In an interview on The Top Cookery Books of All Time

Lastly, you’ve chosen David Thompson’s Thai Food. He’s Australian as well.

Yes he is, though I think of him as being Thai. He has spent so much of his life in Thailand, and his partner is Thai, and he has cooked there for many, many years. What I love about this book is the way it is so uncompromising. It’s classic Thai cooking. It’s quite grand cooking, much of it: these are recipes you would probably do for a slightly special occasion. There isn’t much in there for someone who wants to throw something together when they come home. It’s ‘I’m cooking today’ type cooking. There’s no watering down of the traditional recipes for the sake for Mr and Mrs M who can’t get such-and-such an ingredient; there’s no, ‘Well, I won’t put that ingredient in because I can’t get it in my local Safeway.’ I think it will end up being an important historical record of Thai cooking.

And when do you find yourself using these recipes?

I find myself making these recipes when I want a breath of fresh air. They’re so different from everything else we cook here, because of the lemongrass, the chillies, the lime leaves, the ginger, the coriander and all the stuff that gets your heart racing. These Thai ingredients are all very stimulating, and they have a freshness to them. It’s very different to the comforting, cosy cooking that we do so much of here in England. It’s certainly not a book I turn to for a quick fix. But it’s a total blast of fresh air, and that’s why I do it, because I feel I need that.