the Thais, their cuisine, and in particular the hazy mountainous province of Chiang Mai. Andy makes regular visits to Thailand, where he trawls the markets--watching, asking questions, and collecting recipes. He chats engagingly with local cooks, who share with him tips and techniques--but he is also a keen observer, and gets ideas and knowledge from furtively watching other, unsuspecting cooks. Either way, by whatever means, Andy gets the goods. Whenever Andy comes to Thailand, I see him in Bangkok, where I live, and occasionally we travel together up-country. Accompanying Andy as he pursues his culinary quarry can be exhausting. He moves quickly from shop to shop, market to market, or village to village with nary a regard for his fellow travelers. He walks past the stalls that don't pass muster, refusing to stop, while those of us in his wake bleat plaintively, wanting to eat, looking longingly at dishes he dismisses and leaves untouched. Mr. Ricker demands the best and thus he commands my respect, even if I do often end up hungry, tired, and sulky. Andy has turned his not being Thai into an advantage. He is not limited by an inherent belief, as many Thais are, that his mother's is the best and the only way to cook. His approach is much broader and more encompassing; he casts his culinary net wider, across all of Northern Thailand and its verdant and fertile fields. Andy first backpacked through Asia and landed in Thailand in 1987, around the time I was making those same laps. I am surprised I didn't run into him. Although, given the similarity of our quests, our mutual love for Thailand, and our crazy partying ways, it's quite possible we did. . . . Andy's moment of culinary epiphany came over a mushroom. Mine was over a serpent head fish, clearly demonstrating that we can't choose our moments. The objects of our inspiration--some fungi and a fish, respectively--might seem silly, but in the end, they prompted both of us to change the course of our lives, including how we eat and cook. I still recall that sour orange curry of serpent head fish, tart with tamarind leaves, plump with flavor. The seasoning, tastes, and textures of that curry transformed my understanding of Thai food. From then on I was hooked. I moved to Bangkok to learn about the city's remarkable cuisine, regal past, and sophisticated tastes, opening a few swank restaurants in the process. Meanwhile, Andy was researching up-country, eating his way through the north of Thailand. Later he opened the first Pok Pok restaurant in Portland on a maxed-out credit card, a mortgage, and with little capital. In the decade since then, he has established himself as an important voice in Thai cooking and an emissary of Northern Thai food internationally. I remember working with Andy in both New York City and Portland and being amazed at his rather informal approach to cooking, kitchens, and restaurants. His very first restaurant was built out of his kitchen and partially demolished house, the food served through a window onto his porch and into the backyard--much like some small countryside restaurant in Thailand. You see, I come from the dainty world of fine dining, where certain things--such as grilling over charcoal in smoky forty-four-gallon drums, backyard coconut pressing, drinking beer on the job out of glass jars, fermenting mustard greens on the roof, and more beer drinking--were simply not done (unfortunately). But the casual appearance of Andy's restaurants belies the rigorous, ambitious cooking that happens in his kitchens. He is obsessed with making the very best food he can. I admire the canny way he doctors his lime juice to approximate the taste of lime juice in Thailand, the resourceful way he finds and secures Thai produce, and his faithful adherence to Thai recipes, techniques, and tastes. The restaurants may not look terribly fancy, but inside, Andy and his Pok Pok crew are complete perfectionists, constantly adjusting and tinkering with their recipes to ensure everything is right. Andy has almost singlehandedly created a market for regional Thai cuisine in the United States. Such food was practically unknown in the US before Pok Pok, but now, many of the dishes he cooks are the objects of cultlike devotion. For proof of his swashbuckling success, simply observe the lines that wind down the street outside of the Pok Pok restaurants. People clamor for his food--a style of cooking that they didn't know existed before 2005. One excellent example is that delectable pork laap , which was as lip-smackingly good as any version I have found in Thailand. While eagerly waiting for my second plate, I looked across our table--with its now-empty plates of grilled sausages, noodle salads, soups, curries, and chili dips--to the other tables of equally replete and happy diners. I couldn't help but wonder, what would this damned skillful cook do next? Well, you're now holding Andy's latest project: the Pok Pok cookbook. In it, Andy chronicles Chiang Mai's wide-ranging culinary repertoire--including my longed-for pork laap , a sour orange curry quite similar to the one that first enthralled me so many years ago, and many other Northern dishes. This book is the product of years and years of research, practice, and experience, and clearly demonstrates why Andy and Pok Pok are so successful: great food; honest, practical advice and guidance; and a sincere desire to please without compromising the integrity of the cuisine. It's a winning recipe. ---------------------------------------------------------- Excerpted from Pok Pok by Andy Ricker, J. J. Goode All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.