I am a huge admirer of Adam Liaw’s work, and he deserves to be as well-known outside Australia as he is within its shores. His output is prodigious and of the highest standard, and he is rightly lauded as a trusted source on a wide range of culinary cultures. He’s a meticulous recipe developer/writer, a natural teacher, an illuminating broadcaster, and an understanding cook. His latest title, Asian Home Cooking, is perhaps his greatest accomplishment so far. It’s an absolute stonker of a book, enormous in size, in range, in ambition, in achievement. Prophecies are always a mug’s game, but I feel on pretty safe ground saying that this will be regarded as a classic long into the future.
Now, normally I’d rattle off a shortlist of recipes to give you an indication of what the book holds, but in this case it is simply impossible. No shortlist could do it justice or reflect its range. I can’t even give you a list of the countries covered without writing at far too great a length. What I can tell you is that if you have any true interest in food and cooking, I feel you need this book. It contains excellent iterations of recipes you may already be familiar with, and will introduce you to many, many dishes you might well not have come across. Either way, Liaw makes you want to cook them immediately and gives you the confidence to realise you can. I feel perhaps I could have been more ambitious myself in choosing the recipe to share with you today, by which I mean I could have selected any number of recipes that are less-well known. But the reason I have gone for his Mapo Tofu is not because I wanted to play it safe, but because — selfishly, perhaps — I wanted very badly to have the recipe on nigella.com for evermore!
Extracted from Asian Home Cooking, Adam Liaw (Hardie Grant Books, RRP £35.00).
Photography by David Loftus.
