It Rains Fishes

Entering Thailand Slowly

Some books explain a country. Others let you enter it.

It Rains Fishes by Kasma Loha-Unchit. A cookbook that gradually becomes something else: a portrait of Thailand through memory, ritual, and everyday life.

It Rains Fishes, by Kasma Loha-Unchit, belongs to the second kind.

At first glance, it appears to be a cookbook. Recipes move through its pages alongside descriptions of ingredients, regional dishes, and fragments of culinary history. But after spending time with it, the book stops reading like a collection of recipes, leaving behind the rich, quiet rhythm of daily Thai life. It is a portrait of Thailand emerging through memory, ritual, landscape, and everyday gestures.

Travel often begins visually. We encounter a country first through images: skylines, markets, temples, street food filmed under neon light. But food offers another kind of entry point, one that is slower and far more intimate. Recipes carry geography inside them. Rivers, monsoons, migration, family, seasons, remain quietly present within the preparation of a single dish.

What makes It Rains Fishes particularly compelling is the way it avoids treating Thai cuisine as something exotic. The writing remains deeply attached to ordinary life. Meals emerge as part of the rhythm of living: prepared in kitchens, remembered through families, tied to weather, agriculture, scarcity and celebration alike.

While reading, I found myself thinking about textures: the sound of rain against metal roofs, river humidity, open-air markets at dawn, steam rising from food in the middle of conversation. Thailand began to appear less as an itinerary and more and more as an inhabited space.

Much contemporary travel media encourages rapid recognition. Places become immediately legible through familiar visual symbols. But books like It Rains Fishes slow that process down. They ask for a different kind of attention, one rooted less in consumption than in patience and observation.

In that sense, the book feels connected to the kind of journey I hope to undertake myself. Not simply moving through Thailand, but remaining long enough for smaller details to emerge: routines, silences, gestures, fragments of ordinary life that resist immediate interpretation.

Preparing one of the recipes from It Rains Fishes at home in the Alps, before travelling to Thailand.

Before departure, I tried cooking one of the recipes from the book at home, here in the Alps.

For a moment, the distance between places seemed to narrow slightly. Yes, food cannot replicate a culture. What, sometimes, it can do is create a form of attention toward it. I started realising that cooking that dish was becoming a preparation for the journey: an attempt to approach another place with greater care, humility, and curiosity before arriving there physically.

Perhaps this is what certain books ultimately offer us before travel: orientation. A slower way of learning how to look.

The finished dish. A small taste of Thailand, prepared thousands of kilometres away.