David Thompson - Thai Street Food

The extent of Thai Street Food's appeal depends entirely on your attitude towards street vendors ("delicious quick snack" or "hello, salmonella"). It's all very well to be given instructions on how to make great crunchy prawn cakes, but the risk with a book about street food is that the sense memories from the real thing will override the inclination to re-discover it on home turf.

Thai Street Food keeps the best of what you might find in Thailand (sweet banana roti! Glass noodles with mushroom and bean curd!) and intersperses it with Western-style recipes that use Thai ingredients and flavours.

The focus is firmly on assembling and simple pan-frying. While this is a neat deviation from traditional cookbooks, it makes you wonder if you really needed a recipe to cook grilled bananas. However, there is something to be said for a whole book of tasty, easy snacks, meals and deserts- all too often we've looked for a straightforward recipe requiring fresh (and few) ingredients only to wind up attempting something complicated, French and full of butter.

Be warned, though: if you don't like coconut milk, prawns or twenty photos of Thailand between each set of recipes, you may find the repetition of these elements in Thai Street Food to be a pain in the baht.

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