The limits of culinary authenticity

One of the less palatable contributions to Lao food taste is made by padak, a thick and foully odiferous fish sauce which is drawn out of a vat of fermented rotten fish and rice husks. It is not a visually attractive condiment; it is unkind to the olfactory organ; it trounces every other flavour in its wake. Back in the day, every household had a claypot full of decaying fish sitting by the backdoor, all ready to round out the casserole. Padak strikes me as a ten year old prankster’s dream. Imagine: fill a bucket with dead fish and salt and scraps, pour in some muddy water, let it rot for a while, and then make people taste it on the grounds that it’s a delicacy.

Foreigners are said to have assimilated to Lao culinary culture when they can dip a raw bean into a pot of padak and eat it with gusto. My brief sojourn in Laos has not equipped me with the wherewithal to appreciate padak in any form. The official story is that the fishy, salty taste of the padak is distributed through a dish and mellowed. I do not believe this to be true. When Lao food is prepared for Western palates, the cooks go easy on the padak or, better, substitute for it the shrimp paste that goes into Thai food. If, however, you quit the tourist boulevards and go forth with great intrepidity to the local markets in pursuit of an Authentic Culinary Experience, no such allowances will be made. As I have discovered. Lao green papaya salad is pretty similar to somtum, the Thai green papaya salad. What distinguishes the one from the other, at least on the street, is the padak and the addition of this one ingredient is fatal. Similarly, I had to abandon an eggplant casserole which should have been delicious after just a few bites on account of the padak pestilence.

I like Lao food enormously. Although they all juggle the same basic set of sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavours, Lao cuisine is much feistier than Thai and Cambodian food. Great swathes of lime and tamarind battle it out with slugs of ginger and garlic and chilli. The broths are full of lemongrass; the sour vegies are really, really sour; there are eggplants and tomatoes everywhere. Herbs don’t get used as a garnish, they get thrown into everything by the handful. All these things are good. So yes, I like Lao food enormously but it seems that it is an adapted Lao food that I must love. And thus, on the vast and complex arena that is the dinner table, the great questions of cultural relativism are raised. To embrace Lao food, must I discard my own culinary values? Do I commit an act of gastronomic imperialism when I laud, indeed call for Lao cuisine sans padak? Am I striking a blow for the globalisation of the palate when I refuse to accept the most distinctive ingredients on the menu?

I’ve been pretty harsh on travellers who refuse to cope with local ingredients. Nothing gives me an easier occasion for a good old scoff than hearing some nitwit in a leisure suit order a curry with no chilli. Some feeble sense of culinary superiority is strengthened when, just as I bite into an eye-opening clove of raw garlic, someone else has an audible attack of the squeams over the onion or the garlic or the rice or the fish or the spice or some such rubbish. They, gormless philistines, crave trans fats; I crave strange greens. I feel like a maverick and I like it. Padak has made me question my suitability for this category.