Switzerland is a country of cheese and, ideally, should smell of this dairy product. Exotic Dominica, most likely, will smell of money. But Thailand is the only country that is thoroughly saturated with the smell of its national cuisine. Thailand smells the same everywhere, whether it is the resort areas of Pattaya, the canals of Bangkok, the market near the Bridge over the River Kwai, or the ruins of the ancient capital Ayutthaya. What does it smell of? Fish sauce nam pla. This is the most important product for Thai cuisine, without it any food seems bland to Thais. The sauce is sold in various containers - both plastic jars and glass bottles, it comes in various qualities, strengths, and prices, but its essence is unchanged: it is the juice of over-fermented fish.
Nam pla is prepared in large wooden barrels. Production is always located on the seashore, away from housing, or perhaps people themselves run away as soon as too much Thai sauce appears nearby. It is prepared for a long time. First, salted small fish lies in the sun for two or three days, slightly rotting and drying out. Then the barrel is packed with it, covered with coarse salt, and pressed down with a heavy, hundred-kilogram lid. The process resembles sauerkraut fermentation, but the fish ferments for a whole year. The fish used for the sauce are special types and only small ones, so that over a year of fermentation (to put it scientifically) it decomposes to the bones and turns into a thick juice. The sauce goes on sale diluted with water, with a maximum content of the original fish juice of about 25-30 percent; the price of a 50-gram bottle is 50 baht ($1 is approximately 45 baht), and for a portion of any Thai dish, one or two drops are enough.
Those who do not like Thai dishes say that they all smell of rotten fish. But for lovers, the smell of nam pla seems pleasant and mysterious. Let's be frank: if you forget about the fish, the smell of the sauce is closest to pine needles.
Soup from a samovar
The main dish of Thai cuisine is tom yam goong soup from a samovar. The soup samovar is arranged in the same way as the tea samovars we know: in the center there is an open pipe with hot coals, similar handles on the sides, and a vent at the bottom. But the soup samovar is flattened to make it easier to scoop the soup with a spoon. And it is served open, with the lid removed, so that diners do not burn themselves.
Real tom yam goong is sour, very spicy, piquant, with a bright shrimp flavor. Several epithets at once are needed because the taste of tom yam goong is complex and special, but once you try it, you will remember it forever. In restaurants, tom yam goong is prepared as follows. First, the shrimp are peeled, leaving only the tail unpeeled. The shrimp themselves are added at the very end of cooking, and the shrimp shells are fried in boiling palm oil for four to five minutes, then boiled in a pot for about ten minutes. The broth should be strong, so very little water is added, just enough to cover the shells. Then the broth is strained, poured into the samovar, and brought to a boil in it, then several open mussels with shells are added, two or three roots of galangal (Thai ginger), spice paste, nam pla sauce, lime juice, lemongrass ta khrai, kinkan leaves (a citrus tree with small orange fruits), several pods of hot pepper - and simmered over low heat for ten to fifteen minutes, and about three minutes before serving, the peeled shrimp are added.
The spice paste is different in every restaurant. But usually it is ground turmeric (a root of bright orange color and sharply spicy taste) and ginger powder, seeds of local cilantro varieties, cumin, and a little tamarind jam for stickiness (tamarind is the fruit of a tropical acacia, tasting like tkemali). Ta khrai, a fleshy local herb, gives the soup a special sour taste and a bright lemon aroma. Kinkan leaves serve the same purpose. Hot pepper is any chili; in Thailand, the hottest variety is the tiny, tiny peppers phrik khi nu, literally translated as 'mouse droppings'. The samovar with boiling soup is placed on the table, and everyone pours liquid into their own bowl and fishes out the shrimp, while the roots and leaves continue to boil.
Thai cuisine is the most democratic of national cuisines. A very rich Thai can easily send an assistant in a 600th Mercedes to a street restaurant, and he will take plastic boxes and cups with chicken, rice, soup, and spicy sauces, pay 50-60 baht, and bring them to the boss.
Unlike the Chinese, who serve rice at the very end of a festive table, Thais make no exceptions. All Thai dishes are accompaniments or side dishes for rice.
The recipe for the royal soup is the same as in a street eatery; diversity was never encouraged by Thai culture. Of course, the mussels for the royal soup are kept in running sea water for at least ten days, and the galangal is taken from the vicinity of Kanchanaburi, the purest, and the shrimp are the freshest and noblest from the royal ponds, and the nam pla sauce is the most... it is harder to choose a definition here; perhaps it would not be an insult to say that the king is offered the most rotten-smelling nam pla.
The usual Thai greeting sounds like a question: 'Sanuk mai?' - 'Are you glad, cheerful, content, happy?' The response can only be affirmative. No less often another question is heard: 'Aroi mai?' - 'Is it tasty for you?' The answer is also always only: 'Aroi maak' - 'Very tasty.' 'Sanuk' and 'aroi' are the main Thai words; they are both an obsessive desire and the purpose of life. But if not every Thai manages to live a happy life, then royally tasty food in Thailand is available to everyone.
Three Thai tricks
In addition to tom yam goong and chicken gaeng curry stewed with curry paste and cashew nuts, another obligatory Thai dish is a salad of grated green papaya with peanut crumbs or pea sprouts, dressed with nam pla and seasoned with hot pepper. Without green papaya, Thais do not eat meat. And nutritionists have their own explanation for this. The fact is that green papaya contains the enzyme papain, whose main advantage is the breakdown of food proteins.
Given that in many people proteins are digested slowly and incompletely, the help of an external enzyme is most welcome, because undigested protein rots and forms toxins. Moreover, papain helps the intestines destroy the most persistent and harmful bacteria. In short, papain is the first trick of Thai cuisine.
The second trick is glutamate. In the last ten years, this ancient Asian culinary discovery suddenly became widely used. Why suddenly? Because the era of globalization and the production of “long-lasting” products and various instant soups has begun, where glutamate successfully deceives our taste, passing off soy as meat, fried pasta, and buckwheat flour with caramel as shrimp, chicken, and mushrooms. We know monosodium glutamate as a “flavor enhancer.” But it is only in “instant soups” that we are palmed off with synthetic glutamate, while Thais use natural glutamate, boiled down from fermented fish innards and shrimp (it is sold as salty white crystals). Monosodium glutamate itself has no taste. But for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Thai people, glutamate is the center of taste. The Japanese word “umami” literally translates as “fifth taste” (in addition to salty, bitter, sour, and sweet).
The third trick is coconut milk. Soups are made with concentrated canned coconut milk, added to seafood pilaf and little by little wherever the cook wishes. Fresh coconut milk is also used for soups in restaurants, but much less often; fresh milk acts on a European stomach as a mild laxative. Pieces of chicken, pork, and large shrimp are soaked in fresh coconut milk for a seafood mix. The light taste of coconut follows the diner in festive dishes like rice with mussels in pineapple and in everyday food — for example, stewed marinated buffalo meat with pickled radish.
Upside-down tomatoes
Here is a picture of an evening Thai restaurant. Waiters run around the hall with red-hot, oil-splattering frying pans, cooks wheel out carts with soup samovars, musicians on stage belt out tunes on out-of-tune xylophones with brass plates, and visitors wave their hands and call for waiters. How do they call? They shout: “Nong, nong!” — literally translated as “Little one!” Nothing special; in France a waiter is similarly hailed as “garçon.” But when Thais wave to a person, they hold their palm downward and bend their fingers toward themselves. And the way we do it — palm up, fingers toward oneself — is how one calls a dog in Thailand. That’s how it is: just take a closer look and you will see another life — an upside-down, eerie Asia.
In Thailand everything is the other way around. They love giant cucumbers, do not acknowledge small ones, throw them away; they pound garlic together with its skin; they eat only green tomatoes, considering red ones rotten. And try buying in Thailand the same dried fruits that they bring to us! Better not try — they will turn out to be salty!
Food inversions, plus the fact that the number of dishes in Thai cuisine is historically limited, has led to Thais being unfamiliar with many modern tastes. And they do not know how to cook not only European dishes but also many Chinese dishes. In a resort restaurant, even an experienced chef cooks European dishes strictly according to a recipe: he puts 50 grams of this, 80 of that, and does not taste it, because he still cannot tell by taste what tourists will like. So a Thai may well eat a European dish, but will never appreciate its taste and at the first opportunity will gladly return to his over-peppered and spicy cuisine.
In Thai restaurants, waiters and cooks quickly get their bearings and will serve a tourist not a real tom yam gung with the correct amount of spices and nam pla, but a tourist version. The author of the article experienced the effect of real Thai cuisine when he roamed the wild Thai north and dined with the highlanders. But the rules of tropical life demand eating exactly the brutal soup, because spices kill the most persistent plasmodia and amoebas not killed by boiling.
Real tom yam gung is simply brutal; it is so spicy and peppery that a European may well break out in an allergic rash.
Living jumping shrimp
But even “tourist” Thai cuisine becomes boring after three or four days. Europeans have long known the “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” It is when a European, after close acquaintance with Eastern cuisines, gets allergies, experiences fever, indigestion, and a persistent unwillingness to visit such establishments in the future. The “syndrome” is not a fiction, as evidenced by the numerous “white cuisine” restaurants that Europeans run at Thai resorts. In Pattaya, dozens of Italian, Polish, Russian, German, American and simply “European” restaurants are not empty.
Therefore, we would advise not to get carried away with traditional Thai dishes, but, having tried them, to move on to seafood as soon as possible. Moreover, it is not tom yam gung that actually made Thai cuisine famous. The worldwide fashion for everything that lives in the sea is what has allowed Thai cuisine to become one of the most popular and sought-after outside the kingdom. It is precisely because of the fashion for sea-food that dozens of Thai restaurants operate in every major American and European city, in Australia and Asian capitals.
When Thais cook not for tourists but for themselves, they pre-coat seafood and fish with pastes or pour sauces over them. They use garlic sauce, lobster-shell sauce, sauce made from ground dried shrimp with peanut oil, tamarind sauce, and sauces based on nam pla. Shrimp are gutted and slit, squid are cleaned of mucus and cut into pieces, shells are opened, fish are split into two halves along the spine. Then everything is thoroughly coated and placed in metal mesh covers with strong clamps.
Coconut shells blaze in the braziers. Cooks lay grids on the red-hot grate, and thick aromatic smoke creeps toward the sea. But for tourists, pieces of seafood and fish are not coated with anything; they are skewered on bamboo sticks and fried even without palm oil. If you want, dip them in sauces; if not, eat them Mediterranean style. The most popular dishes among tourists are seafood mixes (shrimp, mussels, spisula, scallops, pieces of sea cucumbers, cuttlefish, squid, and small octopus fried on a grill or in a pan) and “live jumping shrimp”. Live shrimp are thrown into boiling water; they squeak and jump out, and when a little hot pepper is added, they die. Cruel, but very tasty.
Crocodile steak and turtle broth
Thais consider the “collar” to be the most expensive part of the crocodile - for them the most valuable are the fat and glands, about 600 baht per kilogram. But for a European palate, the best is the tail (400 baht) or the “saddle” with ribs (300-330 baht). In taste, crocodile steak resembles sevruga. It is hard to find a closer analogy. But perhaps the comparison is indeed the most accurate, because sturgeons and crocodiles are neighbors from the Jurassic period. Many think that snakes are even more ancient, but that is not true. Let gourmets know: the snake is a crocodile that lost its legs, not the other way around. As proof, biologists cite the fact that snakes have preserved so-called false ankles. Therefore, snake meat has a more “young” and less exotic taste - its meat is very similar to game. We would advise gourmets to order viper or boa constrictor - cobra meat is much tougher. Only turtles that live in water can be eaten. In Thailand, water turtles are highly valued and considered healing. They usually treat themselves with a strong turtle-snake-chicken broth.
The turtle (trionyx - Taiwanese or fierce Far Eastern) is killed with a hammer blow and placed, shell and all, into boiling water (in 20-25 hours the shell completely dissolves). After 15 hours of cooking, a gutted python is laid on top - a sort of tube of meat four to five meters long. Then it is boiled for another 15 hours, black chickens kai dam are added, and in the last hour ten types of plants used in Chinese medicine are thrown in. The broth is boiled down, filtered, and bones and stems are pressed out. The pure broth is hermetically sealed in packages and sold. You should drink half a glass of broth per day; its effect is similar to that of preparations made from shark fin (main targets: kidneys, liver, bones, heart; used as a general tonic, anti-cancer, and against impotence).
The Chinese were the first to call the famous swallow's nests a delicacy. But in China itself the nesting grounds have been almost completely destroyed, and Thailand is now the largest supplier of swallow's nests. Biologists claim that the edible nests belong not to swallows at all, but to cave swiftlets, but the meaning does not change: nests are hardened bird saliva. European gourmets compare the taste of swallow's nest to sturgeon caviar, but in fact the taste of a boiled nest resembles salty marmalade. Asians praise nests not for their taste but for their benefits. Thais claim that they boost immunity and restore vital energy.