The Muslim kitchens of Thailand

Muslim cooking in Thailand has two principal homes. One is the southern provinces bordering Malaysia, where Malay-speaking Muslim communities have long kept their own table. The other is the central plains and Bangkok, where Muslim families of Persian, Indian and Cham descent settled in the old kingdom's capitals and in the quarters of the later city. Leela Punyaratabandhu, in Bangkok, writes of Thai cooking as a layered inheritance, and the Muslim kitchens form one of its oldest and most distinct layers.

The Muslim contribution to the Thai table is best understood through its spices and its meats. Dried spices such as cumin, coriander seed, cinnamon, cardamom and clove, which sit uneasily in a kitchen built on fresh herbs and pounded roots, entered the central Thai repertoire through Muslim cooks and the trading communities they belonged to. They appear most visibly in the curries known as kaeng matsaman, usually rendered massaman, whose name is generally understood to mean Muslim, and in the milder, richer curries that sit apart from the sharp green and red pastes of the plains. Massaman shows the meeting plainly. The paste takes the familiar Thai base of dried chillies, galangal Alpinia galanga, lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus, shallot and garlic, and adds the dry-roasted spices of the Muslim kitchen. The curry is then built with coconut milk, potato, onion and roasted peanuts, with beef, chicken or duck as the meat, and is seasoned with palm sugar, fish sauce and tamarind. Its character is rounded and warm rather than fierce, and it is generally eaten with plain rice. Beef is the clearest mark of the Muslim table in a country where many Buddhists traditionally ate it sparingly. Muslim cooks supplied the beef and goat of the Thai city, and their dishes stand apart for it. Khao mok gai, a yellow rice cooked with spiced chicken in the manner of a biryani and served with a sharp sweet-sour sauce, belongs to this tradition, as does satay, grilled skewered meat served with a peanut sauce and a cucumber relish. Roti, the griddled flatbread eaten with curry or sweetened with condensed milk, is another inheritance from the Muslim and South Asian communities. In the south the table follows the Malay pattern more closely, with turmeric, fresh and dried chilli, and coconut worked into robust, often hot, curries and rice dishes. The Muslim kitchens thus did not form a single cuisine but a series of related ones, shaped by place. Their lasting influence on the Thai table lies in how thoroughly they were absorbed: dishes such as massaman are now counted among the classics of the national cooking, with little sense of a foreign origin.

The Muslim dishes of Thailand taste of warmth and depth rather than of sharpness. Dry-roasted spice, rich coconut milk and the sweetness of palm sugar are balanced by tamarind and fish sauce, and the dishes are eaten with plain rice, which tempers the richness. Roti and rice serve alike as the vehicle for the sauce, so that the curry is the centre of the meal rather than a seasoning for it.