BOOK REVIEWS : Asian Cuisines...

“Exotic cuisines”--remember the ring those words used to have? You still see them on magazine pages and book jackets, but what they tend to mean now is that somebody hasn’t caught up with the real world.

“Exotic” honestly won’t do any more for the daily bread of the people who might have put together your television set in Kuala Lumpur or grown your table fruit in Chile. Or are perhaps your neighbors .

Even places that remain nearly closed to foreign traffic--for instance, Myanmar (formerly spelled, and still pronounced, Burma)--can never again seem exotic as things did before the world became so dizzyingly interconnected. I believe the global village, and not the caprice of jaded tastemakers deciding “Scratch French Classic” (or whatever), is the true reason American cooks are seeking out guides to less-explored culinary territories.

The tastemakers may not have done a great job of registering the facts of life, but it isn’t entirely their fault. There just aren’t enough competent and genuinely bicultural cooking interpreters to introduce the rest of us to the “new” cuisines.

Luckily, some cookbook publishers are beginning to take up the challenge. The appearance of handsome paperback introductions to four Asian cuisines in the past year from a single publisher, Chronicle Books, is a happy instance.

The Chronicle series led off last year with Nancie McDermott’s “Real Thai” and has continued with “Under the Golden Pagoda” by Aung Aung Taik, “The Korean Kitchen” by Copeland Marks with Manjo Kim, and “At the Japanese Table” by Lesley Downer. These attractive well-designed books would make someone a nice gift set--all the nicer in that the individual layouts seem to have been planned for contrast rather than uniformity.

The approaches of the four writers are also extremely divergent, which is great up to a point, but has a downside: Some fulfill expectations that others don’t even begin to address. Whether by fluke or for good reason, the strongest book (“Real Thai”) takes on the cuisine that has already put down the sturdiest popular roots on the American scene, while the least familiar food (Burmese) gets the poorest treatment.

On a less extreme level, Lesley Downer’s Japanese survey does a thoughtful job with a well-recognized area while “The Korean Kitchen” is a hard-working but not always very illuminating addition to an amazingly neglected field.

The prettiest book is surely “At the Japanese Table” (companion to a BBC television series that hasn’t been aired in this part of the world). It also ranks high for general sensitivity to its subject. True, you can buy a far more inclusive manual in Shizuo Tsuji’s “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art” (Kodansha Press: $29.95) or even find guides to sub-specialties like sushi, soba , or Japanese garnishes. But for a brief general introduction, this has no competition.

Downer’s aim apparently is to help the uninitiated understand a way of cooking and eating rather than to present a Japanese cordon bleu curriculum. The roughly 100 recipes (supplemented with Chris Turner’s color photographs and a lot of detailed directions for such procedures as skewering, garnish-cutting, makizushi -rolling, etc.) present good versions of ordinary Japanese dishes like plain miso soup, spinach with sesame dressing, salt-grilled fish, or “moon-viewing noodles.”

On the other hand, they also nod to the age of intercultural hybrids--duck breast simmered in a sauce bound with kuzu starch, “flower sushi” with “petals” of smoked salmon folded around rice, pan-braised sliced beef rolled around a trio of vegetables.

Downer astutely organizes her recipe chapters by Japanese cooking categories--e.g., steamed foods ( mushimono ) or one-pot dishes ( nabemono ) rather than American menu categories. In contrast to some who laud the supposed healthfulness of the Asian diet without facing up to its real emphases, she generally uses meat in modest amounts per person that underscore its historical rarity in Japan, and is no spendthrift with seafood either. Such choices in themselves do much to get neophytes off on the right educational foot.

If you know something about cooking you should be able to follow the pleasant, well-chosen recipes. I had no problems making the lovely chirinabe (a one-pot dish of fish, tofu and assorted vegetables briefly cooked in a light stock and served with several attractive accompaniments) or the salmon teriyaki. Those who might dither over how much liquid to use in the chirinabe (“a large saucepan” filled “two-thirds full”) or what size pan to use for sauteing the teriyaki ingredients, or who aren’t up to minor adjustments of timings and seasonings, may sometimes have a struggle.

This intelligent book would be even better with more attention to the resources of Japanese stores in the United States. The British-based author doesn’t seem aware that any American within reach of a large Japanese community can easily buy many characteristic ingredients like bamboo shoots, sour plums, chrysanthemum greens, or kamaboko (fish sausage) that don’t appear in her recipes. Another curious gap is the neglect of homemade pickles, a major aspect of the cuisine. Possibly Downer thought it wiser to do well by a fairly limited repertoire of ingredients and straightforward dishes than to unleash a flood of exotica and time-consuming rituals on the beginner. Certainly “At the Japanese Table” shows an impressive overall awareness of the balance between simplicity and authentic detail that is just what beginners need.

“Under the Golden Pagoda” also makes an effort to stress what is accessible and reasonable for American cooks--but not nearly so good an effort. Knowing little of Burmese food beyond occasional restaurant meals in this country and sketchy accounts in a handful of cookbooks, I hesitate to criticize anything as “inauthentic.” But Aung Aung Taik’s well-meant survey just doesn’t do the things a first guide to an unfamiliar cuisine ought to do. One comes away with the sense of an engaging personality, not of a disciplined teacher.

To start with the best features: Taik leaps into the subject with irreverent gusto and a welcome absence of mystifications. You will not find two-page rhapsodies about nearly extinct varieties of crayfish caught nowhere outside the Isthmus of Kra. Long a resident in the United States and entirely pragmatic about making do with what he finds here, the author aims to get people into the kitchen at once with the American ingredients that best fit the bill.

The roughly 140 recipes look to me like an attractive selection of dishes--but, considering how clearly the author states that Burmese in their own country live mostly on vegetables, fruit and rice--strangely weighted toward American preferences. Meat and poultry main dishes are heavily emphasized with amounts like two pounds of beef for four servings that would tax the enthusiasm even of dedicated carnivores. The recipe chapters go by American menu categories, even categories like “appetizers” that Taik acknowledges don’t exist in Myanmar. Comparatively little time is spent on trying to convey anything about Burmese daily meals.

Many recipes look well-worked and I can attest that the two I tried are just fine: a simple, ultra-garlicky steamed eggplant dish and the long, tedious, but gloriously worthwhile version of mohingar , the famous Burmese noodle and fish soup. (Taik greatly simplifies the elaborate garnishes that usually accompany this.) There are others that I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole, at least in the form given here. A real puzzle is the huge amounts of ground cumin in many of the recipes (half a cup in a crab dish meant to feed two), corresponding to nothing I have tasted in restaurants or seen in other cookbooks. So little effort does Taik put into explaining a basic palette of seasonings and effects for any people in the multiethnic society of modern Myanmar that one can only guess whether this is a purely personal quirk or a reflection of a widespread preference.

Again and again, details are left out that would help kitchen ignoramuses or newcomers to this subject understand what they’re doing. You’ll be told to cook sliced onion “until golden brown” without knowing whether that means at or somewhere before the crisp-flake stage, or to chop up a chicken into small pieces with no suggestion about the right implement. Or a recipe will call for “butterfish fillets” with no help for the East Coast user to whom butterfish are tiny things that would fit in the palm of your hand. Nor is Taik much help to shoppers wondering what the “ladyfish paste” is that they’re supposed to get from a Chinese fish market. How to make your own fish paste if you live light-years from any Chinatown is a question a more careful author would have addressed. Copeland Marks and Aung Thien provide a perfect formula for it (the mixture for “Basic Fish Cake”) in “The Burmese Kitchen” (M. Evans: $19.95). This book also has its gaps of understanding, but it is more conscientious about basics than the likable but exasperating “Under the Golden Pagoda.”

Marks, who also collaborated with Manjo Kim on “The Korean Kitchen,” specializes in wonderful culinary subjects that have tended to be blank on our culinary map--Guatemala, Indonesia, remote outposts of Sephardic tradition. But before embarking on a Marks book, you’d better know what you will and won’t get.

What you surely will get is an array of tested recipes--a benefit not to be taken for granted in all cookbooks. In this regard Marks is like the sort of traveler who can be depended on to come back from any voyage with enough snapshots to paper the Great Pyramid. It’s the world beyond the snapshots that gives him problems, the world of relationships between people and food. Try as he may to examine culinary styles and traditions, his descriptions are inevitably handicapped by clumsy prose and odd fumblings of historical-cultural exposition. Lazier and far more ignorant culinary globe-trotters can write rings around this diligent observer.

“The Korean Kitchen” clearly rests on more exacting standards than “Under the Golden Pagoda.” It begins with more of a perspective on history and daily eating habits than Taik’s book, and the chapter organization of the 150-odd recipes owes more to Korean than American menu priorities ( kimchi varieties and a large sampling of the characteristic side dishes coming first, “Meat and Poultry” occupying a distinctly secondary position at the end).

Just as evidently, Marks has tried to seek out an interesting array of dishes, starting with but not limited to indispensable classics: pine-nut porridge, naeng myon (buckwheat noodles in cold broth), chicken and glutinous rice soup with ginseng, and bulgogi (barbecued rib steak). Notably absent are the raw fish ( saeng sun hoe ) and raw beef ( yuk hoe ) that Koreans serve so beautifully, but Marks may well have thought it sensible to avoid these in view of current concerns about food-borne infection.

Given the bareness of the field--no other American trade publisher now has a Korean cookbook in print--this serious effort from a respected writer performs a much-needed service. I just wish it did the job with more authority and polish. An awkward writer at best, Marks seems especially hasty and unsystematic here. What suffers is clear information.

From the glossary of ingredients on, something is amiss in the basic knowledge-gathering and sharing. Why mention corvina, of all fish, as being a Korean favorite, while misidentifying it with the scientific name of the Atlantic croaker? Or spend half a page describing home-fermented Korean soy sauce without adding that Korean groceries here regularly sell prepared soybean lumps ( meju ) for the purpose? (Choices of commercial soy sauce are not mentioned.) Why are the romanizations of Korean words so inconsistent?

Well-checked, workable recipes are Marks’ usual strength, and that is generally the case here. Even so, there are strange lapses. “Squid and mushroom stir-fry with noodles” has somehow lost the noodles. The version of jap chae (clear starch noodles tossed with an assortment of stir-fried ingredients) worked for me like a charm, but please don’t accept the statement that dang myun --the general name for these noodles--is a trade brand. Bindaedoek , Korean mung-bean pancakes, were also excellent, but I had to read the directions about five times before understanding when to add three separate batches of scallions.

If you are as crazy as I am about Korean food, you will want to buy this honest attempt despite its flaws. Otherwise, you may prefer to wait and see whether any competition comes along. The adventurous have a much better choice in Marc and Kim Millon’s delightful “Flavors of Korea” (Trafalgar Square paperback: $17.95). But it is a British import (available in Los Angeles at Cook’s Library, 8373 West 3rd St.) with no concessions to U.S. terminology and measurements.

Nancie McDermott’s “Real Thai” is the work of a former Peace Corps volunteer still passionate about the cooking she first explored in Thailand almost 19 years ago. She is eager to make American cooks understand the food in terms of regional variations. Seeing that the country is a lot bigger than California, the idea makes much sense. Of the four books, this is the one I expect to have the most fun cooking from.

To dispose at once of my only real objections: “Real Thai” does no more than any other work I’ve seen to enlighten my ignorance of how meals and cooking are arranged in ordinary Thai families. Painstaking menu plans, I don’t want, but it would be nice to know the equivalent of whether cornflakes are eaten for supper or how many dishes might be prepared for a simple everyday dinner. I also wish there were more vegetarian dishes.

However, McDermott does very well by her chosen task of mapping regional preferences and influences. Other Thai cookbooks have touched on the issue, and the lavish coffee-table book, “Thailand the Beautiful Cookbook” (Collins: $45) spends some time on it. But McDermott makes it real by organizing her roughly 115 recipes into five separate regional chapters (another chapter gives a helpful anthology of basic formulas that serve as more or less ubiquitous culinary underpinnings). This helps stamp on the cook’s or browser’s memory what seems to flourish more in some areas.

The lion’s share of attention goes to the cooking of the Thai heartland, the big central plain in which the old kingdom of Thailand flourished with Sukhothai as its capital. In McDermott’s presentation this seems like the general lingua franca of Thai cooking, still bearing elements of a former “palace cuisine.” The other regions she singles out are the southern-reaching strip of Thailand running along the Malay Peninsula (heavily Muslim-influenced), the Gulf of Siam coast (the obvious center of seafood cookery), and the northwest and northeast (colored respectively with mixtures of Burmese-Laotian and Cambodian-Laotian elements).

What’s immediately obvious from the recipes is a zealous interest in fine-tuned seasonings, something that results in longer ingredient lists than those in some other Thai cookbooks, but that is easier to pursue now than it was when Thai food first came into this country.

Jennifer Brennan’s “The Original Thai Cookbook” (now a GD/Perigee paperback: $10.95) made what I still think is the best overall attempt to introduce Thai cuisine to American home cooks--but the recipes did without jasmine rice, sataw beans, bird chiles, fresh galangal, dried shrimp, differentiated kinds of basil, fermented bean curd and other things widely available in Asian markets here only 12 years later.

Even where availability isn’t an issue, McDermott tends to be more particular about some small or large detail--for example, using cumin (Brennan has caraway, a quite different note) in the most important curry pastes, steaming (not boiling) sticky rice and providing an appropriately seasoned chicken stock recipe (which Brennan left to the cook’s initiative). The Brennan book is far more thorough in its general portrait of land and culture, does better botanical sleuthing about herbs and plants and has excellent coverage of tropical fruits, which McDermott virtually ignores. Many cooks may want both works.

*

My two cooking experiments from “Real Thai” left me eager for more. One, said to have been introduced by the Hainan Chinese, involved a poached chicken with jasmine rice cooked in the poaching liquid, everything then being served with a great salty-sweet sauce. The other, a wonderful explosion of different flavors, was crab meat and pork cakes with a fiery sweet-and-sour sauce. (Be warned that the mixture is loose and messy to handle; even so, I didn’t need anything like the specified one cup of flour to coat the cakes for frying.)

As is so often the case, experienced and inexperienced cooks may have vastly different reactions to cooking from McDermott’s recipes. Real beginners may flounder over things like getting the right three-quart saucepan to cook the chicken and rice (I made out fine with a four-quart saucepan) or that cup of flour. For people who know their way around a kitchen, the recipes will convey that sense of getting right into the flow of things, one of the pleasures of good cookbooks.

An exasperating booby trap awaits the cook trying to use any of these books: They all have skimpy, spotty indexes that include almost no names in the original languages--even tekka maki and tempura don’t show up under “T” or mee grop (more often anglicized as mee krob ) under “M.” Probably the most awful bits of editorial sloppiness are omitting the Thai-script glossary entries promised on Page 4 of “Real Thai” and the many phantom index entries to (nonexistent) chapter-by-chapter recipe listings in “Under the Golden Pagoda.” I bet many readers will also share my disappointment at the absence of a map in any book except “The Korean Kitchen.” Given the impressive and welcome commitment represented by those four books, couldn’t somebody have fussed just a little more over details?