Cracking the Coconut: Classic Thai Home Cookingby Su-Mei Yu
Morrow, 326 pp, $30
In her new cookbook Cracking the Coconut, Su-Mei Yu takes the purist, authentic route to reproducing the incredible food of her homeland. And this is, surprisingly, a quite novel approach in these times of shortcuts and convenience. She places great emphasis on preparing Thai food as it used to be done, to achieve the pure, intense flavor of Thai cuisine as it was meant to be eaten.
The purist approach means you use a mortar and pestle to pound your curry pastes instead of opening the short, squatty can of paste that you bought at the market. It means you roast, peel, and massage your own coconuts to extract real coconut cream and coconut milk instead of opening the can of coconut milk that contains flour as an emulsifier. That does not mean, however that you shouldn’t use the food processor to grind the coconut flesh with the water prior to pressing out the cream. Nor should you throw away the electric spice grinder to use for pulverizing your fresh-roasted spices. Su-Mei Yu may be a purist, but she’s not a fool.
The author leads the reader through a thoroughly entertaining and enlightening tale of the development of Thai cuisine: from the seasonings of fermented fish, wild onions, and white peppercorns of the ancients to the fish sauce, shallots, and prikk sodd chiles of today, from the basic seasoning pastes of salt, garlic, white pepper, and cilantro root to the never-ending variety of complex curry pastes of recent times. And she constantly stresses the key to the best of Thai cuisine: that it be prepared with only the freshest of ingredients, with the most traditional of methods.
Cracking the Coconut begins with a thorough discussion of the Thai kitchen and the tools to be found within. She then launches into the methods and concepts utilized by every classic Thai home cook, with descriptive contrasts between “the Thai way” as opposed to “the Western way.” The chapters are arranged in a clever way, starting with the building blocks (rice and coconut), and progressing onto the more complex dishes (curries, salads, and noodles).
Cracking the Coconut contains 175 exquisite recipes that are very clearly written and easy to understand and follow. Yu owns one of the most highly acclaimed Thai restaurants in the country, so the recipes are all tested and foolproof. Follow her careful, simple instructions, and you will taste Thai food as you never have before. Doing it the correct way may take a bit longer, but the results are astonishing.
This article appears in December 15 • 2000.
