Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford

Author:Jeffrey Alford
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Artisan
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

SANGKHOM:

Recently we went back to Sangkhom, a small northeastern Thai village on the Mekong where we had spent several pleasurable weeks ten years earlier. When we first arrived, we were quite disoriented. The bungalows we had stayed in before were no longer there, having been washed away by a flooding Mekong. But after a little searching, we found a group of new bungalows not far away, built in the same simple style, each with a porch looking out over the river.

The new bungalows are owned by Yigal and Nupiit. “Food is available in the village,” Yigal explained as we checked in, “or, if you tell us ahead of time, you can eat with us. Nupiit is a great cook; she has even cooked for the Rolling Stones.”

As it happened, we never learned more about the Rolling Stones, but Yigal was right: Nupiit is a great cook. Born in Sangkhom and raised there and in southern Laos, where her father worked, she cooks in a northeastern Thai-Lao way, and is particularly knowledgeable about wild edible plants. Yigal, born in Israel and raised in New York City, met Nupiit on a trip to Thailand many years ago, and they have been together ever since. Half the year they live on the big island in Hawaii, and half the year in Sangkhom. They live well but modestly, charging only two to three dollars a night for a bungalow, and about the same for a meal. Yigal has a satellite dish, and at night he loves to point it around at different places in the sky and watch Russian television, Polish, Burmese. It’s fun, watching Polish television sitting in a little village in Thailand, listening to the Mekong and feeling its breeze.

But it’s not nearly as much fun as eating Nupiit’s cooking and learning kitchen ways from her. “This is the way we eat sticky rice,” she said to Dom and Tashi the very first lunch we ate together. “You take a good amount of rice in your hand, and then with your other hand, tear off a much smaller piece from the big piece, like this.” With her little bite-sized piece of rice she then reached for a bit of fried beef jerky. On the table there were at least ten different dishes, far more food than six of us would finish. As in Laos, there was a plate of steamed vegetables: chunks of pumpkin, wedges of cabbage, long beans. There was an herb plate with fresh coriander, green onion, Chinese celery. And then there was all the hot stuff: a tom yum hot enough to singe our lips; a salsa (jaew), rich-tasting with grilled chiles and shallots; a laab, chile-hot and fragrant with roasted rice powder; a plain-looking salt-grilled fish from which we’d pick small chunks of tender meat.… Some of the tastes were bitter and wild, others easy and wonderfully familiar. It was a beautiful table of food, green, earthy, and abundant.

We’d planned to spend a few nights in Sangkhom, but

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