ABSTRACT
The cooking in Thailand (the country was called Siam prior to 1939) is rich and varied with many unusual flavor combinations of spices, herbs, and fresh ingredients blending hot and sweet with sour and salty. The culinary influences are Chinese and Indian, a bit of Persian and Portuguese, and more recently, South American; the religious influences are Theravada, a form of Buddhism. All meals revolve around rice and fish and dishes that are stir-fried, steamed, or grilled over charcoal, or around curries, stewed dishes, and sweets. There is considerable use of kapi, a fermented shrimp paste particularly popular in a sauce called nam prik. Sauces are made not only with kapi, but also with garlic, onions, ginger, tamarind, lemongrass, and salt and pepper. Thai people like them and coconut milk, chili peppers, galangal, kaffir lime, coriander, mace, cumin, cloves, star anise, turmeric, salted beans and cabbages, fish sauces, palm sugar, and many herbs, including Thai basil in very piquant dishes, probably the most piquant in this region, if not in the entire world. Curry pastes are in constant demand and are made from the bird chili, consid ered the hottest anywhere. There are also milder curries, some of which use turmeric as their base. Thai people prefer grinding their spice mixtures daily, even though there are a plethora of ground varieties in the marketplace. Other popular spices are cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg used in dishes that are not as piquant. The meat of four-legged animals plays a minor role in the cuisine, but chicken and shrimp are enjoyed and, along with fish, are used frequently with many vegetables, including a kind of celery in soups and stir-fried dishes called ceun chai, which is smaller and with thinner stems than the celery used in the United States. They also use a lot of luk grawan, which is cardamon ground from nongreen pods, and krachai, an unusual rhizome sometimes called lesser ginger.
