How a cookery school in a Thai slum became an international success

In 2012, the world's news media gleefully reported that a Thai cookbook - in fierce competition with and - had won a prize for the world's oddest book title.

The giggle-inducing was the work of Saiyuud Diwong, who is better known by her nickname (which is short for Chompoo, or "rose apple" in Thai) and a resident of Klong Toey, the largest and most notorious slum in Bangkok.

At the time, Poo had been running a modest cooking school in Klong Toey for only a few years. The result of the book's triumph was swift. Although Poo's school was already popular, employing slum neighbours and proving a model of positivity in a bleak landscape, suddenly she was being fêted by gastronomy's great and good.

British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver shared the cover of on Instagram. The book became a bestseller, and media tours of Australia and Britain followed. The curious pounded a beat to Klong Toey in increasing numbers, and five-star reviews piled up on TripAdvisor.

Then, in August last year, disaster struck: a fire started in a neighbour's ramshackle home reduced the immediate neighbourhood to ashes. Poo's cooking school was no more.

But you can't keep a self-proclaimed "superwoman" down, and now, after a rebuild and refit, Poo is back in business.

A Cooking with Poo class starts with a tour of Klong Toey's labyrinthine outdoor market, where aisles are jammed with mountains of young coconuts, lady finger bananas and mangos, bamboo baskets of fragrant holy basil, mint and coriander, writhing catfish and eels, decapitated frogs, waxy pig heads, all at rock-bottom prices.