History of Thai Food
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The food of Thailand is startlingly bold and imaginative. Carefully crafted to appeal to all senses, it combines beautiful presentation with fragrant aromas, contrasting yet complementing flavors and textures, and often fearsome chili-heat.
Although Thai food appears unique it is in fact one of the world’s great fusion cuisines. The country may never have been colonized, but Thai cooks certainly absorbed foreign influences. As in much of Asia, Chinese culinary techniques are very strong, particularly in the form of noodle dishes, soups, and stir-frying to steaming. Indian spices give fresh-tasting Thai curries their deeper, toasty notes, while the flavors of Southeast Asia are tasted in satay and coconut curries. Even Thai chilies are not indigenous, but were introduced by the Portuguese in the 16 th century.
Thai cooks, many of them attached to the Royal Court, transformed these new ingredients and cooking techniques into something distinctly Thai by combining them with ancient seasoning of garlic, pepper, coriander root, lemongrass, pungent herbs, sour kaffir lime, tamarind, galangal, Asian shallots, coconut, palm sugar, fish sauce, and shrimp pastes
These flavors are not, by any means, subtle, but Thai cooking blends them into graceful dishes where no one taste overpowers the other. Above all, Thai cooks value balance, and it is the combination of sweet, sour, salty and hot tastes that makes the food vibrant. With seasoning so important, it is no surprise that the mastery of Thai cooking lies in the labor---intensive creation of its curry and soup pastes, which heavily contrasts with the cuisine’s quick cooking techniques.
The incredible aroma of a hot bowl of Tom Yum says much about Thai food. One of its distinctive characteristics is the use of fresh seasonings to impart a lemony essence and floral flavors. In Thai cooking, garlic and shallots, along with the aromatic root seasonings of ginger, turmeric, and the peppery galangal, is the foundations of many dishes. Fish sauce and shrimp paste add a salty taste, chili some heat, and coconut and palm sugar bring sweetness. But it is the sour yet refreshing citrus notes of lime, kaffir lime leaves, and lemongrass that balance the dish.
Although Thai cuisine is often described as lemony, in fact, lemons do not grow at all in a tropical climate. Instead, the juice of small, sour Thai lime is often added to cut the sweetness and oiliness of dishes. An alternative to a sour Thai taste can come from tamarind or vinegar. The bitter juice of the kaffir lime is very rarely used in Thai cooking, but its leaves and bumpy rind are used for their musty, limey fragrance and to hide the smell of the fish sauce or shrimp paste. Lemongrass, bruised with the back of a chef’s knife to release the oils and yet add more fragrance into the curry pastes and soups.
A visit to bustling, cosmopolitan Bangkok can make Thailand appear very urban, but in many ways the country remains predominantly an agricultural society. The food most people eat everyday therefore reflects the simple, labor- intensive lifestyle of the paddy fields. Many families cook in an outside kitchen; the simplest meal is rice, grilled fish and a chili dipping sauce (nam phrik), and chili relish.
Rice being harvested in Central Thailand
The central plains of Thailand are dominated by rice paddy fields, and the fertile land of the country’s heart beat allows many families there to be essentially self-supporting. Even a small farm can provide rice, vegetables, a few herbs, fruit, fish from the canals (klongs), and frogs and insects from the fields. With enough to sustain themselves there is little need to hunt, with the diet supplemented by a little meat from pigs, chickens and ducks. all over Thailand there is a plentiful supply of food; fish from the southern coastline, rice in the north, and Thais can pick corn, coconuts, pineapples, and harvest rice.
Like many Asians, the Thais consider a meal a meal only if it is served with rice (khao). Rice and food are synonymous and, with the exception of snacks, Thai dishes are generally thought of in terms of the flavors and nutrients they add to plain rice. Rice makes up the biggest proportion of the meal, a first mouthful is savored before any of the other dishes are tasted, and then just a little of each dish is added to flavor it.
The long-grain jasmine rice grown in Thailand is one of the most highly regarded in the world, the Thais themselves calling cooked rice (khao suay), ‘beautiful rice’. Treated simply, the rice is usually steamed to a fluffy yet not sticky texture and releases a delicate aroma, though not a floral one, the jasmine referring to the appearance not the fragrance of the rice. It provides a neutral palate to balance the power of Thai dishes.
Thailand is also one of the few countries to value sticky long-grain rice. The rest of Asia rarely uses sticky rice, and then mostly for sweet dessert, snack dishes. Only in the relatively infertile mountains of northern Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos where it flourishes is this ancient grain used as a staple.
Black sticky rice is also popular and while other cuisines shun black food, the Thais have embraced this earthy tasting rice, which combines so well with sugar to become a sweet dessert dish.
At the table, Thai rice is served much hotter than other Asian countries, and usually kept warm, covered, spoonful’s served out onto the plate only when needed. Sticky rice is traditionally served in a bamboo basket to keep it warm and moist, and is always eaten with the fingers, rolled up into a ball and dipped into sauces or consumed with dishes. Sticky rice is also transformed into sweets, usually combined with coconut, as in the banana leaf parcels of sticky rice sold on the streets.
Despite the majority of Thais being Buddhists, very few Thais are vegetarian. Instead most observe a distinction between killing an animal themselves and eating it, with fishing deemed perfectly acceptable. Thais have never been great meat-eaters or hunters. In such a fertile environment food is easily foraged from the land, river and sea, so protein is more likely to come in the form of fish, tofu, and nuts.
Snakehead Fish packed with lemongrass
and kaffir lime leaves ready for steaming
Thailand’s long southern tail offers kilometers of seafood-rich water, relatively inexpensive and eaten at almost every meal, especially in the south. Even in the landlocked north, the country is endowed with plentiful fresh-water fish, in its extensive network of streams, rivers, ponds, even rice paddy fields, especially during the monsoon season.
Fish tends to be served whole in Thailand, simply steamed or grilled with chili, lime juice or ginger. It is also roasted, wrapped in banana leaves, or deep-fried and smothered with a sauce. Seafood is also notably used in Thailand’s hot and sour salads (yum). Thai dishes also have their distinctive taste from the sea in the form of seasoning like shrimp paste and fish sauce.
As the Thais eat almost no dairy products, the creaminess of their savory dishes, rich sweets comes instead from the coconut, a fruit available and scattered with abundance across the whole country.
The coconut is one of the most versatile foods in the world. Unusually, Thai cooking doesn’t make much use of animal fats so coconut cream, the main source of fat in the Thai diet, also replaces oil or butter in many recipes. Curry pastes and fresh seasonings are cooked in the oil that separates out from the heated coconut cream, then meat, poultry, seafood or vegetables are added to the soup.
Fresh coconut cream isn’t in fact the liquid found inside the nut, but is made from grated coconut meat steeped in hot water and ‘milked ‘to produce a liquid with a rich, thick consistency. This cream contains little water so that it can be cooked to a high temperature. Its thinner relation, coconut milk, is taken from a second soaking. The coconut meat is also grated for cooking some dishes.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Thai cooking is its use of fresh herbs. Herbs certainly contribute flavor, handfuls tossed into dishes to give a pungent essence.
In most Thai recipes, coriander is the essential herb. Unusually it is the roots that are prized for their aroma and heady taste, pounded with garlic, salt and peppercorns as a foundation for many dishes. The refreshing leaves and stems are added to almost all soups, salads and fish dishes.
Thai cooks also use three varieties of basil, all quite different from European basil. Thai sweet basil has a basic flavor, its aniseed pungency sweetening soups and red yellow curries. The strong aroma of holy basil, sometimes called ‘hot basil ‘because of its peppery spiciness, is accentuated when cooked and used only in strong dishes. There is also a delicate lemon basil thrown into soups and seafood. Spearmint is added fresh to seafood or minced meat salads, it’s cool fragrance and taste a contrast to the chili-heat of these dishes.
Thai soups are not quite what you might expect from the name. A unique component of most meals, they are neither the individual bowls of chicken noodle or minetrone soup found in western cooking nor the digestive broths of Chinese and Japanese cuisine. Instead, a Thai soup (tom), is brought to the table with all the other dishes, to form a harmonious, balanced meal. Ladled into small bowls, the occasional spoonful is sipped during a dinner to counterbalance the other flavors. Thought of only as part of the whole, never as a dish that stands alone. Thai soups can vary enormously, some bursting with spicy, strong flavors, others almost delicate, balancing the sharp tastes or cutting the richness of other dishes.
To many people outside of Thailand, Tom Yum is one of the best known Thai dishes, a hot prawn soup (Tom Yum Kung) aromatic with lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves. To the Thai’s