Bangkok Glutton

People say that the best thing about travel is how it teaches you about yourself. After one month on the road in southern Italy, I can confidently say that I have truly learned a lot, and that lot is this: I have 100 percent turned into my parents (if I start bugging my children to have plastic surgery, you can be sure that I am no longer me, but my mom). Alas, I can no longer go without Asian food for longer than two weeks. Even in Puglia, where there are surprisingly few Chinese restaurants, and where all the Japanese restaurants are all-you-can-eat.

So we did what we could with what we had. We mixed roasted chili paste smuggled in our suitcases with formaggio fresco, ladled homemade meat sauce onto rice like curry, and fried up many Thai-style omelets with Italian basil. One night, we ended up making an obscene amount of jab chai (Thai-Chinese vegetable stew) with soy sauce, oyster sauce, cavolo nero, cabbage, carrots, chicken wings and three kinds of mushrooms, and eating that throughout the week whenever we got hungry at night. Towards the end of our stay, we dreamed of fermented rice noodles, rice curry stalls, and bowls of chili dip surrounded by a mountain of Thai produce.

So it was something of a relief when, only a couple days after touching down, I ended up in Chin’s kitchen with my friend Chris, on a two-day mission to learn as many Thai dishes as Chin could teach us. How many dishes would that be? Name them all. Believe me, Chin tried to teach us all of them.

Thai food is difficult to learn, which may surprise people who are taught to believe that European cuisine is as hard as it gets. While I do believe haute French food is the most expensive (all that waste), I also think that Thai food is up there when it comes to labor intensiveness (is that a word), patience, and time. This is a cuisine that was cooked up, literally, in royal palace kitchens, where a brigade to rival anything under Paul Bocuse was put to work squeezing out coconut milk, pounding chili pastes, stirring curries under a cloud of chili smoke, or beating sticky rice flour batter for kanom until their arms fell off. Today, these dishes are enjoyed by everyone, but few people enjoy an entire army of cooks in their kitchens. It’s little wonder, then, that ready-made chili pastes and even things like Rot Dee are around; we can’t be blamed for wanting to take shortcuts when Thai food is such a pain in the ass to make (incidentally, Chin makes her own curry pastes and roasted chili paste, which she sells at Rimwat Cafe.)

Yet, like moths to a flame, we still fancy ourselves real cooks who burn with the ambition to “make everything from scratch” (or as close to scratch as you can reasonably come in a short period of time). Enter Chili Paste Tour’s cooking courses, where you can learn to cook at least four dishes from scratch and enjoy them as they are meant to be eaten right there and then, before going home and tumbling onto your couch to recuperate with a drink and maybe some Tiger Balm. Chin usually has a roster of dishes in mind depending on what’s available at the market, but you can add to it, since she knows how to cook just about anything, including desserts.

We are not talking just simple stir-fries or noodles either; we are talking curries, some of them serious. On our first day, we played kanom jeen vendor and made three types of curries that would go with these popular Mon-style fermented rice noodles. This included the hard-to-find “kanom jeen sao nam”, a mix of pineapple, shrimp powder, ground peanuts, julienned ginger, sliced garlic, chilies and coconut milk that is usually eaten during the Thai summer. Chin taught me to cut the pineapple like how a somtum vendor juliennes the green papaya on the street, but she took over because she was afraid I would cut my hand off.

Chin also put us to work pounding boiled yellowtail snapper until it was appropriately mushy enough; this takes much longer than you would expect and results in fighting with a quicksand-like mixture reminiscent of the bog on the Yorkshire moor that tore my meniscus last year. This mixture is what goes into nam ya, made with galangal, lemongrass, lime leaves and turmeric and fried with coconut milk until it spatters. Next, kanom jeen nam prik, one of my least favorite dishes normally, but this version much less cloyingly sweet, with only 2-3 Tablespoons of palm sugar and still aromatic with ground peanuts and shrimp powder.

If you feel like this sounds like a snap, don’t worry: there was also green curry, for which we made meatballs out of clown featherback fish stuffed with salted egg yolk, fried clown featherback fishcakes with the meat beaten until a spoon stands straight up in the bowl, ajad to go with the fishcakes, pickled carrot and daikon radish threads to go with the nam prik curry, Ratchaburi-style sour curry with fresh coriander leaves and coconut shoots, roasted chili paste, and a really delicious pad sator (a last-minute addition) with a touch of palm sugar and plenty of the homemade roasted chili paste.

The second day was similarly action-packed. Instead of kanom jeen vendors, we were full-on khao gang cooks, but at a particularly old-fashioned place with a good reputation, like Klang Soi. Of course, that means something classy like “khao tung na tung”, a dipping snack with a confusing name in Thai.

We made a lovely clear-broth tom yum soup with nary a condensed or fresh milk in sight with big tranches of Thai seabass. It was bright and bracing, exactly the way I like it.

We headed down south (culinarily) for a gander at one of my husband’s favorite dishes, pla sai (sand whiting) fried with turmeric and lemongrass, and discovered that it’s cooked for far longer than simply “cooked through” — in fact, it’s cooked until almost obliterated, to make the bones as edible as possible.

And yes, we made curries. There was a “gang kua” with pumpkin and pork and seasoned with fresh bai horapa and torn lime leaves straight out of Chin’s garden. While it’s known as “red curry” in the West, it’s kind of a misnomer because there are two kinds of red curries: “gang kua”, which is stirred for minutes like a roux until the coconut cream breaks and oil dots the surface, and “gang phet”, its dumber sibling, which has more curry “broth” and is milder in taste.

And finally, the “big daddy” of Thai food, massaman curry, which is arguably the most complicated dish to make. I’ll be honest and say we worked from a pre-worked paste that Chin had made, otherwise we would have been there still and I wouldn’t be writing to you right now, I’d be dead. What I can add is that the massaman was delicious, not too sweet and with just the right amount of peanutty flair.

While there were a lot of dishes, we did learn what I think is the central tenet of making Thai food: you need to taste it at every step, and adjust accordingly. In this way, Thai food is endlessly adaptable; it can be sweet if you like sweet, it can be spicy if you’re a chili head, it can be salty if you are me, it can be anything. Too sour means more salt and vice versa; too sweet means more umami; too spicy means add more liquid. Everything involves adjustments and things rarely come out perfectly immediately, so relying on a written recipe as the end-all-be-all is often counterproductive. This is a good lesson to learn. Also, roasted chili paste goes with almost everything.

If you think we got away without learning to make some desserts, you’d be mistaken. There was “look choop”, which we made without dye because Chris and I were too lazy, and dough that Chin colored on-site with dragonfruit (pink) and pandan juice (green). And there was bua loy, made with pumpkin (gold) and jackfruit seed (light purple) in a sweetened coconut milk broth.

But one of the standout dishes for me personally was Chin’s tamarind shrimp, which I’d classify as Southern Thai but which actually can be found everywhere. Chin lightly breads her shrimp in whole wheat breadcrumbs before frying, a trick that makes the tamarind sauce hold on better, and the simply-made sauce itself is probably the best I’ve had. Chin generously let me copy the recipe here, so if you have some shrimp and tamarind sauce on hand, you definitely should try this.

Otherwise, well, I’ll just quote Chris: “Sometimes, it’s worth it just to pay for it.”

Chin’s Tamarind Shrimp

Serves 3-4

• 6 shrimp, peeled and deveined
• A handful of whole wheat breadcrumbs on a plate
• 3 Tablespoons of neutral cooking oil
• Deep-fried shallots and fresh coriander leaves for garnish

For tamarind sauce:

• 1 cup tamarind juice
• 3 Tablespoons coconut sugar
• 3 Tablespoons fish sauce

Over a medium heat, heat oil in a frying pan. Lightly cover both sides of shrimp with breadcrumbs and place them in pan with hot oil, but don’t crowd them, so if you have to fry in batches, have at it. Cook until shrimp turns pink and opaque on both sides, about 2-3 minutes. Lift from pan and place on serving plate.

In a saucepan, heat tamarind juice, sugar and fish sauce together. Taste for seasoning. Once you’re satisfied, ladle sauce over shrimp, garnish shrimp with shallots and coriander leaves, and serve immediately.

A long long time ago, in a country far far away, I went to a Steely Dan concert. It was a gift (bought voluntarily, and out of the blue) from my then-boyfriend, during a visit to his family home in Vermont. It was the ’90s and Steely Dan were obviously past their prime, but big enough to do the kind of nostalgia tour that big-name acts from the past rely on as their bread and butter; as a result, the crowd was full of wealthy boomers who were no longer able to immediately recognize the smell of pot (from somewhere, I don’t know where). When we got back to the car, my then-boyfriend punched in a tape of Velvet Underground’s “Loaded” (which was mine, mind you) and, as the start of “Who Loves the Sun” began to sound, pounded on the steering wheel with the energy of a prosecutor presenting a murderer with the evidence of her crimes. “How great is this music?” he shouted, and it was his way of telling me he had had a horrible evening, full of terrible music, regretfully on his own dime.

People who care about music (or me) seem to misunderstand why I like Steely Dan. It’s not the great musicianship or production value, or occasional “smooth jazz” of it all. I like them in spite of these things. It’s because they sound like a beleaguered small-time band playing in the lobby of a down-at-heel lounge in Murray Hill, shoehorning gigs in between 9-to-5 jobs and sermons from well-meaning family members on why giving up on your dreams is the adult thing to do. There’s something about Donald Fagen’s voice that suggests that he is persevering in life in spite of it all, even though he is undoubtedly way richer than me. When he sings “Any Major Dude” (a song that pulled me through some tough times in the past), it sounds like it’s coming from an old guy sitting on someone else’s stoop in the west 40s in New York, who you’ll never see again. That thought gives me comfort for some reason.

Karma works in funny ways. I had my own Vermont ex-boyfriend moment recently (but not on my own dime), at a buzzy new restaurant on Charoen Krung Road (arguably Ground Zero for buzzy new restaurants). Specializing in modern Thai cuisine, it had won plaudits internationally and had correspondingly taken some lessons from fine dining restaurants in the West. There was an understated, almost hidden entrance leading to a hushed sanctuary within, and the necessary pre-dinner moment of contemplation (15 minutes minimum) where we could focus on original artworks exclusive to the restaurant. The menu (in courses, obviously) didn’t list the dishes themselves, but instead the chef’s inspiration and musings on how the dishes came about, in the sort of teeny-tiny writing that is the bane of old people everywhere. And then there was the food: reimagined classics, or showcases for technique, dishes saddled with names reminiscent of early stage Gaggan (or maybe late stage Gaggan too, I haven’t been to Gaggan in a while).

If I haven’t said this before, let me state this explicitly: I don’t believe in “authentic” Thai cuisine. I believe that the evolution of Thai food is a necessary part of keeping the cuisine alive and vibrant, and that Thai food has been able to remain vital by doing just that over the past few centuries. There is no “real” recipe for green curry, or anything else, aside from the fact that it uses Thai ingredients and starts from a paste (hopefully pounded in a mortar and pestle, but not etched in stone, even though I will judge you, but who cares). I’ll even loosen the Thai ingredients thing if you’re a restaurant abroad, because I believe that great cuisines can evolve from monetary (and customer taste) constraints, just like how Chinese-American and Japanese-Peruvian cuisines were created (and they are great cuisines). I want to see new cuisines sprouting from Thai food. I want to see people innovating and expanding the boundaries of what make Thai food possible. I want it to incorporate elements from everything that is around it, just as it has successfully done since the birth of Thai food.

But I hated this meal. I hated the fact that, today, fine dining = courses, frequently more than you can stand. I hated how seriously everything was presented, in the face of dish titles that highlighted an overarching desire to be a part of the West (you can accuse me of unconscious projection here, even though consciously I do all I can to fight that in spite of my terrible language skills and overall demeanor. You understand my dilemma). I hated that there was plenty of intellectualizing, but no emotional element to the food (this is also a Western trait because post-Rousseau, the West distrusts emotion). And I hated that there was barely any rice, except for a cursory nod at the end, in honor of Thailand’s agricultural roots, of course.

I’ve come to understand that what I hated, really, was the system in which food like this has become necessary. We must have wine pairings like in Western restaurants in order to be taken seriously, even though that’s not our tradition. In the same vein, we must have courses, even though our food is not meant to be eaten that way. Some restaurants (Aksorn, Samrub for Thai, Haawm) thread this tiny hole in the needle by presenting courses at first before serving everything Thai-style at the end. I am OK with this, because I understand that many of us live in a sort of twilight world where we are one thing but also the other at the same time. I respect this because — OBVIOUSLY — and because that is also what modern Thai cuisine is, a “luk krung” (born from two parents or lifetimes of different cultures). And like any “luk krung”, there is the overweening temptation to fall all the way over to the side that is “stronger” (again: my Thai language skills). The dislike for the obvious Western slant in some modern Thai restaurants comes from a dislike of my own weaknesses. But that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong; adhering to a system started by someone else inevitably puts all of your work at a disadvantage. Playing by Western rules for Thai food will always allow people to categorize Thai food as inferior to that of the West.

Time to listen to “Any Major Dude” again, I think.

In spite of all of the guides I’ve published about traversing the length and breadth of Thailand for good street food, I’d never been to Songkhla, a province set like a cap over the three southernmost Thai provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala. Formerly known as “Singora” or “Lion City”, Songkhla was once the “jewel in the crown” of a former Malay kingdom before coming under Thai control in the 18th century, where it (obviously) has remained ever since.

Thanks to its serene location connecting Malaysia to Siam, conveniently situated next to the Gulf of Thailand, Songkhla always enjoyed a role as a trading hub. This made it ideal as a base for entrepreneurial Fujian and Guangdong Chinese families, one of whom rose to political and business prominence as the Na Songkhla family, serving as governor for eight generations until 1901. Today, their former home serves as the Songkhla National Museum.

I was aware of all of this, and had even been told of how charming Songkhla’s Old Town is by numerous people. Yet nothing prepared me for exactly how picturesque and idyllic it was until I set foot in town after an hours-long delayed flight on AirAsia and a failed attempt to get a fried chicken lunch near Hat Yai airport (Songkhla does not have its own airport). What this means is that I was hungry, and in a bad mood, and still I was charmed by this town with its photogenic alleyways, interesting street art, innumerable cafes, and obviously, wonderful food.

Part of what makes the Old Town so idyllic is the marked absence of Starbucks, McDonald’s, or even a 7-11 (that’s left to the rest of town, where most people live). There’s only a Cafe Amazon (how are they everywhere?), tucked away on a shady side street across from a local sweets shop, as darkened and hushed in atmosphere as a hidden library. Another thing? It feels relatively undiscovered, populated by a few wandering Malaysians, a couple of touristing Thais like us, and a handful of Western tourists that you can get to know over the course of your 2- or 3-day trip (periodically bumping into the guy from the cafe this morning, the couple from the wine bar last night, the family from the hotel lobby, you get the picture). It’s quiet enough here to be almost unnerving, and even the youngsters taking photos for their social media are unobtrusive, as if they had been schooled in the airport on how to behave.

Displayed in almost every business in the Old Town is a useful book promoting the eateries and shops of Songkhla, through which we discovered local delicacies like “yum kai krob Songkhla”, a spicy salad of steamed egg yolks with herbs; “guaythiew hang moo” or “pig’s tail noodles”, seasoned with palm sugar and vinegar; and “khao man gang gai”, a Southern Thai-style nasi lemak combining the twin delights of coconut rice and chicken curry.

Alas, we didn’t have the time to try these delicacies (I know). What we do have time for is one of Songkhla’s most famous snacks: a quick “sundae” of house-made ice cream topped with egg yolk and a spoonful of Ovaltine powder from I Tim Ong (also famous for its fish meatballs).

There’s also the famous “kanom kai” made by Pa Mon (there are a lot of famous things to eat here), Thailand’s answer to Proust’s madeleine.

But the culinary peak of our trip was Tae Hiang Aew, recommended by my friend Nat and the inspiration behind the “Old Town Songkhla” guide (much like how Jay Fai was originally the inspiration for my first street food guide in 2010). Said to have been a must-try for all visiting dignitaries to Songkhla, this surprisingly humble open-air shophouse restaurant specializes in honest, straightforward Thai-Chinese cuisine, without contemporary bells and whistles like mountains of chilies or rivers of oyster sauce.

According to the Songkhla guide, there are five dishes that regulars always order here. The first is a delicious yum of “mamuang bao”, an egg-sized green mango native to Southern Thailand that is studded with little umami bombs like strips of dried squid and dried shrimp powder (on the side for us, because my husband is allergic). There’s a “dry tom yum” of deep-fried seabass with tons of lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal and roasted chili paste. A dry “pullo” (Chinese-style five-spice stew) of duck snuggled against red barbecued pork. Tofu “song krueng” (“fully dressed”), slathered in a cornstarch-thickened minced pork sauce larded with scallions and ginger. And either deep-fried whole fish or our choice, stir-fried morning glory, not smothered in chilies but simply cooked with garlic and a fermented brown bean sauce, simple and secure in its flavors, a genuine taste of mid-20th century Thai-Chinese cooking.

This is when you can tell that the chef in the kitchen has taken a few orbits around the block; it’s a type of cooking that is disappearing, slowly, as tastes and palates evolve. It doesn’t rely on anything — not on teasing the eye with beautiful arrangements or the tongue with sensational flavors. It’s the type of food you’d find at a place like Hi Nakorn Pochana , known for its seafood but actually excelling in its large variety of stir-fried greens: simply served with garlic, allowing the flavor of the vegetables to shine through. This is not to say that cooking today is worse or inferior; it’s just changed, just as we all change over time.

Thankfully, Songkhla seems to be one of those places that doesn’t change as much, at least for now. Maybe this is why I’m so drawn to it. I’ve located my new house, which appears to be inhabited, next to a lovely alleyway with a view over the lake (I will not tell you where this is because I don’t want you to take it, but if you’ve been to Songkhla you probably already know). I will just bide my time until it becomes available (or not, because maybe it’s not meant to be). So don’t worry, you won’t have to forward my mail just yet. But you’ll find me there again, by hook or by crook, someday. Hopefully I’ll get to try everything else that I missed the first time around.