Passport & Plate - Som Tam
Thailand | Monday, March 2, 2015 | 5 photos
2 cloves garlic, peeled
3-6 red bird’s eye chillies
6 small Roma tomatoes, cut into halves
3 snake beans, trimmed and sliced into 4cm lengths
3 Thai eggplants, sliced into quarters
2 tbsp grated palm sugar
1 tbsp dried shrimps or 2 tsp shrimp paste
1 large green papaya, shredded
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tsbp lime juice
In a large mortar, pound the garlic and chilli until crushed.
Add tomatoes, beans and eggplants and pound lightly.
Add palm sugar and lime juice and pound lightly, then do the same with shrimps or shrimp paste, and papaya.
Add fish sauce and lime juice and pound once more to integrate into the salad.
Serve topped with crushed roasted peanuts, if wished, and a side basket of sticky rice.
I learned to make som tam under the tutelage of Dao, owner of the Red Orchid cooking school in the best little village in the world, Pai, in northern Thailand. We were on honeymoon—we married five months previously, two months after my dad had died suddenly, leaving me parentless. I was five months pregnant (we didn’t muck around), and had a long, lazy month tripping round Thailand. Dao spoke barely any English and her assistant Dai even less, and our co-pupils were a Hebrew-speaking Israeli couple. The brilliance was that it mattered not a bit; gesture and demonstration, and intonation, more than sufficed. We even quickly came to recognize Dao’s sharp wit. We made 10 dishes that day but it was som tam that grabbed me most fervidly: I’d already gotten to know and love this dish on my travels and to me it represents the best of Thai street food—its success lies in the precise balancing of sour, sweet, salty, spicy and bitter, it changes at the hand of the cook and by region, and it’s simple, quick and plenty of fun to prepare. Som tam originates in the Isaan region of Northeast Thailand, a disadvantaged area, many of whose people have had to travel elsewhere in Thailand to find work, facing discrimination along the way. Yet the recipes they have brought with them—dishes like som tam, gai yang and larb—have captured appetites throughout the land of smiles, becoming favourite street food dishes; it’s an interesting dichotomy. At the end of our class Dao told us to come back the next day as she was making us lanterns fashioned from banana leaves and orchids for Loi Kratong. The next evening we took our lanterns to the river and, along with the villagers, cast them off—along with bad luck from the previous year—into the current. Today, souring the produce market for green papaya, snake beans and dried shrimp, and the rhythmic thwack of the pestle pounding, takes me right back to Pai.
