Old versus new

Old versus new

How badly should we really miss the Thai cuisine of 50 years ago?

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE
Old versus new
Green curry with beef. Photos: Suthon Sukphisit

Culinary art keeps evolving. Nothing is the same when looking back 50 years, when the same kind of food was completely different from today. It is quite difficult to predict future food style. It would be possible that shrimp with spicy soup might add vermicelli or black bean. Or pad Thai might add red tilapia fish. Or soybean milk might replace coconut milk in green curry.

In Bangkok, where things change so fast, the culinary scene is so competitive that restaurants need to arrange for their own creativity, convenience and speed, lucrative pricing, and interesting public relations. But when it comes to food quality, we here talk about the quality of the present time.

Fifty years ago, food quality was different from in the present, because raw materials for food, including fresh ingredients, dried food, vegetables and seasoning sauce, were very easy to find. People had plenty of time to cook at home. Their preferences and cooking methods did not vary much from one person to the next.

Take pad khaprao, for example. In the past, the meat was from animals caught in the forest, like birds, eels, boars, frogs and turtles. Meat and bones were chopped before firing with strong and hot spicy curry paste to reduce unpleasant smells. There are two kinds of curry paste. One is made of red onion, garlic, galangal, lemongrass, bergamot, chilli and shrimp paste. Another is prepared with chilli, garlic and galangal and seasoned with fish sauce. When the firing process finishes, the dish will be decorated with basil, red chilli and bergamot leaf.

People in the present day use more kinds of meat, such as beef, pork, shrimp, fish and chicken. They are easily found in the general market.

It could then be assumed that curry paste is the heart of Thai food, which is a main component in fried food or curry. In the past, each family would prepare the curry paste, and would know which kind of curry paste should be used with a certain dish.

For home-made curry paste, ingredients can be well selected and cleanly prepared. The curry paste should not be ground like a powder, otherwise, there will be no texture from chilli, lemongrass and bergamot.

In the preparation of green curry, a cook usually uses meat with a strong smell, such as beef, catfish, eel and deer. Green curry paste is important here because it can curb the unpleasant smell from those meats and at the same time add an aromatic smell to the dish.

Green curry paste is made of green chilli, red onion, galangal, lemongrass, bergamot, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, nutmeg, mace, cumin, cloves and pepper. It also adds more pea eggplant, basil leaf, chilli and chilli leaf. For green curry with catfish, all ingredients are the same, but with additional turmeric for better smell.

It could be said that food in the past had more variety than in the present. For example, there was a dish called catfish egg mixed with mango salad. Garlic, chilli, fish sauce and lemon are the key seasoning ingredients.

Another hard-to-find ingredient is dried sliced mussel and horseshoe crab eggs, which is for red curry with pineapple.

Home-made food is seen less right now due to time restrictions. People only cook on weekends, and most of them do not prepare their own curry paste. They can buy it anywhere. Coconut milk is found in a box, pasteurised rather than fresh from the coconut. Moreover, there are many ready-to-eat items available on supermarket shelves, requiring just the addition of meats and/or vegetables. The taste is not so bad and the price is reasonable.

However, many restaurants strive to get back to the past. They cook Thai food in the original style, seeking original fresh ingredients, self-made curry paste to get the original taste. But such restaurants are still limited in number, although there is a high demand from customers who want authentic Thai food.

Of course, we cannot lodge a complaint, asking chefs of the present day to bring back the authentic Thai taste of 50 years ago. But all these are just examples of change. In the next 50 years, the Thai food of today will become old-fashioned as well.

Stir-fried fish with fresh chilli and finger-root. Suthon Sukphisit

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