Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Rice
In the morning Thais rise with two fundamental smells: rice being cooked and the
burning joss sticks offered to household shrines. The start of the new day means
another opportunity to eat rice, which is synonymous with eating. (The Thai word 'to
eat' is
gin kôw
, literally 'to eat rice'.)
Rice can be steamed, fried, boiled in a soup, formed into noodles or made into a
dessert. In its steamed form it is eaten with a spoon and, in the case of
kôw nĕe·o
(sticky rice), eaten with the fingers. It appears at the breakfast, lunch and dinner
table and is even sought out as a late-night snack. The classic morning meal is a
watery rice soup (either
jóhk
or
kôw đôm
) that is the ultimate comfort food, the
equivalent of oatmeal on a cold winter day. The next meal of the day will probably
be a stir-fry or curry, typically served over rice, bought from a street stall or shop-
front canteen and quickly gobbled down. In provincial towns, everyone heads out to
the night market to see and be seen and to eat more rice, usually in the form of a
stir-fry.
Noodles
When rice just won't do there is another, albeit rice-derivative, alternative:
gŏo·ay
đĕe·o
(rice noodles). Day or night, city or village,
gŏo·ay đĕe·o
is the original Thai
fast-food served by itinerant vendors or from humble shopfronts. It is a ubiquitous
and highly adaptive dish that demonstrates Thais' penchant for micromanaging fla-
vours. You choose the kind of noodle, the kind of meat and you flavour it yourself
with a little fish sauce, sugar, vinegar and chillies; don't shy away from the sugar, it
works wonders.
There are three basic kinds of rice noodles -
sên yài
(wide),
sên lék
(thin) and
sên mèe
(thinner than thin) - as well as
bà·mèe,
which is a curly noodle made from
wheat flour and egg. Most of these only appear in noodle soups but a few are used
in various stir-fries, such as
pàt tai
(thin rice noodles stir-fried with dried or fresh
shrimp, tofu and egg).
Head to the morning market for a bowl of
kà·nŏm jeen
(rice noodles doused in a
thin curry). Spicy, fishy, salty, soupy, this dish is all the flavours rolled into one and
piled high with strange pickled and fresh vegetables that will make you feel as if
you've grazed on the savannah and swum through the swamp.
Kà·nŏm jeen
is usu-
ally served at rickety wooden tables shared with working-class ladies dressed in
polyester market clothes.
