I write a lot about Asian food, and to facilitate this tasty pursuit, I maintain a shelf of reference books. These aren’t necessarily the most useful books in the kitchen (though frequently they are), but they’re the best when, for example, I want to know more about Sichuanese pickled chiles.

**Southeast Asian (general):** Hot Sour Salty Sweet

**Noodles (general):** Noodle

**Thailand:** Dancing Shrimp, Thai Food

**Vietnam:** Into the Vietnamese Kitchen

**Philippines:** Memories of Philippine Kitchens

**Japan:** Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

**China:** Land of Plenty, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Breath of a Wok, The Dim Sum Dumpling Book

**Chinese-American:** Helen Chen’s Chinese Home Cooking

**Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore:** Cradle of Flavor

**Korea:** Eating Korean

A few observations. First, a few of these books are so comprehensive, it’s hard (from my admittedly limited perspective) to see how they could be improved: _Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, Memories of Philippine Kitchens, Japanese Cooking, Land of Plenty,_ and _Cradle of Flavor._ _Eating Korean_ is close.

_Japanese Cooking_ has held up remarkably well, considering it was published in 1980, but sooner or later there’s going to be a hole there. I have Hiroko Shimbo’s Japanese Kitchen, and I like it, but it feels idiosyncratic, as much about Hiroko Shimbo’s (very appetizing) cooking as about contemporary Japanese cooking.

What are your go-to books for national cuisines?

Last night I leapt up from the couch and turned a stick of butter into clarified butter. I mean, I didn’t just wave a wand, although that would be a cool superpower. I went to the stove, melted some butter, boiled the water out of it, and strained it through a paper towel. Then I used it today for scrambled eggs and crepes.

Why don’t I do this more often? I frequently burn butter, but clarified butter is hard to burn and tastes almost as good. I have a suspicion that French toast cooked in a large amount of clarified butter would be the best French toast ever. I will report on Monday.

Order today.

**Update:** First of all, Amazon is now showing a discount price of $15.64. This is a steal. This book is worth way more than $15.64. It is worth $16. Second, there’s a description of the book on my publisher’s site, which I’ll excerpt below.

People keep asking me who my publisher is, and it looks like they’ve decided to call it HMH, or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This is quite a mouthful, but it could be worse. They could have called it Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and World.

Do you feel sorry for the people whose names get left behind in publishing mergers? Like Row of Harper & Row, or Brace and Jovanovich? Mifflin just dodged a bullet, which is a pretty impressive, since he died in 1921.

Oh, incidentally, this means Hungry Monkey comes from the same publisher that brought you Curious George. (Not to mention _The God Delusion_.)

Here’s the scoop:

> Matthew Amster-Burton was a restaurant critic and food writer long before he and his wife, Laurie, had Iris. Now he’s a full-time, stay-at-home Dad and his experience with food has changed…a little.

> Hungry Monkey is the story of Amster-Burton’s life as a food-lover–with a child. It’s the story of how he came to realize that kids don’t need puree in a jar or special menus at restaurants and that raising an adventurous eater is about exposure, invention, and patience. He writes of the highs and lows of teaching your child about food–the high of rediscovering how something tastes for the first time through a child’s unflinching reaction, the low of thinking you have a precocious vegetable fiend on your hands only to discover that a child’s preferences change from day to day (and may take years to include vegetables again). Sharing in his culinary capers is little Iris, a budding gourmand and a zippy critic herself–who makes hug sandwiches, gobbles up hot chilis, and even helps around the kitchen sometimes.

> A memoir on the wild joys of food and parenting and the marvelous mélange of the two–Hungry Monkey takes food enthusiasts on a new adventure in eating (with dozens of delicious recipes!). In the end, our guide reminds us: “Food is fun, and you get to enjoy it three times a day, plus snacks!”

Still cooking from The New Steak. Last week it was marinated flank steak with diced Asian pear on sesame noodles. Iris, it turns out, really likes Asian pears, especially if they’re tossed with a little lime juice.

I’ve long maintained that I could happily eat spicy noodles with meat and vegetables every day for the rest of my life, and this recipe did nothing to change my opinion. But I also learned something about flank steak.

Actually, the recipe in the book called for flatiron steak, an inexpensive and tender cut that I haven’t figured out how to cook properly. (It never tastes right to me.) So I used flank. But I followed, as best I could, the instruction in the book to cut the steak into chunks before cooking it. It wasn’t clear what size of chunks Cree LeFavour was talking about, so I cut the flank into something like 3"×3" squares.

This had several advantages over cooking a whole large piece of flank. It was easy to get all the steak cooked medium-rare, because I could poke or take the temperature of each piece separately. It was easier to get a good sear on it; on a whole flank steak there are always parts that make poor contact with the pan. And there were plenty of burnt edge pieces, which are especially great in a bowl of noodles.

I’m going to cook flank steak this way from now on. In fact, I did it again last night, when I made steak tacos with tomatillo salsa. And some Mexican street corn.