Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America Volume 45

Name: Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America Volume 45
Price: 95.00 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780520293731

✍️ Padoongpatt, Mark

Reader Score

4.6

(1 review)

$95.00

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📜

Food Writing & History

📚 EDITORIAL REVIEW

“If you are a curious home cook or food historian fascinated by how immigrant communities use cuisine to build identity, this is for you. However, casual cooks looking for a quick, step-by-step weeknight dinner recipe collection will find themselves disappointed, as this is a deep cultural history rather than a standard cookbook.

— Editorial Team

Author

Padoongpatt, Mark

📚 all books by this author (2) →

🏛 University of California Press 📅 2017 📔 Hardcover ISBN: 9780520293731

📚 This Book in Collections

🥢 Asian kitchens 🎁 Hardcovers worth giving

📝 Description: Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America Volume 45

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles's and America's culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U. S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

💎 Expert review

“

🍳

Eatbook Family editorial team

Cookbook desk

Padoongpatt offers a rigorous academic examination of how Thai food shaped racial contours in America. The strength lies in its use of oral histories to explain culinary adaptation in urban spaces. However, this is not a practical guide for home cooks seeking step-by-step instructions or ingredient lists. Readers looking for quick dinner ideas or visual inspiration will find the dense historical narrative dry and unhelpful for daily kitchen use.

✓ EDITOR'S REVIEW

⭐ Reader reviews

The starting rating comes from the team Eatbook Family —

⭐ eatbookfamily.com editorial review Editorial rating 4.6/5

★★★★★

If you are a curious home cook or food historian fascinated by how immigrant communities use cuisine to build identity, this is for you. However, casual cooks looking for a quick, step-by-step weeknight dinner recipe collection will find themselves disappointed, as this is a deep cultural history…

Reader rating

4.6

Based on 1 reviews

Eatbook Family editorial team

Padoongpatt offers a rigorous academic examination of how Thai food shaped racial contours in America. The strength lies in its use of oral histories to explain culinary adaptation in urban spaces. However, this is not a practical guide for home cooks seeking step-by-step instructions or ingredient lists. Readers looking for quick dinner ideas or visual inspiration will find the dense historical narrative dry and unhelpful for daily kitchen use.

❓ Frequently asked questions

No, this is a cultural and historical study of Thai American foodways rather than a traditional recipe-focused cookbook with instructional photos.

No, it focuses on the historical, social, and political development of Thai food in America rather than practical kitchen measurements or grocery guides.

📖 Who should read this

📜 Historical context

Rooted in the complex dynamics of American Cold War intervention in Thailand, this work explores how informal empire introduced U.S. citizens to Thai dishes abroad. It traces the journey of Thai immigrants arriving in Los Angeles, showing how they skillfully repackaged and reinvented traditional foodways to navigate and shape urban and suburban American culinary landscapes.