Culinary Adventures in Thailand

I wish I had written in more detail about my travels at the time I was doing them, but I will do my best to recapture some culinary experiences from a few years ago.  I arrived with my ex in Thailand after 22 hours of being on two planes, coming from Texas.  We got there at night and were famished.  After finding a cheap hostel to stay in we walked to the nearest outside food cart market we could find.  Thailand is known for having very clean markets and extremely sanitary practices when it comes to preparing and serving food.  However this first market was held on pavement covered with a thick layer of filth left over from the days activity.  I spotted a large rat scurrying in and out of a nearby the gutter.  "This is awesome!" I told Aaron.  And I meant it.  There is no possible way a market like that would ever exist in America.  I was excited by the rawness of a new country where all kinds of cultural practices would be different, all signified by this one rat.  We surveyed a few of the food stands to see what they were serving and chose a woman who made us both huge plates of a vegetable and shrimp stir-fry dish.  It was delicious, and it was the spiciest food I had ever tasted.  Neither of us knew know how to ask for water, and we didn't see any bottles set out that we could point to, so we ate with nose drippings falling into our napkins and occasionally the food.  Ever since that meal I was able to handle spicy food and even began to eventually prefer it.

The food was amazing there.  We would be walking around, even a ways outside of a town or city and would see a small house with a plastic table and chairs, adorned with condiments.  We would order pad thai and pay the equivalent of 50 cents a plate.  Another great dish that was common was som tam or green papaya salad.  Its made from a young papaya which is peeled and grated, raw peanuts, chilies, and lime.  It was another very spicy dish that was also delicious.  My favorite dessert there was sticky rice with mango.  It was made very sweet by a generous drizzling of sweetened condensed milk.

I fell in love with some of the fruits, like rambutans, mangosteens, lychee, and longans.  Dragonfruit was good, but I was more impressed with the outside appearance of the fruit and the Dr. Suess-like trees that it grew on.  I saw many dragonfruit orchards from the windows of buses.  I was scared to try durian fruit for the first few weeks, because it smells horrible.  Some descriptions of the smell that I've heard are "rotten fish with custard" and "dead dogs".  But I did give in to the pleas of my host family and tried it with sticky rice and sweetened condensed milk.  The creaminess of the fruit was unbelievable, and I had that dish repeatedly.

Aside from the great food, there were also some very strange dishes.  I worked at a school where I ate lunch in the cafeteria every day.  Once they served a rice noodle dish, in which the noodles appeared akin to worms.  They were short and fat, tapered off at each end, and flavor of the coconut sauce they were served in reminded me uncannily of the flavor of Burger King's hamburgers from my childhood.  There were food carts that would sell a variety of hot dogs, from green to red, to slit down the middle, or small criss-crosses all the way down.  These I never ventured to try, and considered them more as art pieces that were interesting to observe, than food.  There were dessert carts in all the markets and parks, lined with colorful gelatinous squares.  These were disappointing upon the first bite because although they looked like they would be sweet, it was salt that prevailed.

Mothers of Pasta

Remember making dry pasta necklaces or glueing macaroni to construction paper  as a child?  We thought of these art pieces as great gifts to give our mothers while our mothers, I'm sure, thought them hideous nuisances to be thrown in the garbage as soon as we weren't looking.  Well, there's much more to where that pasta came from than you might think.

Today I was inspired to begin writing about food customs around the world.  This was spurred by a Frenchman telling me that there is a tradition in Holland in which family members will give a gift of a pepper grinder to a male on his 30th birthday if he is still a bachelor.  While I was unsuccessful in finding information on the history of how this tradition got started and what it might signify, (I wrote to The Splendid Table and hope the mystery will be unveiled soon) I stumbled upon something else that caught my fancy.  I learned that all the various types of pasta that we find in grocery stores actually originated in their own separate regions of Italy.  I had never given this any thought before. 

The climate of Italy is rather mild and makes for a great place to grow the semolina wheat that most pasta is made from.  Making pasta was a creative outlet for women in old Italy, and they would shape the pasta according to the sauces they would serve with it.  Ridged pastas, like penne, were meant to hold thick meat sauces while other smooth pastas held lighter cream-based sauces.  

The blog below does a great job of defining some specific pastas and their regions of origin:

http://mymelange.net/mymelange/2010/06/pasta-shapes-italy.html

Also, here is a site that has pics of 150 kinds of pasta and their names.  There are over 350 known shapes on the market:

http://www.archimedes-lab.org/pastashape.html

It occurred to me that when Americans think about Italians cooking we think of men, as in the stereotypical image of male chefs with their white aprons and white hats serving huge plates of spaghetti and meatballs or skillfully spinning pizza dough.  There were and are men doing these things in restaurants to make a living, but women took the stage in the home.  Whenever an Italian speaks of remembering a family members cooking, it is often of a mother or grandmother.  

I am now thinking about the trial and error that went into each pasta shape while it was being created.  Were there dramatic pasta  competitions between women in order for one style to be chosen for their region?  Were some shapes that were once popular lost over time?  So much work has been done to form these mundane things that permeate our daily lives.  Next time you indulge in a delicious dish of pasta, remember there's centuries worth of history in that there bowl.

P.S. In researching this topic I discovered there are even companies that make novelty "naughty" pasta shapes, with names like "Titaroni"or "Peckeroni Pasta".   If you listen close you can hear those ancient mothers of pasta rolling in their Italian graves!