Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong and the palace kitchen

Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong belonged to the Bangkok court of the Chakri dynasty, where the cooking of the inner palace was taught within noble households and passed from one generation of women to the next. David Thompson, in Thai Food, treats her as the principal authority for the cooking of that tradition and draws on her recipes as a foundation for his own account of the central Thai kitchen.

The palace kitchen of the Bangkok court was a household art rather than a restaurant trade. Its cooks were women of the inner court and of the noble families attached to it, and the knowledge they held was carried by training and by memory more than by the written page. Thanpuying Plian stands as the figure through whom much of that knowledge reached print, and Thompson acknowledges her in Thai Food as a source for the dishes and the standards of the central Thai table. What distinguishes the palace tradition, as Thompson describes it, is a preference for refinement of work and balance of flavour over force. Ingredients are prepared with great care, pastes are pounded fine, and the contrasts of salt, sour, sweet and heat are held in measure so that no single note overwhelms the others. The dish is conceived as part of a shared meal in which several preparations answer one another, not as a plate to be judged alone. The tradition also attended to the appearance of food. Carved vegetables and fruit, delicately shaped sweets and finely cut garnishes belong to the palace repertoire, and they demanded a patience that only a staffed household could supply. Thompson sets this against the cooking of the street and the village, which he presents as vigorous and direct, and he shows how the court kitchen drew on that wider cooking while giving it a more finished form. For the cook who consults Thai Food, the importance of Thanpuying Plian lies in the standard she represents. Her recipes, as Thompson uses them, give a reference point for how a central Thai dish should taste when made with full attention to its parts. Those who read her through Thompson should take from her the discipline of the preparation, the balance of the finished dish and the respect for the ingredient that the palace kitchen held.

The palace table seeks equilibrium among salt, sour, sweet and heat, with aromatics such as galangal Alpinia galanga and makrut lime Citrus hystrix used to perfume the dish rather than dominate it. Thompson presents the meal as a set of dishes that complement one another, so that a rich curry is set beside something sharp or fresh and the rice is the quiet ground of the whole.