The recipes are presented in old-school format, 3 or 4 to a page with ingredients and minimal instructions; none of the preamble that’s typical on food blogs (not this one!) today. Myra Waldo traveled extensively as a food consultant for Pan American Airways and did her best to interpret the foods she liked for the American cook with zero experience of Asian cuisine. Most are a lot better than they have to be.
My tattered Myra Waldo cookbook.
Ground Lamb Curry with Peas, for example, uses individual spices rather than the “curry powder” you’d expect in a midcentury cookbook. And Korean Bean Sprout Salad was likely designed as an appetizer to be served in an assortment, or banchan, though it’s the only recipe in that category in the Korean section. She frequently uses anchovy paste as a substitute for fish sauce; I think you could probably substitute fish sauce 1:1 to update. And she uses “dried ground chili peppers” instead of localized ingredients like gochugaru which would have been impossible to find in 1960.
Speaking of chilis, some of her recommendations will seem peculiar to today’s cook, like the inclusion of a cup of flour in a pho recipe. Use your own filter and experiment with the dishes that sound interesting to you; do not by any means rely on the recipes as definitive. Myra Waldo’s Complete Book of Oriental Cooking provides a very different kind of food exploration, and a used copy will only cost you a few bucks, so why not check it out!?
