Chinese, Mon, Lao and Malay threads in the Thai kitchen

The Thai kitchen was never a closed system. It sits at the meeting point of the Chinese south, the Burmese and Mon lands to the west, the Lao country along the Mekong to the north and east, and the Malay peninsula below. Alford and Duguid, travelling through the borderlands where these cuisines meet, describe a region in which food crosses frontiers more easily than people or goods, and in which the Chinese presence in particular is felt from Yunnan to the Burmese towns of the Shan hills.

The Chinese thread is the most visible in the everyday Thai kitchen. It lies in the wok and the stir-fry, and in the practice of briefly boiling a green with tough stalks before frying it with seasonings and letting it simmer in the pan. The green Alford and Duguid prefer for this Chinese-Thai dish is Chinese broccoli, called gai laan in Cantonese and jie lan in Mandarin, a leafy member of the mustard family Brassicaceae, with thick, rounded stalks, broad leaves and small white blossoms. The same sequence suits other greens, from bok choi to broccoli rabe, and where the stalks are more tender the final cooking is cut to half a minute or less so that the vegetable keeps its texture. The Chinese grocery has supplied the Thai pantry in other ways. Alford and Duguid describe dried white fungus as a cheap, light ingredient that keeps almost indefinitely in its cellophane package. In Chinese cooking it is commonly served in a lightly sweetened soup, while the Thai cook dresses it as a salad. The ingredient is shared, and the idea of how to use it differs between the two tables. The Lao thread runs through herbs. Chinese celery leaf, sold in bundles at Chinese and Southeast Asian groceries, is eaten fresh in Chinese and Lao dishes in the manner of coriander leaf, and is known in Laos as tang sai. It has slender green stalks and leaves of much stronger flavour than those of ordinary celery, for which mitsuba or common celery leaf are weaker substitutes. Its seeds are used in yellow curry. A single plant thus belongs to two kitchens at once, and the Lao habit of treating leaves as a main flavouring rather than a garnish points to the Thai custom of eating herbs in quantity. The Chinese influence is a present matter as well as a historical one. Alford and Duguid record that Taunggyi, in the Shan hills of Burma, has become thoroughly Chinese in character, with Chinese trucks, goods, workers and restaurant food along its main streets, a result of China becoming a close ally of Burma. The Thai kitchen belongs to this same continuum, in which ingredients and methods pass across frontiers between neighbouring peoples.

These threads change the flavour of the Thai table in practical ways. The wok contributes quick heat and a softened bitterness in the Chinese greens, the Lao tradition contributes the sharp, green freshness of whole herbs eaten raw, and the white fungus salad shows the Thai balance of sour, salty, hot and sweet laid over a Chinese ingredient valued chiefly for its texture. The cook who understands where each element came from can judge better how much of it a dish requires.