Bangkok Glutton

I remember being in Bangkok during one Thai New Year’s and watching a poor Western woman get completely drenched — groceries and loaf of bread and all — in a tuk tuk that slowed down just enough so that revelers could pour an entire wastebasket’s worth of water on her head. After witnessing this silent moment of complicity between the tuk tuk driver and the water-splasher, I vowed to never get caught in the streets of Bangkok during Songkran again. Which is why I’m here, now, cowering on my couch, riding the holiday out until the last water gun has been emptied and consigned to a storage bin for next year.

Since this couch is my home for the next two or three days, my thoughts have been turning to my family, currently in Nakhon Nayok, where they are hosting my mother’s entourage of friends (like a rapper, she rolls 10 deep). These ladies, from my parents’ university days, enjoy 1. remarking on how much weight we have gained or lost, and 2. warbling traditional Thai songs on karaoke. So it may not come as much of a surprise when I admit that I am happy right where I am, right here in this couch in Bangkok.

If only someone would cook for me.

I was shocked a few months ago when my mother, during one of her rare reminiscences of her childhood, talked about her mother’s cooking. I had never heard of my grandmother cooking before. In fact, my grandmother NOT cooking was a major reason given for why my mother did not cook. And yet here we were, with stories about my grandmother cooking. Now, I love my grandma, and visit her every time I’m in Chiang Mai (I get really bad dreams if I don’t). All the same, I was sad to have missed her food. Although my grandmother lived to be 102 years old, she never cooked for me.

You see, my grandma was from Chiang Mai, but married a Central Thai man and moved to Bangkok, where they frequently had Central Thai food. Occasionally, when my grandma was tired of all the palm sugar and coconut milk, she would seek comfort in the dishes of her homeland, with flavors that were straight and true. My mother told me about a prik nam pla that was Northern-style, made with grilled, peeled and deseeded banana peppers doused in fish sauce seasoned with garlic and lime juice. She also told me about a pork dish cooked only for Northern Thai aristocracy called moo hoon, or pork with lots of turmeric and lemongrass (a recipe that will be in our upcoming cookbook!)

And then my mother said she would make her own nam prik kee ga (crow’s poo chili dip), which I believed to be Central Thai until the moment when my mother told me this story. My grandma would make it with prik chee fah, or goat/spur chilies, raw garlic, and salt, pounding it herself and eating it with sticky rice, alone. These were the only dishes she made.

So, stuck in my house as the water wars raged outside, I sought to follow in my grandma’s footsteps and make some crow’s poo of my own. First, I had to get some chee fah chilies, which I bought a few days before Songkran in preparation for this very moment.

I lined a baking tray with aluminum foil, turned my oven grill up to full power, placed a handful of spur chilies of each color on the tray and slid them in when the oven had heated. Then I readied my work station for the only workout I was ready to do that day:

I pounded three cloves of raw garlic with a teaspoon of sea salt in readiness for my chilies. It took them about 15 minutes to get properly softened and lightly charred, and then I peeled them while they were still hot, grimacing and flailing like a serial groper on a Tokyo commuter train during rush hour.

Once peeled, they looked pathetically meager, about 3 Tablespoons worth of chili “meat” — just enough for lunch.

So I stuck them in the mortar and pounded, and, really, it was incredibly easy. The chilies, by now thoroughly depressed by the direction in which their lives had taken, simply gave up after a few loud thumps, and the chili dip was ready in seconds.

I tasted it and found it just salty enough (though my housekeeper Tai, ever the critic, complained it was too salty). We ate it for lunch with just-boiled eggs, stir-fried snow peas, kak moo (pork bits left over after rendering pork lard, stir-fried in roasted chili paste) and, of course, freshly steamed rice. My Central Thai husband said it was good.

(Note: I don’t usually get into these types of discussions because I think it’s a waste of time, but I am spelling “larb” this way instead of laap, laab, lhap, laebpt or whatever other way you feel is correct, because this is the spelling most often seen on romanized restaurant menus. This is also why I spell it “pad Thai” instead of phãatd Taï. “Debates” on how something should be properly spelled in a different language and alphabet from the original are, in my opinion, attempts at gatekeeping, much like how “street food experts” debate buildings and walls instead of food and culture. Periodt.)

I was reminded what the ’80s were like — truly like, not like in “Stranger Things” where everyone suddenly has stellar music taste and no one has ever heard of Taylor Dayne — when I came across a social media post “celebrating” (I guess?) the release of Poison’s “Look What the Cat Dragged In” 40 (?!) years ago. Out of all the things to have not really made it past the ’80s, like Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Nu Shooz, Shannon, and Donnie Iris, the genre known as “hair metal” is one of the most surprising, simply because it was so pervasive during its time. Prettier than Def Leppard, poppier than Van Halen, more glam than Bon Jovi, far less intimidating than Guns ‘N Roses, these guys were “metal” in name only, all surface. Arguably the most famous of these bands was Poison.

If you were to see these guys around today — shiny lip gloss, generous lashings of mascara and eyeliner, stripey pageant queen blush, flowing long locks — you would see an accompanying tornado of online furor over “trans influence” and the “death of masculinity”, fanned by people who most likely listened to bands like Poison in their formative years. For some reason there is no cognitive dissonance from these very same “alpha” males about their own childhood influences. David Bowie is classic rock, Twisted Sister and Kiss are tough macho men, and Axel Rose’s falsetto squawk is so manly that Donald Trump plays it at his rallies. Go figure. I wonder what these guys all have in common?

Anyway, because everything is political and a reflection of our times, I figured I could help macho men relight their flames of masculinity in another way, separate from music. Of course I’m talking about food. And what is the most manly-man, alpha type of Thai food out there? It’s larb, the Northern and Northeastern Thai answer to the “great American” steakhouse, traditionally made by men for men who want to be manly (the bloodier, the better).

Don’t confuse it with the larb you get at your typical Isan restaurant: this larb is way stickier and more pungent, made of beef or buffalo or (if you’re brave) pork, frequently served raw and seasoned with lots of blood and a mix of spices that either includes cinnamon and nutmeg (Northern) or lime leaves and roasted rice kernels (Northeastern), alongside leaves and herbs that are grown right where the animals feed.

There are, I’m sure, versions of this type of restaurant in Bangkok, though I have yet to go into one. Where I do like to go is in Isan, where larb joints are a dime a dozen, and in Chiang Mai, where there is a super famous larb place right near my parents’ home. Called Larb Ton Koi, it specializes in buffalo meat, collected fresh from the slaughterhouse and either served raw or lightly blanched and hand-minced into a larb or sliced raw or lightly blanched into a saa. So famous that it regularly commands 3-hour lines, the shop is sold out by 2:30, so we usually order to go. But if we were to stay, we would be able to watch the artistry of Chef Surat, who minces, slices, pounds and flavors every dish a la minute, with a single knife and his proprietary blend of spices while his wife makes the accompaniments, including gang om. Of course, the bulk of the clientele is male, although Chef Rat hasn’t really thought about why that is. “Men like larb,” he reasons. “Women like gang om.”

Like Larb Ton Koi, Udon Thani’s Larb Tha Suk is built along similar lines, with raw and cooked larb and saa and a single chef slaving away over a block of wood with a butcher’s knife. The usual accompaniments are also there: a big plate of fresh greens, raw garlic cloves, sticky rice, and two dipping sauces of jaew and another flavored with nam dee, or bitter bile.

These restaurants seem busiest at lunchtime, where groups of people — yes, usually men — meet to talk about their mornings over bottles of Saeng Som, even if it’s a weekday. It’s a callback to the past, when village celebrations involved the slaughter of a cow or buffalo, after which the butcher (always male) would make up plates of larb, saa and whatever else they could rustle up at that moment, honoring the animal by using up every bit of it (even the partially digested food!)

So when you rock up to your local larb joint with bottle of Mekong in hand, know that you are simply honoring Thai traditions, pairing your larb with the spirits needed to wash out your mouth and whet your appetite. And if you are a woman, know that you’re in a primarily male space, so you’ll have to eat twice as much.

Like many people my age who are desperately looking for ways to procrastinate from pressing life issues, I have been following the “Where’s Kate Middleton?” discourse. I don’t pretend to have a wide-ranging or intellectual interest in this topic; I don’t care about how this adds to the latest “missing woman” trope popularized all the way back in the days of Wilkie Collins’s time, or even what this says from a PR management-in-the-time-of-social-media perspective. I just want something diverting to take up all my time from thinking about work.

All the same, while there are numerous hypotheses, some of them are pretty unsavory. I don’t want to write about those because it would make me look ghoulish, and those are not my colors (I am a “cool summer” person, in case you are probably not wondering). I would just like to say that we should step back, and allow her the time which is surely needed so that she can make her way back to 21st-century England after having touched a strange stone and transported herself to 18th-century Scotland, where she is currently enmeshed in a Highland War against the English. If that means that she is out of view for months and months, then it is what it is (also, I would not blame her if she decided to stay with Jamie Fraser, but I digress).

Alas, people are impatient, especially in the day and age of the 24-hour news cycle, so various parties have attempted to fill this void, with varying levels of success. Probably the most famous of these attempts is the “Mother’s Day” photo apparently made up of several different images. This hullabaloo only illustrates a time-worn and, unfortunately, true saying: There is no substitute for [insert the point you are making here, in this case the actual Kate Middleton].

As you may know, I am currently writing a cookbook, and in cookbooks — especially Thai ones — substitutions are often suggested for hard-to-source ingredients. Thai cooking has a lot of them, like galangal, makrut lime leaves, and lemongrass, none of which really can be substituted, if good Thai food is what you’re after. If you are allergic to these ingredients, we are sorry: your dish may be good, but not really really good. It’s just the way things are.

While doing research on Northern Thai food with my Aunt Priew, she made me a dish I hadn’t had before, out of the pomelos that grow year-round in her front yard. It’s called tum som o, a mix of flaked pomelo, bird’s eye chilies, palm sugar, sliced Thai eggplant, slivered lemongrass, shredded sawtooth coriander, dried shrimp powder, and fish sauce. However, the most important ingredient is nam poo, which is the black juice of pulverized field crabs. The color, if you’re not used to it, is alarming, but the taste — deeply umami, salty, with a shadow of bitterness — is what Northern Thai food is all about. If you don’t have it, sorry; don’t make this dish.

If you do somehow have the ingredients for this dish, here’s the recipe:

• 1 pomelo, peeled, segmented, and separated into flakes
• 1 head of garlic, crushed
• 2-3 bird’s eye chilies
• 1/2 tablespoon nam poo
• 1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon palm sugar
• 2 Thai eggplants, sliced
• 2-3 lemongrass bulbs, sliced
• 3-4 sawtooth coriander stalks, sliced
• 1 tablespoon dried shrimp powder

In a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic with the chilies until well mashed. Add palm sugar and pound to incorporate. Add lemongrass and do the same. Add your sauces: nam poo and fish sauce and mix well. Taste for seasoning. In a bowl (or still in the mortar), carefully add pomelo and mix with a spoon to incorporate the dressing throughout. Add sawtooth coriander and dried shrimp powder and mix with a spoon. Decant into your serving dish or bowl and serve immediately.