Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.06.2005, Síða 52

CHIANG MAI, Thailand - It’s only
the first hour of class, and already
Rungphit Saisombat is taunting us.
“Here, come and taste my curry. I
am still the best,” she says, almost
straight-faced. But the corners of
her mouth and her impish, flashing
eyes let students know that she’s not
entirely serious about showing us
who’s boss.
One by one, we meekly approach
her wok with our spoons and take
a dip. Of course, her curry is better:
I’ve been cooking Thai dishes like
tom kha gai since only about 5
o’clock.
At 30, “Roong,” our playful
teacher at the Chiang Mai Thai
Cookery School, has years of
experience. For a native Thai like
her, the tantalizing colours and
odours of ingredients like chilli
peppers, curry paste, and coconut
milk, and the sizzling sounds they
make as they alchemize in a fiery
pan, are second nature. To us, they’re
as exotic as an elephant ride through
a rice paddy at sunrise.
“Don’t forget to
smiling,” Roong reminds us. “If
you not smiling, it’s not delicious!”
Immediately after we had arrived
in Chiang Mai, my wife, Isabelle,
and I had fallen in love with the
inexpensive, inescapable local cuisine
- and not only the fancier food from
restaurants, but also the informal
noodle shops with plastic tables
spilling onto the sidewalk, and the
endless snacks sold from carts and
mobile stands on every street corner.
Chiang Mai, population 250,000
about 90 miles from the Burmese
border, is known as the runner-up
city for Thai cuisine, with the added
benefit of being easier to negotiate
than the sprawling and frenzied
Bangkok. With few high-rises,
this northern crossroads maintains
a small-town feel and has rapidly
become a popular hub for more
adventuresome tourists shunning
the crowded southern beaches. But
after a few days of wandering the
city’s Ping River banks, gawking at
orange-clad monks and only half
understanding what we saw inside
the warren of alleyways, gates, canals,
and thronging market streets of this
13th-century walled city, we felt too
much like observers and not enough
like participants in our vacation
home.
On principle, my travel
philosophy is to cultivate curiosity
through knowledge and involvement.
I don’t feel proud when the extent
of my interaction with a destination
includes purchasing ceramic
knickknacks and snapping photos on
a first class breeze-through of A-list
sites, leaving the locals behind in a
cloud of dust. So, instead of taking a
luxury air-conditioned tourist bus out
of Chiang Mai into the mountain
valley towns of Mae Hong Son and
Pai, where hiking and mountain
biking trails lead to hill tribe villages
and rivers ideal for rafting, we tried
the rickety local transportation
swirling up and up, and were greatly
rewarded. Like, for instance, that
sleepy pit-stop village at the road’s
zenith that sold incredible steamed
dumplings stuffed with chicken and
mushrooms or peanuts and taro root.
In between exploring the
countryside, Westerners often hole
up in Chiang Mai to take yoga,
massage, and cooking classes. How
better to understand the soul of
Thailand than through its cuisine?
With a lifelong love of food, but
no professional training as cooks,
we were signed on as students of a
master chef. Established in 1993 by
Sompon and Elizabeth Nabnian, the
Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School
was the city’s first. Classes are held
on the back terrace of The Wok
restaurant; the couple opened the
school at the urging of their satisfied
customers.
The oddity is that the evening
we tie on our aprons and stand
behind our individual cooking
stations we discover four of our eight
classmates are gourmands from Paris.
One, Francoise Meunier, is a food
lover well known for giving French
cuisine classes to tourists. There are
no other Americans. So here we are,
12 “farang” (Thai for “foreigners”)
bent over our gas cookers, mortars-
and-pestles, and chopping blocks,
speaking French with one another,
and English with Roong. None of
us knows any Thai beyond “ hello,”
“ how much?” “ thank you,” and a
particularly useful phrase to show
your pleasure after eating well: “
aroi maak maak” (very delicious).
Another necessary expression is “mai
pet,” which means not spicy, though
a Thai’s interpretation of “not” may
still make you swelter.
“If you like really mild,” Roong
says, “ask for ‘farang spicy.””
‘Small but dangerous’
Our course includes a tour of the
Sompet Market, not far from the
cooking school on the east side of
the old city. We take a “songthaew”
(one of the red pickup trucks that
serve as communal taxis) and pile out
like Western produce arriving at the
market. Here we are introduced to
the building blocks of Thai cooking:
lemongrass, coriander, kaffir lime
and leaf, garlic (two varieties), basil
(three), palm sugar, fermented fish
and shrimp pastes, and galangal
(Siamese ginger).
“Kaffir lime, for soups,” Roong
begins, then delivers the punchline,
“or for making dandruff shampoo!”
Roong leads us to her favourite
vendors, such as the workshop that
smashes and grinds whole coconuts
to make cream and lower-grade
coconut milk. As we wander from
stall to stall in the dim, creaky,
and low-ceilinged interior teeming
with noises, strange cargo, and
unidentifiable fishy smells, I imagine
I’m a stowaway inside a ramshackle
ship on a trading mission to a distant
land.
How do we know if a snake-
headed fish is fresh, Roong asks
us, as the class crowds around the
fishmonger and his trays of scaly
flesh, severed heads, and whole fish
still alive and swirling. “Push a finger
into the filet. If it springs back, it’s
good,” she pronounces.
We learn to differentiate jasmine
rice from sticky rice, purple basil
from sweet basil, and Thai from
Burmese garlic. Roong shows us jars
of pickled whole crab, stacks of dried
fish, piles of mushrooms, bags of
dried spices, vats of tofu, bottles of
fish sauce. Made from roasted dried
spices and fresh ingredients, red,
green, and yellow curry pastes have
been pulverized and cured in hot
oil to preserve them. We role-play
on tour CHIANG MAIThailand
If You’re Not Smiling, It’s Not Delicious:
Cooking and Travelling Thailand
“shopper-merchant” and touch, taste,
rip, and pinch the various elements
of the six dishes on tonight’s syllabus.
“We call this one ‘burn eye
chilli,”” Roong says, holding up
a little red pepper. “Small but
dangerous.” We wait for the
punchline. “Like me.” ‘More for
good luck!’
Chiang Mai is
the old capital
of the Lanna
empire - “the
land of a million
rice fields” - a
region whose
architecture, art,
dress, dialect,
and cooking is
more closely
allied with
Burma and
the mountain
hill tribes than
with the rest of Thailand. But much
of what we cook are classic Thai
curries, soups, and stir-fries. These
are meals that do not simmer all day
over low heat. They are made to
order and flash-fried in woks in 15
minutes, making them ideally suited
for the kitchen classroom.
We’re back at the cooking HQ,
armed with our knives and struggling
to follow Roong’s preparation of red
curry with fish (gaeng phed plaa),
which involves our friend from the
market, old snake-head. We look
over our bowls of vegetables, meats,
and spices, and try to individually
replicate the process as she circulates,
offering advice on the fly.
“Okay, just one chilli. Leave out
seeds for less spicy,” Roong instructs
one student. “Just a pinch - Thai
pinch. Farang pinch salty!” She peers
over at Isabelle’s simmering broth.
“OK, it’s ready. Take it off.”
Roong isn’t a stickler for
precise measurements, which seems
subversive to students like me who
treat cookbooks like holy texts. She
dumps some coconut cream into one
of her concoctions, exclaims “and a
little more for good luck!” and adds a
second blob. For Roong, as for most
Thais, the concept of sanuk, or “fun,”
is paramount, and should infiltrate
every activity.
“If you not sure how hot oil,
put in finger,” Roong jokes. But I’m
gullible enough that I begin moving
my hand toward my wok before
Isabelle slaps it away. When the last
student has slid the final chicken
in coconut milk (tom kha gai) out
THE CHEAPEST WAY TO GET TO THAILAND:
Iceland Express
Keflavík to London: 2,500-7,200 ISK. 11,000 to 15,000 ISK roundtrip.London to Chiang Mai:
$1500 through British Airways.London to Bangkok: $600 through Aeroflot to $728 through Alitalia.