In the modern rush to food 'freshness', the venerable recipes of olden times are worth remembering
Globally munched and adored, Thai food gets some odd spins in foreign countries - let's not get started on fusion - but it's the venerable recipes of old Siam that silence the great debate over authenticity.
Dr Kanit Muntarbhorn has a library full of cookbooks that were already well thumbed a century ago, and he's been in the kitchen trying them out.
"I'm bringing back Siamese food, 100 years old or older," says the physician, who's been researching old recipes for the past two decades.
Among other ingredients, he's up to his knees in fish. "Thailand is a culture of freshwater fish, which is why fish predominate in so many of the old dishes."
Kanit has determined from his cookbooks - many of them first editions - that Thai food has four main groups.
There's aharn boran, which is commonly translated as "ancient food", though it's based on recipes that are at least 100 years old - hardly "ancient" by historical standards.
Still, it's distinctive from aharn kao, meaning "old food", derived from recipes 50 to 100 years old.
Then there are aharn ruam samai (contemporary - dishes created in the last 50 years) and aharn samai mai (modern - what cooks are concocting today).
Like anything old, the oldest recipes are in danger of being lost forever, so Kanit is on a mission of preservation, beginning with 10 recipes he's chosen from his rare kitchen manuals. His hope is that they'll help spark renewed interest in the food we used to eat and lead to better documentation.
"Many cooks claim they serve 'ancient' food, but they have no idea how old their dishes are, or how they originated," Kanit says.
Here's Kanit's initial "top 10":
Yumyai (salad)
Masman (red Muslim chicken curry)
Hrum (minced pork in a crisscrossed egg wrap)
Khao tom sakhoo (sago-grain boiled rice)
Khao kluk namphrik (rice mixed with chili paste)
Khao tang namphrik PAD (rice cracker with a fried chili-paste topping)
Thod man plaa (fish cakes)
Thod man kung (shrimp cakes)
Khaijiew namprik (omelette with chili paste)
Gaeng ped nua (spicy curry with beef)
The oldest of Siamese dishes, Kanit says, are gaeng (curry), yum (salad) and tom yum (spicy soup). All of these are found in the first Siamese cookbook, "Patinnabutr Lae Jod Mai Het", written and published by Somjeen Rachanupraphan in 1889.
But gaeng appeared in Thailand's oldest dictionary, published in 1873. The definition: a watery accompaniment to rice, made with shrimp paste, chilli, shallot or onion and garlic.
"By definition, gaeng must include garlic - otherwise it's not gaeng!" Kanit says. The word came from the Han Dynasty Chinese geng, meaning stew, as in a dish cooked with a considerable amount of water.
Muslim masman curry wasn't considered gaeng in the 19th century - only when garlic was added to the shrimp paste, chilli and shallots - but it and its ingredients eventually became so commonplace that they were considered indigenous.
And the original gaeng masman used chicken, Kanit says.
The tom yum was called tom yum pla mor, with the pla mor (climbing perch) predating the shrimp now universally used in tom yum goong.
"So you can't call tom yum goong 'ancient' because the original used fish instead of shrimp," Kanit says.
The recipe for tom yum pla mor belonged to Thanpuying Plien Pasakornwong, the wife of Chao Phraya Pasakornwong, better known as P Bunnag.
Apart from the upwardly mobile fish, the key ingredients were lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, pan-roasted chilli paste, coriander leaves, fried garlic and lime juice.
"People in those days also used spices as food preservatives," Kanit notes.
Siam's first recorded salads were yum hed khone (silver sillago salad), yum yai and yum pla krob (crispy-fried fish salad).
Just a year after that first cookbook appeared, more dishes were documented, including various curries, tom yum prakraben (ray soup), shrimp cakes and fishcakes made with different freshwater fish.
Can modern Bangkokians enjoy these venerable dishes just as much as their ancestors? Kanit says his hoped-for revival will require "change in the flavour, not in the ingredients".
"The ancient recipes are excellent, but the taste is still a problem. So cooks who adhere strictly to the suggested quantities in the original recipes might have problems. They need to change the flavours slightly."
Old ways revisited
Prof Wandee na Songkhla, who runs the Wandee Culinary School in Bangkok, says some of Dr Kanit's 10 selected dishes could have originated well before 1889, possibly as early as the reign of King Rama II from 1809 to 1824.
The king even composed poems in praise of Siam's favourite dishes, like masman and yum yai. A century later, Rama VI penned a paean to Thai desserts.
"Ancient Thai recipes mostly originated in the palace," says Wandee, "but over time the cuisine's popularity was extended because the palace cooks made royal dishes for their friends and families."
Wandee laments that these 10 dishes are either no longer popular or vanished altogether - the old flavours rarely match modern tastes.
But Wandee urges chefs in restaurants to revive the dishes with changes in the flavour, while sticking to the authentic ingredients.
"Reviving these recipes should actually start at home," she says. "Parents can show the way by cooking these dishes for their children, so they start developing a passion for them."
Here's an "ancient" recipe for chicken curry to try, from 1890:
INGREDIENTS
Chicken
Chillies, dried, about 3 baht, a weight equivalent to 770 grains of rice
Chillies, young, 3 baht
Coriander seeds, 1 phueng, equivalent to 32 grains of rice
Fish sauce, 5 baht
Galangal, 2 phai, or 64 rice grains
Garlic, 1 baht
Kaffir lime, rind only, 1 phueng
Lard, 5 baht
Lemongrass, 1 salung, or 64 rice grains
Onions, heads only, 2 baht
Pepper, 1 phueng
Salt, 1 phueng
Shrimp paste, 2 baht
Sugar, 2 salung
Sweet basil, 6 baht
Thai kaffir lime, 2 salung
Yeera, or cumin, 1 phueng
METHOD
Prepare the curry paste and phrik khing.
Cut the chicken into pieces.
Light a wood fire.
Put the lard in a heated pan, followed by the chicken.
Add the garlic and phrik khing.
Add the fish sauce, chillies, curry paste, sweet basil and kaffir lime leaves.
Add sugar to taste.