The market cookbook and the street vendor's repertoire

The repertoire of the Thai street vendor belongs to the markets, canal-side landings and roadside stalls of Bangkok and the central plains, where cooked food has long been sold ready to eat. David Thompson, in Thai Street Food, takes this setting as his subject and records the dishes of the vendor as a body of cooking with its own discipline, distinct from the cooking of the palace and the household.

The palace cookbooks, the verses attributed to King Rama II and the recipes gathered by Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong describe a cooking of the court and of well-provisioned households, where many dishes were set out together and prepared by several hands. The vendor works on other terms. He or she prepares one dish, or a small group of related dishes, and prepares it again and again through the day, so that the repertoire is narrow and the execution exact. Thompson's Thai Street Food is built on this principle: it presents the dishes by the manner of their selling, and shows how a single preparation, repeated daily, is brought to a fixed standard. The market cookbook that follows from this is a different kind of text from the palace volume. It is organised around what is sold at a particular stall or in a particular part of the market, and it assumes a cook who will buy fresh each morning and cook to order. Thompson records the dishes of noodle sellers, grill vendors, curry stalls and sweet sellers, and in doing so preserves recipes that were passed from person to person at the stall rather than set down in writing. The cooking he describes depends on a few well-made components, such as a pounded paste, a seasoned broth or a dressing balanced between salt, sour, sweet and heat, held ready and combined at the moment of serving. The relation between the two traditions runs in both directions. Many dishes sold in the street derive from the kitchens of households and from the cooking of the Chinese and other communities settled around the capital, and the vendor adapts them to the speed and equipment of the stall, often a single charcoal fire, a wok and a mortar. In turn the printed recipes of cremation volumes, produced to commemorate the dead and filled with the favourite dishes of the deceased and their families, sit between the two worlds, setting down in the household voice a cooking that the market also practised. For the cook, the lesson of the vendor's repertoire is one of economy and repetition. A dish made hundreds of times is refined by that repetition, and what remains is only what the dish requires. Thompson's book is valuable to the reader for this reason: it shows the dishes at their most concentrated, with the technique visible and the seasoning fixed, and it asks the cook to attend to the order of work, the heat of the fire and the balance of the seasoning rather than to elaboration.