The book
One region, eleven tables, one hundred recipes.
Southeast Asia is not one cuisine. It is eleven countries that borrowed from each other for centuries and then went their own way — the same fish sauce, the same rice, the same chillies, arriving at eleven different dinners.
This book sets one table for each of them. It starts where the cooking starts: with the sauces, pastes and pantry staples the recipes are built on, so that a curry paste is something you understand rather than something you buy. Then it works outward, country by country, to the hundred dishes that define them.
It is written for a cook who wants to know why a dish is the way it is, not only how to make it.
Eleven tables
Explore the eleven countries
Each chapter opens on a table laid the way that country eats — and closes with the recipes that put it there.
From the hundred
Where to start
Eight dishes from eight countries. Not a ranking — a way in.
ThailandTom Yum Goong 
VietnamPhở Bò 
IndonesiaRendang 
PhilippinesChicken and Pork Adobo 
MalaysiaNasi Lemak 
SingaporeHainanese Chicken Rice 
CambodiaFish Amok 
MyanmarMohinga
Foundations
Learn the pantry first
Twenty-seven pantry studies open the book, before a single recipe. What fish sauce actually is and how the grades differ. Why galangal is not ginger. Which rice does what. Which chilli, and when.
Get these right and most of the hundred recipes stop being unfamiliar. Get them wrong and no amount of technique rescues the dish.
Twenty-four sauces, sambals and pastes follow them — the components the dishes are actually built from.
The Complete Edition
The Southeast Asian Table
Stories and Culinary Traditions from Eleven Countries.
- 100recipes
- 11countries
- 452pages
- 27pantry studies
The complete work: every recipe, every headnote, the foundations chapter, the regional menus and the full index.
In review with Amazon KDP
Both editions have been submitted to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and are currently in review. Submitted prices are $9.99 for the kindle edition and $49.99 for the paperback. Neither is on sale yet, and prices are as submitted rather than final.
Buying links will appear once the listings are live.
The collection
Choose your edition
The Southeast Asian Table is planned as three editions of the same collection. They differ in how much of it they carry, never in how carefully it was made.
- The Southeast Asian TableEssentialsCover to come
Edition 1 of 3
Essentials
The way in
A short introduction to the region — every one of the eleven countries, a selected few recipes from each.
- Countries
- 11 — all eleven, minimum two recipes each
- Recipes
- To be announced
Coming soon. Not yet available. Essentials has not been built, submitted or scheduled.
Coming soon
- The Southeast Asian TableExpandedCover to come
Edition 2 of 3
Expanded
The working cookbook
A fuller selection, weighted the way the collection is — more from the larger chapters, and still nobody left out.
- Countries
- 11 — all eleven, proportionally represented
- Recipes
- To be announced
Coming soon. Not yet available. Expanded has not been built, submitted or scheduled.
Coming soon
Edition 3 of 3Flagship
Complete
The whole collection
Every recipe, every chapter, and the foundations the whole book is built on — the authoritative edition.
- Countries
- 11 — all eleven
- Recipes
- 100
In review with Amazon KDP
Both editions have been submitted to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and are currently in review. Submitted prices are $9.99 for the kindle edition and $49.99 for the paperback. Neither is on sale yet, and prices are as submitted rather than final.
Start with one table.
Pick a country, cook one dish, and see whether the rest of the region follows.
Imagery throughout this site is produced with generative AI tools and reviewed by the author. It is illustrative, not documentary photography of finished dishes. How these images were made.