Noodles Asian Style

by Cara Hobday

1996 Readily available ingredients give these 100 recipes popular appeal.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 1996

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a much better book than I expected. There is a maxim that a restaurant may have great food or a great view but not both. A similar maxim suggests that, when a cookbook has photography as sumptuous and evocative as Robin Matthews' in this book, the text will fail to excel. Instead, Cara Hobday has pulled together a quite wonderful, too short, collection of recipes from all over Asia. After working as a chef in England and Australia, she traveled extensively in the Orient, gathering recipes as she went. The image that rice is the only starchy staple in Asian diets is mistaken. In all parts of Asia, noodles are made from wheat, mung bean, rice flour, buckwheat and other grains. Not only does she introduce a great variety of noodles, but her sauce recipes are of the sort which one needs to post inside a kitchen cupboard door and use as starting points (like master sauces) on which local, personal variations can be built. My cookshelf affords a very large number of books about the many cuisines of Asia but there are some recipes in Hobday's book which are new to me. For example, she studs a pork tenderloin with cloves and poaches it with fish sauce. She slices it thinly and serves it atop cold lime-ginger-chili noodles and that sounds heavenly to me. This is a surprise happy addition to the collection.