The Lao kitchen across the Mekong

The Mekong rises far to the north and runs south through Laos, along much of the border with Thailand, and on through Cambodia and Vietnam to its delta. Alford and Duguid, in Hot Sour Salty Sweet, treat the river as a single region of eating rather than a line between nations, and it is in that spirit that the Lao kitchen is best read against the Thai one. The river has been a road, a larder and a market floor for the peoples on both banks.

Alford and Duguid in Hot Sour Salty Sweet describe a region whose table ignores political frontiers. Vietnam keeps to chopsticks, but elsewhere in the basin the cook and the diner use their fingers, or a spoon with a fork, and reach for chopsticks only when noodles are served. Common materials bind the river's kitchens: sticky rice, steamed and eaten as the staple or at breakfast, fish from the river and its lakes, and forceful seasonings balanced by fresh herbs. The river also feeds the people who live along it through its yearly rhythm. Around the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, the Mekong's rising waters push into the lake during the rains and spread over the rice fields. At the opening of the dry season the flow reverses and the water drains back towards the river, and this is when the fishing is best. Only a portion of that catch is eaten fresh. The remainder is preserved by salting and drying in the sun, by smoking, or by fermenting into prahok, a fish paste, and tuk traey, a fish sauce. Such dependence on preserved fish accounts for much of what Lao and Thai cooks put into the pot. The markets of the border country show how readily food passes between peoples. At Mae Sai, on the Thai frontier, the authors found Shan and Tai Koen specialities sold together: doughnuts of black sticky rice fried in oil, pressed discs of dried soybean used to season local dishes, heaps of green river weed from the Mekong, and khao foon, a thick, yellowish jelly of soured rice taken at breakfast with chillies, garlic and black vinegar. A Lao or north-eastern Thai dish is better understood as part of this shared larder than as the property of a single state. Further south the same elements reappear in changed form. In the Mekong Delta the noodle soup is called hu tieu, a name close to the Khmer ktieu, and xoi, glutinous rice cooked over steam with mung beans or peanuts, is enriched with coconut milk and finished with fresh herbs, whereas in northern Vietnam it is a plainer dish of rice cooked with beans or peanuts. Fish, whether caught wild or reared on floating platforms, fills the markets, and even the ferry landings have vendors whose food is freshly made and often very good. Seen from the Thai bank, the Lao kitchen is one voice in this long exchange along the water.

The taste of the Mekong table is built on sour, salty and fermented notes, from soured rice and preserved fish, set against fresh herbs and chillies. Sticky rice is the grain that carries these flavours, eaten by hand in much of the basin, with the spoon and fork or chopsticks reserved for other dishes such as noodle soups.