Tak ka tan: A bit like Pringles with legs
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Her lacquered fingers delicately pulled the wings away from the body, the legs were similarly dispatched. The torso she popped deftly between ruby red lips. “Arroy” she said. I raised my eyebrows, cockroaches taste good huh? “Not a cockloach!” she replied as she slipped off her stool to go and get me another beer.
Thai cuisine is famous all over the world and restaurants catering to lovers of the countries gastronomic delights flourish everywhere from Sydney to Seattle. But if you’ve had the pleasure of sitting at the beer bars in say, Nana Plaza, for any length of time you may have noticed that some of the things that the girls put into their mouths bare little resemblance to the things you see on Thai menus in the western world.
The other evening, while propping up the bar at Playskool, I issued a five-hundred baht note (about US$15) to two delightful ladies and commissioned them to return with snacks. This is what they brought:
Som tam
Ferocious: som tam
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The Tourist Authority of Thailand likes to claim that fried rice is the national dish but considering Thai cuisine is famous for being spicy a plate of kao pad seems a bit pedestrian for a national dish. Tom yam goong is the hot, sour prawn soup that all Thai restaurants have on the menu but for the average Thai that’s a luxury dish.
Som tam on the other hand is cheap and available everywhere. Every neighbourhood has it som tam lady and if you ever need to catch up on local gossip go talk to her. The som tam lady knows everything.
It is made from grated/julienned green papaya which is mixed in a mortar with tomato, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and a fiendish amount of chilli.
It is often garnished with freshwater crab but I refuse that. Eating crab from a polluted river that has been stored in a plastic jar through the heat of a Bangkok day is too much like asking for trouble.
Ka nom jin
Noodles, again with a very spicy sauce. The recipes for this are many and have been handed down through the generations. This one had prawns, string beans and plenty of chilli but it disappeared over the other side of the bar somewhere, I only got to sample a tiny fork-full
Neur bing/Moo bing
Making kaoneow bing
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Neur is beef and moo is pork. These were strips of the respective meats dried, cut into strips and barbecued. The strips are about the length of a finger but a bit thinner and are tough and chewy.
Kao neow/Kao neow bing
Kao neow is sticky rice. The rice grains are soaked overnight and then steamed in a rattan basket. This produces a congealed, chewy mass of rice which you can break off, roll into balls and dunk in the sauce of your som tam. Kao neow bing sees the rice being flattened out and rolled into discs about four inches in diameter. These are coated with something yellow and a bit cheesy flavoured and barbecued.
Jing leed
Jing leed: nutty
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This is a cricket, wok fried lightly salted and eaten whole. It is quite crunchy and has a delicious nutty flavour. It is about one to one-and-a-half inches long.
Tak ka tan
The common grasshopper and one of the most popular of the insect dishes. This little critter used to devastate crops. When the farmers discovered they were edible they got their own back. These days they are even farmed. Wok fried and lightly salted they taste a bit like Pringles with legs.
Maeng Da
The giant water beetle has quite a bitter taste. It can be eaten whole but I think it is best minced and mixed with chillies, shallots and spring onions and eaten with kao neow. They can also be used to flavour curries.
I didn’t get to try the silk worm larvae or whole load of other interesting things this time around. The dishes are all popular in Issan the north-eastern region of Thailand which borders Laos and Cambodia. This is where most of the girls that work the bars, as well as taxi drivers, construction workers, cleaners etc come from. And they all go down exceedingly well with a bottle or five of cold BeerLao.
