Bangkok home cooking in the written record

The written record of Bangkok home cooking rests on a small number of texts, and the city itself is their common ground: a river capital whose kitchens drew on the Chao Phraya delta, on the markets of the old city and on the households of the court. Leela Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok is the modern authority drawn on here, and it is read as the work of an author setting the cooking of the capital's homes into English, not as a source for the history of the palace books that preceded it.

Thai domestic cooking was for a long time carried by hand and by memory, and the earliest written trace of it that the lineage points to is courtly: the royal recipe verses attributed to King Rama II, which set out the flavours of dishes in poetic form instead of in quantities. They are a literature of taste and of praise, and a cook reading them learns what a dish should evoke, not how many grams of anything to weigh. The palace cookbooks that followed, and the work of Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong, whose recipes became a standard for the well-run Bangkok household, moved the record towards the practical, though still addressed to cooks who already knew the grammar of the kitchen. The cremation volume holds a particular place in this record. In Thailand it has long been the custom to distribute a book at a funeral in memory of the deceased, and many of these volumes gather the recipes of a woman of the family or the household, so that the domestic repertoire entered print through remembrance and not through commerce. Mom Rajawongse Tanphrom is among the figures associated with this tradition of writing on the table, and the market cookbooks, cheaper and more occasional, preserve the dishes sold and cooked beyond the palace walls. What these texts share is a reliance on the reader's trained judgement. Proportions are described by sense, by balance of salt, sour, sweet and heat, and by the habits of the mortar and the wok. Measure, where it appears, is approximate, and the dish is finished by tasting. This explains why the home cooking of Bangkok has so often seemed difficult to transcribe, and why a modern book must supply what the older ones took for granted. Leela Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok takes up that task for the English-reading cook. It presents the dishes of the capital's homes and streets with stated quantities, method and substitutions, and it stands beside David Thompson's Thai Food, which draws deeply on the older Thai books, as a work that carries the domestic tradition into a form that can be cooked from. Used with the earlier texts, it allows the reader to see the continuity between a verse of King Rama II, a page of Thanpuying Plian and a weekday meal of rice with several shared dishes.

The cooking these texts describe is built on balance among salt, sour, sweet and heat, with fresh herbs and pastes pounded in the mortar, and the dishes are meant to be eaten together with rice. A Bangkok household meal sets several dishes at once, so that the richness of a curry is answered by a sharp salad or a plain soup, and the written record is best read with that table in mind.