David Thompson's philosophy of Thai food

David Thompson's Thai Food, published in 2002, set out to record Thai cooking as a cuisine with its own court and village antecedents, and not as a set of recipes adapted for foreign kitchens. Thompson drew on Thai-language cookery books, among them those of Thanpuying Plian Passakornrawong, and on the cooking of Thai households, and he built the book around the structure of the Thai meal. Thai Street Food, published in 2010, turned the same attention to the food sold in markets and on the roadside of Bangkok and the provinces.

The governing principle of Thompson's approach is that Thai food is a cuisine of balance and not of single flavours. In Thai Food he describes the meal as a composition: a rice-centred table in which several dishes, among them a curry, a relish with its vegetables, a salad and a soup, are set against one another so that richness, sourness, heat, sweetness and salt answer each other across the whole spread. No dish is meant to carry the meal alone. A cook who understands this tastes each preparation as one part of a larger arrangement, and seasons accordingly. The second principle is that technique and ingredient are inseparable. Thompson insists on the pounding of pastes in a granite mortar, on the frying of coconut cream until it splits, and on the correct choice of each aromatic: galangal Alpinia galanga is not ginger, and holy basil Ocimum tenuiflorum is not sweet basil. Each substitution alters the dish, and Thai Food is written to make the cook aware of what is lost. The pastes are not blended for convenience, because the bruising of the ingredients in the mortar produces a texture and aroma that a machine does not. The third principle is historical seriousness. Thompson treats the older court cooking of Bangkok and the regional cooking of the provinces as distinct traditions, and he is careful to record the dishes that have changed or fallen from use. This sets Thai Food apart from earlier English-language Thai cookbooks, which tended to simplify and to adapt to the pantries of Europe and America. Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid approaches the region through travel and the household; Thompson approaches Thailand through the text, the kitchen and the discipline of the craft. Thai Street Food extends the argument. Thompson holds that the food of the street, made by a single cook who has done one thing for years, is as exacting as the food of the palace, and that its authority comes from repetition and specialisation. The book organises itself around the vendor and the dish and not around the formal meal, and it shows that balance is achieved there too, through the condiments set on the table, which let the eater complete the seasoning. The preparations that follow in this book are best read in this light. Each technique, from the pounding of a paste to the dressing of a salad, is a part of a system of balance, authenticity of ingredient and respect for the cook's inherited method, and it is within that framework that Thompson's instructions are most fully understood.

The Thai meal, as Thompson presents it in Thai Food, is built on the answering of richness, sourness, heat, sweetness and salt across the whole table and not within a single dish. A coconut-based curry supplies richness and is set against a salad dressed with lime juice for sourness, a relish carried by chilli for heat, and the salt of fish sauce and shrimp paste that runs through all of them. Palm sugar gives the sweetness that rounds the edges of the sharper preparations, and plain rice absorbs and steadies the whole. The cook therefore seasons each dish to its place in the spread, and the eater completes the balance at the table, which is why Thai Street Food gives such weight to the condiments set beside the dish.