The Chao Phraya Delta and the Central Plain

The central plain is built from the silt of the Chao Phraya, which forms where the Ping, Wang, Yom and Nan rivers of the north come together near Nakhon Sawan and then runs south across a flat alluvial floor to the Gulf of Thailand. David Thompson, in Thai Food, treats this plain as the heartland of the cuisine that came to be regarded as Thai, since the courts of Ayutthaya and later Bangkok stood on its waters and drew their rice, fish, fruit and vegetables from it.

The delta is a country of water before it is a country of land. Rivers, canals and tidal creeks divide it, and for much of its history the household stood on a bank or on piles above the water, with the boat serving as the road and the market. Thompson stresses in Thai Food that the character of central Thai cooking follows from this setting: the diet rests on rice and on what the water yields, and the dishes are built to accompany rice rather than to stand alone. The flooded paddies and the channels between them supply the freshwater fish on which the table depends, among them the snakehead Channa striata, called pla chon, and various catfish and barbs. These are eaten fresh, grilled, steamed, fried or curried, and they are also preserved as salted fish, as fermented fish and as the pastes and sauces that give the cooking its depth. Thompson shows how this preserving habit, born of seasonal abundance and the need to keep the catch beyond the flood, shapes the relishes, the nam prik, that sit at the centre of the central Thai meal, eaten with rice, fish and vegetables from the same plain. The plain is also a country of cultivated gardens. Its fertile, well-watered soil carries vegetables, herbs and fruit, and the orchards on the lower reaches of the river are long established. The coconut, Cocos nucifera, is important to the cooking of the region, and Thompson describes how the milk and cream of the nut enrich the curries of the central tradition, which are rounded and gently sweet compared with the sharper, drier cooking of the north-east. The herbs and aromatics that scent these dishes, galangal Alpinia galanga, lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus, makrut lime Citrus hystrix and the basils, grow readily in this soil and are used fresh. The court shaped what the plain produced. In Thai Food Thompson attributes to the palace kitchens of the central region the refinement of presentation, the careful carving of fruit and vegetables, and the complexity of dishes that balance several flavours in a single mouthful. The food of the royal household and the food of the river villages shared their ingredients; what separated them was labour, finish and the number of components, not the produce of the land itself. The central plain therefore stands as the reference point against which the other regional cuisines of Thailand are usually described. Its rice, its river fish, its coconut and its gardens supply the structure of the meal, in which a soup, a curry, a relish, a fried dish and a salad are set about a common dish of rice and eaten together. Thompson presents this arrangement as the logic of the cuisine, and it is the delta that made it possible.

The taste of the central plain is one of balance, in which salt, sweet, sour and heat are weighed against one another and softened by coconut and by the sweetness of palm sugar. Thompson describes the central curries as richer and rounder than those of the north and north-east, and the table as a spread of dishes of contrasting character set about rice, each tempering the others.