Thailand Confidential

Rotten Fish, Yum Yum!

My dictionary tells me that anything “rotten” is undesirable. It says “rotten” is “foul-smelling, putrid… wretchedly bad; miserable.”

That doesn’t sound like anything I’d want to put in my mouth. But around the world, many do. And usually it’s rotten fish they eat.

I’ve made a study of the unusual things some people eat in books titled Strange Foods (1999) and Extreme Cuisine (2004). My message, if I may use such a weighty word, was that what is called weird in one corner of the planet is merely lunch in another. In my research and travel in six continents, I encountered several places where fish was deliberately allowed to rot and then wolfed down with a lot of smacking of the lips, followed by requests for second helpings. For an American raised on meatloaf and mashed potatoes, this seemed very strange, indeed. But interesting. It is my curiosity that’s driven my quest, and in the process I’ve discovered some very tasty dishes.

The locations that got the most credit, or criticism, for putting rotten fish on the menu were in Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska. In Alaska, the Inupiat and Kobuk tribes traditionally caught what are called sheefish with hooks made from bear teeth and buried the catch ungutted in a leaf-lined pit, where it decayed in its own juices for several weeks. It should come as no surprise that the aromatic result was known, colloquially, as “stinkfish.” In northern Scandinavia, the dish is called surstromming. In this case, the herring is salted in brine and allowed to ferment and age a few months. The fish is then tinned and ready for consumption.

The champ in this twisted, gastronomic Olympiad generally is acknowledged to be the Icelandic dish called hakarl. This is cured shark meat that is cut into strips and, again, buried in the ground (preferably a gravel bed) for several weeks. Washing and air drying follows—although that doesn’t diminish the smell— and it, like all the others, it is best served with whatever local alcohol might be available. In quantity.

What has this got to do with Thailand? Not much, except that when it comes to rotten seafood, the Land of Smiles tops all of them. Here, fermented fish is not a specialty served seasonally or on holidays, it is an essential part of the diet and an indispensable ingredient for its cookery.

I’m talking about nam pla. This and its many Southeast Asian variations is made from rotten seafood and is produced by packing small fish—usually anchovies, but sometimes other fish, or even shrimp or squid—into barrels or crocks with salt or brine, and leaving it to ferment for at least a month and for up to a year, after which the liquid is drawn off and matured in sunlight before being bottled. It is then used in the same way salt is used in the West, or soy sauce is added to dishes in China and Japan. Unlike table salt, however, the brown liquid is highly nutritious, rich in protein and B vitamins.

(Crystallized salt is never used as a table condiment in Thailand, but may be added during cooking. Salt also may be added to some fruit juices or used as a dip, with or without sugar and chilis, for green mango, pineapple or other fresh fruit.)

What puts fish sauce into the why-in-the-world-would-anyone-want-to-eat-that? category is its smell. Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients (1988), erroneously likened the taste to “encountering Camembert for the first time.” In fact, Camembert is a mild cheese with a faint smell of mold, which is one of its ingredients, but Bruce knew fish sauce when it came into olfactory range. It took some getting used to, he said, “for those who haven’t grown up with it.” Others have made far ruder comparisons redolent of outhouses and the you-know-what that’s always found in them.

What few realize is that this pungent sauce has been around for a lot longer than Thais. In Classical Greece and Rome, virtually everything was seasoned with what they called liquamen, or garum, made from anchovies and other fish in much the same manner. Anchovies packed in salt, which lend their dizzying fragrance to numerous Italian dishes, are another inheritance from this kind of ancient fish pickling.

Nowadays, the stuff is found mainly in Southeast Asia, added to numberless dishes during the cooking stage, or after serving, or next to the main dish as the base for a dipping sauce, in Thailand usually combined with chopped chilis, fresh lime, and other ingredients. Variations on the same salty theme are manufactured in Vietnam, where it is called nu’o’c ma’m, in Cambodia tuk trey, ngan-pya-ye in Myanmar, and patis in the Philippines. In the United States, usually in shops in a city’s Chinatown, I find competition from producers in Vietnam and the Philippines, but everyone agrees that it is Thailand that exports the translucent, brown sauce in the greatest quantity. It probably doesn’t have to be said, but fish sauce keeps indefinitely on the shelf, without refrigeration. It’s already rotten, so what else could happen to make it worse?

What is not found so widely is pla ra, a runny paste created when fish is abused in the same fashion, this time with rice husks thrown in, and the whole sticky mess is eaten, usually using the fingers, with rice. I’ve been exposed to this quite a lot recently, now that I have a house in Surin, a province in northeastern Thailand where a jar of the stuff is never far from the dinner plate. I confess I have a jar of it in my kitchen in Bangkok as well, its lid screwed on as tight as handcuffs applied by a sadistic cop. Even so, I swear I can see an occasional bubble rise through the glop to the top and when my Thai-Khmer wife Lamyai opens the jar, the “fragrance” fills the kitchen like a hyena’s burp, the birds go silent in the neighborhood and geckos fall from my apartment walls. As I watch her dip her fingers into the stuff and lift a smear of it with rice to her lips, I remember that rice and fermented fish were the K-rations that sustained the Vietcong.

Although I think Scott and Kristiaan Inwood, authors of a small but delectable book called A Taste of Thailand (1986), overstated the case, I know what they were talking about when they said it recalled the “accumulated stench of putrefying corpses, abandoned kennels, dirty feet, stagnant bilges, and fly-blown offal.”

Lamyai calls this blasphemy, says such opinion smells worse than the goopy gray stuff clinging to her fingertips and lips.

Thai Aphrodisiacs: Food That Makes You “Strong”

Before getting into the hard facts, a caveat: what follows was performed at the direction of a magazine’s editorial staff; as I told my wife as we ventured forth on each expedition with firm resolve, “Honest, honey, I’m just doing research.”

What I learned, in a nutshell, was that Viagra and other pharmaceutical pick-me-ups may have acquired a sizeable following in the Land of Smiles, but there remained a number of gastronomical boosts that defied any challenge from a laboratory in Switzerland, or from all the counterfeit factories in India. At least that was so if you listened to the true believers, most notably the people who captured, cooked and sold the stuff.

Before venturing into one of the countless restaurants that specialize in birds’ nest soup—clustered densely in Bangkok’s Chinatown and in southern Thailand where many of the nests are “harvested,” from the Phang Nga Sea south to Hat Yai—I did a little reading on the subject. This led me to wonder why the first person to climb to the top of a dark, bat-infested sea cave on a rickety bamboo ladder and saw nests made largely of bird saliva, thought this messy bit of housekeeping would make a yummy bowl of soup. Rhino horn, at least, was phallic in shape, more or less, and it wasn’t too long a reach to think that a tiger’s parts might convey the strength and stamina of what the Guinness Book of Records called the most dangerous man-eating animal on earth. Why the nests of birds that, just before their breeding season, fed on gelatinous seaweed that made their salivary glands secrete a glutinous spit, with which they constructed their nests, was added to this aphrodisiacal list may forever remain a mystery.

All that said, on a visit to Hat Yai I happily ordered a bowl and while waiting, talked with the restaurant proprietor. He told me that the dried nests took up to a full day and night to clean, soak, and rinse, and that there were myriad ways of cooking them, but all required the addition of other ingredients—minced chicken and egg white, ham and wine, chrysanthemum petals and lotus seeds, for example, to replace the nutrition totally removed by the cleaning, soaking, and rinsing of the nests. This then was baked inside a coconut or pumpkin, or stuffed inside a chicken and double-boiled, or merely simmered as any other soup.

Although there was a market for dried and packaged nests in Asian groceries and Chinese herbal shops, where it cost upwards of three hundred dollars for about an ounce, making it nearly worth its weight in gold, it sounded like a lot of work and I wasn’t surprised when I was told that virtually all birds’ nest soup was consumed in a restaurant. However, I was assured, with the customary grin and wink, that the stuff delivered what was promised. So it wasn’t a dinner-and-a-movie date, but dinner-and-then-go-back-to-the-hotel-as-quickly-as-possible experience. On the way home, my wife apologized for giggling.

My experience with shark’s fin was, sadly, quite similar, and was further tempered by warnings that some species were now threatened with extinction and reports of “finning,” the cruel cutting off of the fins and release of the crippled fish to a slow and gruesome death. I also learned that, in much the same manner as the birds’ nest, after a long soaking, boiling, and rinsing, the fin was rendered without nutrition and nearly tasteless, contributing only a gooey consistency to the soup. It was chewy and had a pleasing texture, but it was the crab meat, roe, shrimps, sweet-smelling mushrooms and other vegetables, ginger, bamboo shoots, thinly sliced ham, shredded chicken and ginseng that gave the soup its flavor and anything approximating nourishment. Once again, I rushed home with my wife, who after a while said, “Ho hum.”

It was time to take a break and review. As I understood it, an aphrodisiac was any substance, animal, vegetable, mineral or, in the modern age, pharmaceutical, that was believed to stimulate a man’s or woman’s libido, increase sexual energy and performance, and in whatever way possible, enhance the enjoyment of sex. That sounded good to me, but was it reasonable to seek such warming support in food and drink?

Yes, it was true that Aristotle recommended parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns bruised to powder and drunk in muscatel, that Ovid counseled a mixture of “pepper with the seed of the boiling nettle, and yellow chamomile ground up in old urine,” that the fifteenth century work, The Perfumed Garden suggested dabbing a paste of honey and ginger directly on the male organ to increase size, and that The Kama Sutra, the notorious Hindu guide to love, advised the firmness- or endurance-challenged to boil the testicles of a goat or ram in milk and sugar.

Interesting, yes, but like the birds’ nest and shark’s fin soup, what a hell of a lot of work, and some of it rather more yucky than I wished.

There was another possibility. What is termed “organotherapy” dated back at least to Roman times, when it was believed that eating a healthy animal’s organ might correct some nagging ailment in the corresponding human organ, a belief that continued to the present day. Thus, if eating foods that looked phallic made any sense—to the aforementioned rhino horn add deer antler, sea cucumber, and the geoduck, a clam that can weigh as much as seven kilograms and has a neck like a fire hose, all quite in demand in Asia—it seemed to me that it was time to kick the crusade one level higher—or lower, depending on your point of view—and try a dish or drink whose main ingredient was genitalia.

I confess I wasn’t inexperienced. Many years ago I ate the cojones of a loser in that day’s bullfight in Mexico City (deep-fried), in Singapore I slurped up a bowl of what was said to be turtle penis soup, and in Guangzhou, China, I once drank too much of what the menu described as Five Penis Wine, a liquid of dubious murkiness caused by what I was told were the empowering, powdered genitals of goat, dog, cow, deer and snake. Could I find such an uplifting food or drink in Amazing Thailand? Did I really want to?

It was on a random trip to the Samphran Elephant Ground & Zoo, some thirty kilometers west of Bangkok, that I found what I was looking for. Besides pachyderms, this sprawling, leafy compound also has numerous crocodiles on show. Now, I’ve never been overly impressed by these large, toothy reptiles in such a setting; they seem little interested in doing anything but soaking their scaly bodies in the cement sided pools or remaining equally motionless on the cement pads, their mouths agape. All that great stuff you see on the National Geographic Channel doesn’t happen in captivity.

However, on the way out of the wildlife park, as I passed a display of crocodile skin purses, wallets, shoes and belts, a trade that is permitted by the government for a few breeding farms, I asked if there were any edible products for sale, the clerk brought out some dried croc meat in a cellophane-fronted box, some dark beads that were identified as dried blood (good to relieve pain in the advanced stages of terminal disease, I was assured), and— voila!—what I was told was an adult crocodile’s penis.

“Make you strong!” said the clerk, unsurprisingly, telling me I was to grind it up in a mortar and stir the powder into a drink or soup.

My first reaction was disappointment. I found it hard to believe. The crocs I’d just seen lazing in the sun weighed nearly as much as pickup truck and what I was being offered for several thousand baht was about the size of my finger.

When my wife saw what I’d bought, she laughed. Champagne, black tea, sweetbreads, brains, kidneys, oysters, lobster and crayfish, caviar and roe, starfish, cuttlefish, smoked or salted mullet, anchovies, turtle, prawns, sea urchins, whelks, mussels, moral mushrooms, celery (what’s the full stalk look like?), red peppers, wild mint, pimiento, marjoram, parsley, roots of chervil and of fern, radish, lotus, pistachio nuts, cumin, thyme, sage, borage, walnuts, almonds, dates, quinces, musk, caraway, age, vanilla, clove, saffron, the blood of many creatures, dove and pigeon (because of their sensual courtship behavior)… the list goes on and on, and most of these foods are available in Thailand, where some people (people I’m certain are not friends of yours or mine) actually believe that there is priapic power in the consumption of mouse droppings. If even the more mundane in this list delivered what the myth extended, would it be any wonder that so many of us walk around in a constant state of lust?

What was needed in my search, I decided, was something more exotic, a food that would at the very least offer some true gastronomic adventure, without further endangering any of Thailand’s many threatened species. Here’s some advice from Dr. Schwann Tunhikorn, head of wildlife research for the Royal Forestry Department on the subject of tiger parts: “What people don’t realize is that most of the merchandise is fake. I have never seen a real tiger’s sexual organ in the market.” What is it, then? Dr. Schwann said many were carved from cattle tendon.

My wife and I knew we could do better, so we went to the Klong Toey Market, Bangkok’s largest outdoor food market, situated on the edge of the city’s largest slum but also within sight of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, so perhaps my purchase here would at least be as promising as buying shares in one of the Kingdom’s companies.

Just a few meters from the noisy traffic I met Kui Sai Lim, close to seventy years of age, the last dozen of which he has produced cobra-based tonic drinks and stir-fries. The customer selects a snake from one of several cages nearby, most a meter or more in length, some as thick as a man’s wrist and priced according to size, the largest for less than US$20. Enough, we were assured, to provide a healthy, stimulating stir-fry for two.

As my wife and I watched, the serpent was tied to a metal pipe, head up, its tail lashed to the supporting pole below. Mr. Kui then opened the serpent’s abdominal cavity with a sharp blade and drained the blood into a glass. A tumbler of strong rice wine was offered as a sort of chaser. The snake—still writhing— was skinned, cut into chunks and filleted, then chopped and cooked with fresh herbs, garlic and chilis.

The last of the cobra cocktail was consumed and that was followed by the usual dash back to my flat and the usual ho-hum and so-what, accompanied by the usual matrimonial smirk.

However unrewarded I may have been in my quest, I assured my wife I would not give up. This was, after all, a reasonable region of research and how could she say otherwise, when tens of thousands, maybe even millions of Asians obviously were better informed and more experienced?

The American writer P.J. O’Roarke insisted that the only sure-fire aphrodisiac was a Mercedes-Benz. Others say there are two, money and power.

I don’t even have a motorbike and of the other two, I have none, as well, so please pass the gecko wine.

Gourmet Dining on the Cheap

In the West, street food is severely limited in both variety and imagination. One encounters a soft pretzel served with mustard outside the home of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Roasted chestnuts near London’s Big Ben. Tortillas with a filling in Mexico City. A hot dog here, a submarine sandwich there. And most people think “fast food” means you know whose hamburgers, fried chicken and pizza. Or something nuked in a microwave.

Ah, but take your hunger to the streets of the “developing” nations of the world, and especially to Asia, and there you find a level of culinary sophistication unmatched elsewhere. There are no cloth napkins. There are no waiters to take you to the table. There may not even be a table or chairs and if there are, they may be so close to the ground they seem made for small children. But, the food, oh, the food… isn’t that what’s important, after all, and so often is lost in overpriced, climate-controlled “ambiance”?

On the street, at temporary stalls and rolling carts and from baskets hung from bamboo shoulder poles—here today, gone soon, back again same time tomorrow—is the world’s most succulent and tantalizing moveable feast, where diners encounter unparalleled richness and variety, along with a speed in delivery unrivaled by all the efficiency experts behind the international fast food chains. Street food is the original fast food. And not only is the choice greater, it is cheaper and tastier, and also, in most cases, likely healthier.

No one can say which “developing” nation’s street cuisine is best, but in any argument, Thailand gets unchallenged respect from everyone. It is for good reason that Thai food has been the most popular cuisine to sweep the world since, well, chop suey and the sushi bar. Visitors to Thailand seeking The Real Thing make a big mistake if they don’t eat some of their meals on the street.

Sitting on those tiny stools, knees cracking, struggling with chopsticks, puzzling over why Thais push their food onto a big metal spoon with the back of a fork, while trying to identify the sauces and condiments in the little carry-away rack where there ought to be—and aren’t—salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, can be a daunting, or enlightening, experience. (For the record, the condiments usually are fermented fish sauce, crushed peanuts, dried chili peppers, and sugar, all of which may be added to soup.)

Why, the foreigner may ask, are cold drinks taken away in plastic bags tied off at the top with a rubber band, rather than in a cup? What are all those little pancakes filled with and why is that woman pounding shredded green papaya so mercilessly in a mortar? Are those bananas being boiled in oil? What are those hairy red things piled next to the mangos? Why is so much wrapped in banana leaves or packed into bamboo before it is cooked? Is that toilet tissue being used for paper napkins? Are those insects, heaped high on the tray?

Eating on the street in Thailand is an adventure—noisy, vigorous, and for anyone unfamiliar with the widely ranging Asian diet, sometimes startling. There is no air-conditioned hush that you’d find in most restaurants; a bus and a small pack of motorcycles go past instead. And the food doesn’t appear magically from some mysterious location; you watch it being prepared as the smoke and odors wash over you, and if you stand too close to the huge wok full of boiling oil or fat of dubious origin, it will probably stain your clothing. Eating on the street in Thailand is being a part of a show. Gastronomy as street theater.

This is the way food is consumed in Thailand by the local population. It is to the streets and the waterways (where floating kitchens dispense soup and other foods), carts, temporarily erected stalls, bicycles and vendors carrying baskets on their backs, that the rural villagers and urban poor go for a thrifty, nourishing nosh or snack.

Slices of green mango are dipped into a mixture of sugar, salt and crushed or powdered chilis. Iced whole coconuts are “topped” and served with a straw. Beef (okay, maybe water buffalo) and pork and chicken chunks laced onto skewers are grilled over charcoal. Massive ears of corn are grilled in the same fashion, as are eggs and chicken thighs and whole fish (also skewered) and a puzzling array of twisted innards.

Dried, roasted squid on a bicycle rack is run through a set of hand-cranked rollers and reheated over a brazier balanced behind the seat. Lengths of sugar cane are treated to a similar pair of rollers to extract the clear, sweet juice, which is then mixed with water and ice. Sticky rice is cooked with sweet beans in bamboo or banana leaf. A mixture of coconut milk and rice flour, slightly sweetened and slightly salted, is heated in concave indentations in a heavy iron pan over a portable gas burner. The juice of small oranges (never mind the greenish color; they’re incredibly sugary) are squeezed as you watch, then poured into plastic bags with crushed ice and tied at the top with a rubber band, the corner of the bag open for inserting a straw.

Crispy-fried grasshoppers, silkworms, crickets, beetles, caterpillars, miniature shrimp, tiny whole frogs and even scorpions are salted and spritzed with vinegar and carried away in small paper bags made from the morning newspaper. Better than popcorn, say Thai gourmands. And lower in cholesterol than many other protein sources, say nutritionists.

As for this being the original “fast food,” someday I’d like to see a race staged between a McDonald’s serf and a Thai street cook, see who can deliver my lunch first. I’ll put my money on the middle-aged woman on Sukhumvit, Soi 4, who produces a healthy bowl of noodles with chicken, bean sprouts, chopped morning glory leaves and stems, garlic and spring onions, a selection of condiments waiting on the table with chopsticks and metal spoons, in about ten seconds flat… and—get this!—nothing had been pre-cooked.

Street hawkers—most but not all are women—are numerous where foot traffic is heaviest—for example, outside rail and bus stations, and along sidewalks where there are clusters of office highrises or, after dark, near the numerous entertainment venues. The food varies from one region of the country to another, but if there is a dominant influence, it is that of Northeastern Thailand, called Isan. Not so many years ago, dishes from this part of the country—the largest, the most densely populated, the poorest—were scorned by outsiders as fit only for peasants. Since then, thousands of food vendors from Isan have set up shop not only in Bangkok but throughout the kingdom and many Isan dishes are now considered a part of the “national” cuisine.

In recent years, there have been arguments about how “clean” Thai street food is, or is not. Pesticides and bacteria have been found in many ingredients. (As they are, too, in five-star hotels; five out of the six times I’ve been made sick by what I’ve eaten in Thailand has been after dining at a “nice” restaurant or hotel, not on the street.) The water used by street cooks for washing bowls, plates, and tableware may be of questionable origin. Unlike in the West, few food preparers wear hairnets or hats, or change the oil used for frying as often as they might. The complaints go on and on.

It’s all a tempest in a bowl of noodle soup, if you ask me. In a time of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth and SARS and high cholesterol Big Macs, I find it difficult to get frantic about what I eat on the street in Thailand. The risk is, for me, worth the gastronomical choice and reward.

When I moved to Thailand in 1993, I remembered Edmund G. Love, a long-ago friend in the United States. He was a New York advertising guy back in the 1950s who almost threw his life away with booze, becoming a street person for a while, spending his nights on subway cars. Happily, he sobered up and wrote a book about his experience called Subways Are for Sleeping. It became a successful Broadway musical. I met him a few years later when he was researching a follow-up book based on the idea of eating his way from A to Z in the restaurant listings in the Yellow Pages of the Manhattan telephone directory.

Perhaps it was in Ed’s memory that when I decided to live in Bangkok, I vowed to try at least one “new” food each week on the street, because I saw so many I wasn’t being offered in restaurants, and often couldn’t identify. What better way to get to know the country than to consume its vastly varied cuisine.

Ed Love died about the time he got to “M.”

I figure it’ll be another five years, maybe longer, before I exhaust the possibilities on the street in Bangkok. And then I have all the choices offered in the north and south of the country, where I’m assured there is even more variety.

Country Cookin’

I was traveling in northern Thailand with a group of visitors from Europe, when our van suddenly pulled over to the side of the road. The only Thai in the group, besides the driver, said he’d seen something he wanted to share with us, and as we climbed out of the vehicle, he pointed to some people standing around a small fire in a rice field, about twenty meters from the road.

The fire was of a size you’d expect to see built for warmth in a cold climate. But this was Thailand, so that didn’t explain it. Nor did it appear they were cooking, because I couldn’t see any firewood, food, utensils, grill or wok—only flames and smoke. Why, I wondered, would a group of what appeared to be rice farmers end a day standing around a small bonfire?

As we watched, one of the men in the group added more dry grass to the flames, and our Thai friend, Yutakit Wanischanond, explained. The farmers were preparing a snack to eat before returning to their homes. The questions remained: what were they cooking, and how?

As the flames died and the ashes fell away, we saw what appeared to be an upturned metal can, large enough to have held about four gallons of cooking oil before it found its present use. One of the men removed the hot can with two sticks, revealing a small chicken and what appeared to be a rack of ribs.

We were being beckoned to join the farmers. As we approached, it all became clear: the chicken and meat had been impaled on lengths of bamboo that were stuck into the ground, then covered with the up-ended metal can, which formed a sort of oven around the meat. After that, dry grass had been piled into a mound, burying the can, and set ablaze. More fuel was added until the meat was cooked.

Gingerly, one of the women with a knife cut away some of the chicken and pork into bite-sized pieces, serving them to us on a piece of banana leaf. One of the men then produced a bottle of hooch, the home-brewed rice whisky called lao khao. Some of my fellow travelers objected, saying they couldn’t take food from a poor farmer’s mouth, but Yutakit explained that refusal would offend. We ate. The pork fell off the bone and disappeared in my mouth as if made of meat-scented air, and from a single glass that was passed around the drink’s husky heat prepared my palate for more meat.

Once upon a time, everybody cooked outdoors and every mealtime was a variation of what we now call a barbecue. In the distant times to which I refer, there were no Webers and fancy gas grills. Nor even simple grills. Charcoal hadn’t been “invented” yet. There were no pots and pans. Probably it was a while before the notion of a spit was conceived. There was only blazing wood and meat that was tossed casually onto the coals of the fire at the mouth of the cave, turned with a stick once or twice before serving, charred on the outside, still bloody in the middle.

I was a Boy Scout when I was young, so cooking over a wood fire wasn’t entirely new to me, though I think my buddies and I got more pleasure from setting fire to things than from eating over- or under-cooked chicken and beef that our moms purchased for the camping trip.

Many years later, I lived in the northern California woods, cooking all meals over a wood-burning stove with a massive metal pipe to take the heat and smoke up and outside the house without, we all prayed, setting it aflame en route. This stove also provided the heat for the house. I recall that after years of cooking over gas in my previous homes, learning to regulate the heat in a wood fire was somewhat dodgy, and precarious.

It wasn’t until I moved to Thailand and built a home in a small village in the northeast that I learned how truly wonderful cooking this way could be. Here I was reconnected to the past by my genetic mealtime memory, transported back to pre-industrial times, and to countless millennia earlier, to the basic yet subtle succulence of cooking at its simplest and most eloquent over wood.

In time, wood became increasingly expensive and hard to find in many places, and for a while coal took its place. Coal was easier to store than wood and often easier to get, and it left less ash, but coal fires were as smoky as wood fires and more toxic, releasing dangerous pollutants into the air. Then came gas and electricity and nothing was the same again. If you lived in a modern city in the West, wood and coal fires—for heating as well as cooking—by the mid-1900s were banished in the name of convenience and health. But not so, yet, in much of the world.

Today, cooking over wood remains so pervasive it’s blamed for deforestation, as poor villagers roam farther from home to find combustible fuel. Illegal logging and other environmental abuse, together with rampant development, are responsible for much greater loss, of course. No matter how the argument rages, in the foreseeable future for tens of millions of people, wood will remain the kitchen fuel of choice because it is the only affordable one.

In Thailand, and in most “developing” nations today, there are several ways of cooking over a wood fire. One of the most basic involves placing three large rocks (cement building blocks will suffice) in a triangular pattern, building a wood fire in the middle and balancing the metal pan or grill on top of the rocks. Other country cooks own a clay, portable cooker, or brazier, that serves the same purpose, with wood or charcoal set alight beneath a metal grill or metalware placed on top. Many insist that only a charcoal or wood fire can provide the desired heat for certain dishes and keep a small brazier in use long after acquiring a gas or electric stove. In my apartment building in Bangkok, the Thai family next door has one of these on the balcony. Many others are used by vendors cooking food on city streets.

At a recent new year celebration at my home in rural Isan, the men in the family slaughtered and butchered a hundred-kilogram pig, throwing the first slabs of meat directly onto the coals of a large, open wood fire nearby, turning them with a stick, precisely as it was done in prehistoric times. After a few minutes, the hot flesh was retrieved from the coals, sluiced with water to remove the ash, then cut with a machete into bite-sized chunks and served with a chili, garlic, green onion and fish sauce dip.

Meanwhile, the women took other butchered cuts and prepared them over four more wood fires. One was for boiling the pig’s feet and head in a large pot, another for grilling, a third for stir-frying bits of pork with fresh-cut vegetables, the last for deep-frying strips of skin and fat. The succulent odor of the cooking flesh blew every which way in the shifting breeze, bubbles of grease so small they were invisible, blending with the smoke in a fashion that made me think, “Hey, capture this scent, bottle it, and sell it as an after-shave!”

The women moved swiftly among us as the various dishes were ready, and we helped ourselves with our fingers and cheap metal spoons. While the men ladled a sweet, milky, home-brewed rice whisky into a cup that was passed from hand to hand.

I asked why the gas stove I’d purchased for the house wasn’t being used. Gas was dangerous, my Thai family said; the tank of propane connected umbilically to the stove was, rightly, regarded as a potential bomb. Besides, the women said, they preferred to cook over fuel they knew, trusted and could see.

Thus, wood smoke is now for me and tens of millions more living in Thailand’s countryside, the first sizzling scent of the day, as much a part of the dawning as the rooster’s cry, an essential prelude to a steaming bowl of rice soup, or grilled chicken, or, during the rainy season when the rice paddies flood, plump frog.

On the Eat-a-Bug Trail in Bangkok

When visiting Thailand, go see the Grand Palace and spend an hour in a longtailed boat touring the river and canals. Visit the Jim Thompson House and take in an evening’s ritualistic brutality at one of the city’s kickboxing stadiums. Explore a dazzling Buddhist temple or Brahman shrine and be sure to get a traditional Thai massage. And by all means, go shopping.

Then eat some of the people’s food: insects.

Admittedly, it’s not for everyone. When my daughter, Erin, a first grade teacher in California, visited me in Bangkok and I suggested she try some of the deep-fried crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, silkworm larva and scorpions commonly sold on the street, she said, “Dad, you’re more adventurous than I am. I won’t eat anything that’s cute or disgusting.”

She was talking about what the creatures looked like when alive. Dogs and rabbits were cute, so she wouldn’t eat them, and insects were disgusting. She was unmoved when I quoted an eighteenth century writer, Jonathan Swift, who said it was “a brave man who first ate an oyster.”

“Look,” I went on, without result, “you eat lobster and crab, don’t you? They’re pretty ugly. And when you think about it, chickens are weird looking, too.”

The truth is, I told my daughter, who was beginning to wander off to look at the counterfeit designer jeans on offer nearby, insects are eaten in much of the world, and not just as a quirky treat—like the chocolate-covered ants I ate when I was in college—or for lack of money or anything else to eat. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, insects are not merely endured but enjoyed. In parts of southern Africa when the mopane “worms”—caterpillars, really—come into season, the sale of animal meat actually drops.

And, I went on like a professor whose class you wish would end, the cattle industry is destroying the environment. Rain forests are being torn down to create grazing land. Did you know, I asked, that nearly all the soy grown is to feed livestock? And that according to the World Bank, the average cow in Europe was subsidized to the tune of US$2.50 a day? Besides that, insects were higher in protein and lower in fat. United Nations studies in Africa and Mexico showed insects had seventy percent protein, compared to fifteen per cent in steak.

My daughter said, “Um-hum.” She now had her eye on some “cool” sunglasses.

That doesn’t happen in Thailand, I went on. But of all the places in the world—even in Colombia, where there is a statue of an ant in recognition of its place in the local diet—nowhere outside Thailand were insects prepared and consumed with such year-round regularity and delight. I explained that most of the insects consumed were eaten in the northeastern region, called Isan, and that when residents of this area migrated to Bangkok looking for work they brought their cuisine with them. Yes, I said, it was true that Isan was the poorest region of Thailand, but even when the migrant workers had money in their pockets, they returned faithfully to the insect vendors.

I admitted that there were some insects I had trouble with at first. One was the giant water bug because it looked like a cockroach. Then one day when I met a Thai friend at an outdoor beer bar she had a bag of them. I knew my moment of truth had come.

“Have one,” she said. It wasn’t a question. So she showed me how to pick off the head and legs and peel away the carapace to get to the abdominal sack which much to my surprise contained a kernel of delight. Not only did it taste good, its fragrance was such that I learned it was routinely pounded in a mortar with garlic and chilis and fish sauce for use as a spicy dip for other foods. I bought a sack and said, “Erin, you’ve got to try one. You’ll really love it. You used to like boiled peanuts when we lived in Hawaii. This tastes sort of like boiled cashews, with a bit of fishy aftertaste. And it smells like flowers.”

“Dad,” she groaned, “are you trying to make me sick?”

So I let a couple of days pass before taking her to a restaurant called Bane Lao in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit district, a place as its name implies where the cuisine of Laos is lovingly prepared and served.

“Oh, look,” I said, after we’d been seated, “they have ant egg salad.”

My daughter rolled her eyes and laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”

I pointed to another dish on the menu. “Okay,” I said, “would you rather have the beef lips?”

I never did get Erin to eat a bug, but I’m happy to report that more and more foreigners appear to be trying them, and it’s a darned good thing, too. Because it’s the food of the future. As any environmentalist and scientist will attest, the time is fast approaching when cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats—the four leading sources of the world’s protein today—will be so cost inefficient as to be unaffordable by anyone except the very wealthy.

Cows consume lots of fodder and water and require much time and effort to produce a single hamburger, whereas insects require little room, don’t eat much and breed like crazy. As I explained the food-of-the-future thing to Erin, I assured her the bugs wouldn’t show up on her plate looking like grasshoppers and scorpions.

“Think bug burgers,” I said, cheerily, without any noticeable effect.

Thai Fire

In Thailand, where restaurants rate their dishes by placing one, two, three and sometimes four little red chilis on the menu next to the dishes’ names to alert diners, I am tolerated. Barely. A longtime friend, who is a Thai chef, used to bring home food purchased at street stalls and as she placed it on the table, she pointed to one container and said, “Mine,” then to another, saying, “Yours.” As if to say, “Poor dear.”

Chili peppers are not exclusively Thai, but I can’t imagine life in Thailand without them. Thailand cannot claim to be the birthplace of the Capsicum —the chili was imported, along with much else in the national diet—it only acts as if it does. Surely, the per capita consumption of the small, fiery fruit is as high or higher than anywhere else.

The truth is, it’s an international phenomenon. There’s even a bi-monthly magazine published in the United States, Chile Pepper (there is no agreement on the spelling), and a wide variety of products is available, including pepper-shaped wind chimes, bells, and strings of Christmas tree lights. There is a Hot Sauce Club of America, where members receive two new hot sauces and a newsletter every month. There’s even a popular American rock and roll band that calls itself the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yes, the band is hot.

Chilis are hot because they contain capsaicin (pronounced cap-SAY-a-sin), an irritant alkaloid found mostly in the interior tissue to which the seeds adhere. (Thus, removing the seeds helps lower the temperature.) Capsaicin has at least five separate chemical components: three delivering an immediate kick to the throat at the back of the palate, two others conveying a slower, longer-lasting, and less fierce heat on the tongue and mid-palate. Mmm-mmmmmm-mmm, say my Thai friends, who have had decades to get used to it.

I still think deliberately eating something that creates discomfort, even extreme pain, is strange. The names of the sauces found primarily in markets in the Southwestern United States say all that needs to be said: “2-Hot 2-Trot Sensual Seasonings,” “Inferno,” “Tejas Tears Habanero Sauce” (“Hot Enough to Make You Cry”), “Chili Bob’s Mean Mother,” “Satan’s Revenge” and “Mad Dog Liquid Fire.”

I mean, why would anyone in his or her right mind want to add that to dinner or lunch?

Actually, some varieties of the Capsicum frutecens are quite mild and sweet, but many can only be called hot or fiery. Belonging to the same family as the tomato and the eggplant, they were introduced in Europe by (some say) Christopher Columbus or early Portuguese explorers, originating either in the Caribbean or Brazil. Magellan is credited with taking chili peppers to Africa, the Portuguese with taking them to Asia.

Today, chili peppers play a significant role in many cuisines— from Mexico, where they are used in ragouts and sauces ( moles), to the Middle East where they are pickled whole, to North Africa where they are used to season couscous with garlic. More chili is added to South Indian curries, while the Chinese make a purée called ra-yiu that is mostly oil-based, with fried soya bean and chili as additional incredients. So popular is chili in China that each province has its own brand.

Koreans use a chili paste to make kimchee and hot spicy soup. In Singapore, chili sauce must include garlic and ginger. In Malaysia and Indonesia, it is called sambal and often includes shrimp or dried fish. In Thailand, only a short walk from my flat, there are street vendors mixing and selling som tam, a five-alarm green papaya salad with lime juice and tomato and as many chopped peppers as you can stand; this dish once was a staple for the poor in Thailand’s impoverished northeast, but nowadays it’s hard to find a Thai menu anywhere worldwide that doesn’t include it.

In Hawaii, “chili peppa water,” which is a blend of what it sounds like, is found on every local restaurant table next to the pepper and salt. Throughout the United States chili pepper sauce has a large following, mainly through the sale of Tabasco sauce, manufactured in Louisiana and sold in tiny bottles internationally, and is used to season meat, egg and red kidney bean dishes, sauces and a number of cocktails, including the ever-fashionable Bloody Mary. Not long ago, for a year or so, chili sauce even out-sold ketchup in the States.

Just as different ingredients are added to the peppers from place to place, there are widely varying ways of preparing the sauces. Tabasco is fermented in barrels for three years or longer, while in Thailand, the major ingredients—chili, flour and tomato paste—are merely blended together and there is no fermentation involved. Tabasco tastes somewhat sourer and, in fact, is hotter. It’s in the use of unprocessed, fresh, ripe chilis where Thailand rings all the loudest bells. Thais also like their sauce free-flowing, where in other countries around the region, the thicker and slower, the better.

Chili peppers should not be confused with pepper, by the way. Pepper, black or white, is produced by grinding the seeds, finely or coarsely, of plants of the specie Piper, while chilis are fruits. The chili peppers are the smaller of the two primary types (the other variety is sweet and of no concern here) and they can be green, yellow, orange, red, or black. The smaller the pepper, the hotter it is. In fact, the hottest is the Capsicum minimum, indicating that somewhere in the academic realm where plants are given Latin names there was a botanist with a sense of humor. In Thailand, these are commonly called prik kee noo, politely translated as “mouse droppings peppers” after their half- to three-quarter-inch length and suggestive shapes. Noo being the word for mouse or rat, and kee being the word for you know what.

Despite this scornful imagery, chili peppers are now believed to be a possible medical miracle. Not only does the consumption of a single pepper provide a full day’s supply of beta-carotene and nearly twice the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C for an adult, but also that magic ingredient called capsaicin, a compound found in the vegetable that controls pain and makes you feel better. What’s that? Makes me feel better?

Consider what happens when you bite into a chili pepper. You think you have Shock and Awe in your mouth, with smart (and dumb) bombs going off from lips to gums to tongue and throat. You’re certain that your taste buds have been defoliated. You break into a sweat and reach for your water glass to put out the fire. (A futile exercise, because capsaicin is barely soluble in water. Best thing is to drink milk because casein, one of the proteins in milk, specifically and directly counteracts the effects of capsaicin. Others swear by water mixed with a dash of salt.) Your eyes water and your nasal passages flood. You entertain evil thoughts about the chef and even Christopher Columbus.

At the same time, there may come a strange relief, a beneficial side effect. The messages sent to your brain are similar to those which mark pain and the brain responds to these by stimulating the secretion of extra endorphins, natural opiates that give pleasure. The endorphins then sooth or reduce existing pain not only in the mouth, but also throughout the body.

So far, studies suggest capsaicin reduces pain associated with arthritis, diabetes, muscle and joint problems, cluster headaches and phantom limbs. A study done at the famed Mayo Clinic in the U.S. further suggests that it reduces pain from post-surgical scars. Thus, many people who suffer from chronic pain are now being advised to eat spicy food, either as an alternative or as a supplement to analgesics. It is, then, quite literally, fighting fire with fire.

Chili peppers possess other medicinal advantages. They alleviate symptoms of the common cold by breaking up congestion and keeping the airways clear. (Did you notice that your nose and eyes started running when you broke out in that initial sweat? A capsaicin nose spray is now being considered to relieve headaches and migraines.) Chili peppers also increase your metabolic rate, contributing to the success of a weight-loss program, contain an anti-oxidant that lowers the “bad” cholesterol, and scientists at the famed Max Planck Institute in Germany confirm Capsicum can prevent the formation of blood clots by lengthening the time it takes blood to coagulate.

If that isn’t enough to convert you—I’m beginning to think about heading for the nearest som tam street vendor as soon as I finish writing this—there is growing evidence that chili peppers will get you “high.” According to Dr. Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. who has conducted several studies of the chili pepper, the comparison to opiates is not misplaced, although, unlike addictive morphine, a narcotic derived from opium, says “this is a natural and harmless high.”

My Thai chef friend, who is reading over my shoulder as I write this, is calling me the Thai equivalent of wimp. She keeps a jar of dried seeds in my kitchen and casually dumps them into soups and onto noodle and rice dishes in a manner that seems suicidal.

“Getting to like chili peppers is like playing with fire,” Dr. Rozin said. “Humans tend to put themselves voluntarily in situations which their body tells them to avoid—but humans tend to get pleasures out of these things, such as eating chili peppers or going on roller coaster rides. We are the only species that enjoys such things. No one has ever found an animal that likes to frighten itself.”

It’s Not Whisky

The first thing you have to know about Thai whisky is that it isn’t whisky. When I moved to Thailand and was offered the local brew by Thai friends, I declined—no offense, please— explaining that I’d quit drinking bourbon whisky years earlier because the older I got, its strength went one way and I went the other, so I found it wise to drink something else. Also, when it came to Scotch whisky—sorry, but I always thought it tasted like iodine smelled. I was, I said, a beer and wine person now.

My friends reassured me. They said Thai whisky is not like whisky in the West and, before I could say no, a tot was splashed into a glass over ice and soda water was added with a squeeze of fresh lime. Politely, I took a sip. Hey! It didn’t taste like whisky at all. It was mild and sweet and, I discovered as the meal progressed, it also was the perfect drink to accompany the fiery Thai cuisine.

So, if it isn’t whisky, what is it? The dictionary says whisky’s an alcoholic liquor distilled from the fermented mash of grain, barley for Scotch and in the making of bourbon, maize. Thai whisky—much of it, anyway—is made from sugar cane molasses and rice, or merely molasses, giving it the body and flavor of, well, rum. And those made only with molasses, without any grain at all, are rum. No Thai whisky, I learned, was made from rice or any other grain exclusively.

“I don’t think the Thais even have a word for ‘rum’,” said D. Kanchanalakshana, who followed his father into the Thai whisky business and now is the deputy director of production at the company that makes the Kingdom’s most popular brand, Mekhong. “Anything brown, they called it ‘whisky’. That was true a long time ago when the first western whiskys were imported, and it’s true now.”

I learned there were other differences, as well. Thai whisky can be aged—something that’s done in the West to true whiskys, bettering its value and, most insist, its taste—but it rarely is. Mekhong Superior, available in a limited number of locations, is aged five years, for instance, but the government requires only thirty days. The bottling date can be read on the backside of the label by looking through the glass. Ahhhh! March. That was a very good month!

Young, old… it matters not. Thai whisky is as much a part of Thai culture as sanuk and mai pen rai. Throughout the Kingdom, no matter what the occasion, and perhaps especially when there is no “occasion” at all, the tall, round and short, flat bottles are brought out, even at Buddhist ordination ceremonies and funerals.

Thanit Thamsukati, a former Bangkok Post reporter who now works for the company that makes Mekhong as well as two other “whiskys,” Hongthong and Saengsong, began to sing soon after we met. It was a popular Thai ditty about whisky, he said, where the drinker got so happy he fell into the well. A perfect Thai lyric theme, I thought. This was, after all the Land of Smiles. Where I came from, the United States, where whisky’s praises are also sung, I don’t think anyone ever fell into a well. Usually it was into a depression or a fight or divorce.

No one is certain when alcohol was first consumed in what is now Thailand, but likely it was, as in most places, for centuries a domestic activity. Even today in many villages illegal (untaxed) home brews are fermented and distilled from corn and rice, playing a considerable role in an individual’s or village’s social life. No northern Thai hill tribe “bride price” paid for the groom, for example, would not include some homegrown brew along with the silver and a hog or two.

Most Thai whisky now is sold under a system of concessions that dates back more than 150 years, when the kingdom created cash-producing monopolies not only in alcoholic spirits, but opium, gambling, and the lottery. (The lottery is still operated by the government.) The most recent concession—currently pumping more than US$440 million into government coffers annually—ended in 1999, and new companies entered the field when the bidding resumed for subsequent contracts, although the usual names prevailed. In recent years, the government’s willingness to open the market also saw several privately owned companies emerge. The Saengsong, Chao Praya, V.O., and Black Cat labels, for instance, captured about ten percent of the market.

One of them, Black Cat, initially was known as Maeo Dam, Thai for “black cat,” and it sold modestly, then two years ago it was oddly relaunched in its English translation in a television campaign directed at the Thai market. The award-winning commercial told a story—that no foreigner could hope to understand—about a village loan shark. The villager in debt was not making his payments and the godfather wondered how he could afford to drink whisky if he was as impoverished as he claimed. The answer, of course, was Black Cat. The whisky was that cheap!

Not all Thai whisky is drunk by Thais, just most of it. While there are longtime foreign residents living in Thailand who have developed a preference for the light, sweet taste, and a number of visitors give it a try in the same way they order Thai food and a local beer, almost all of the locally produced whisky is drunk by Thais.

The three-dollar-a-liter cost is the main reason. Before the economic bubble burst in 1997, Thailand was the largest market in the world for Johnny Walker black label whisky, one of the world’s most expensive and prestigious spirits—and that’s in volume, not per capita. But even those impressive sales were dwarfed by the local whiskys, seventy percent of it “white” (colorless) and sold in the rural areas, with caramel coloring added to the remaining thirty percent largely for urban sales.

(All producers boast that virtually all ingredients are locally sourced. Mekhong, for instance, adds a few Chinese herbs and spices to the mix for flavoring—thus qualifying the product for the name “liqueur”—but says that 99.9 percent of the blend is river water, sugar cane molasses and sticky rice. Broken rice is used by some producers because its cheaper and there’s more surface to which the mold can attach during fermentation, and sticky rice is used rather than another kind because of its high starch content, which means there’ll be more sugar in the finished product.)

There’s also more booze for the buck, said Mekhong’s Khun Thanit. The alcohol content was lower than in western whiskys, thirty five percent in the colored brew, twenty eight percent in the colorless, versus forty two percent in Scotch, “but if you have to choose between a bottle of Mekhong and four small beers that’ll cost about the same, you go for the whisky.” It’s more social, too. Traditionally, one person buys the whisky and shares it with friends, and a bottle can last all evening or afternooon. Four beers are bought individually, thus the bonding ritual is gone and so is the beer, in twenty minutes.

“Chok dee krup (or kaa)!” is the standard toast, meaning good luck. And the whisky is always sipped. Good whisky is never, ever gulped, even when it’s rum.