The Transcendental Signified

I haven’t written a whole lot about Thai food and that’s not because I haven’t been eating up a storm but rather because it all just seems just a little bit quotidian, a little bit lunch-on-King-St to extol the virtues of green curry or thick rice noodles or stir-fries with basil and chilli or cashew or whatever. Also, I must admit that my addiction to green curry has hit some sort of critical point and I’ve been ordering it, usually with tofu, yellow tofu at that, with some frequency, ie. everyday. I’m convinced that fresh coconut milk makes everything taste better. What particularly appeals to me about the green curries here is, however, the abundance of eggplant (long, crunchy and tiny all at once) and the absence of unwanted random vegetables like carrot and cauliflower. I am a great lover of both carrot and cauliflower, but I do not particularly enjoy finding them in an undercooked state in a curry. Nonetheless, coming from the city of the five dollar Thai lunch, it doesn’t seem like big news to announce that green curry is currently at the top of the Menzies-Pike culinary pops. Especially when accompanied by a Singha (although rah-yah-blah travellers all over the place tell me that Beer Laos is the best beer in Asia). I’ve also been eating a helluva lot of papaya salad, or somtum, which is offered everywhere, with multiple variants, and makes me feel extremely wholesome. Pad thai is not exactly a great gastro-discovery but the good folk at the roadside noodle carts will cook it up for less than a dollar and, wonder of wonders, use the really wide rice noodles (sen yai?) rather than the thin sticky ones if you ask, or rather, point nicely. Extra wide rice noodles – squishy, starchy and oleaginous – are an ingredient that I confess a passionate and irrational love for so I’m pretty pleased that they can so competently and quickly be turned into pad thai. Come to think of it, I’ve also found myself in ten baht rice noodle heaven at the bus stations. In my opinion, this is what junk food should be all about: stodgy noodles pre-fried in soy and garlic and loads of oil, sprinkled with peanuts and sugar and dished up to go in twenty seconds. A splosh of chilli sauce the colour and consistency of tomato sauce wouldn’t go astray either. Condiments always elevate junk food, I think, by virtue of the opportunity they provide to personalise the standard.

Anyhoo, from Chiang Rai, I made my way to Chiang Saen, a town beside the mighty Mekong, a river I haven’t seen since I left Phnom Penh six weeks ago. Being peckish, I installed myself at a restaurant across the road from my guesthouse on the banks of the Mekong and ordered the Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup. It was a toss-up between that and the Fried Four Red Fellows, which would have been a brave gastro-adventurer choice indeed. Always order the specials, always order things made from local ingredients, aren’t those the rules? I had a complicated and not exactly lucid conversation with a gentleman at the Chiang Rai markets about fish and he told me that the best fish going is Mekong catfish and that there’s too much of it so not to worry about supplies running out anytime soon. I later worked out that he was talking about the Giant Mekong Catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world, which lives in deeper basins of the Mekong and whose capture is traditionally heralded by a ritual which involves chicken’s blood and rice wine. It is also alleged to taste like pork. I have not eaten a great deal of catfish in my time, let alone much Giant Mekong Catfish but I nonetheless humbly submit that I detect nothing porcine in the flavour of the GMC.

As I waited for my soup, I got quite nervous about what looked to be very much like a scorpion milling around amusing itself on the chair next to me. I also tried not to be aware that the party of Chinese businessmen drinking whiskey at a very impressive rate a couple of (empty) tables away seemed to be talking about and pointing at me in a fashion that I was finding a little disconcerting. All this was forgotten when the food arrived. Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup turned out to be tom yum à la Giant Mekong Catfish and I think it was the best darn tom yum I have ever eaten in my life. I’m quite attached to a kind of ersatz homemade tom yum administered as a cold remedy or, under dire and sadly more frequent circumstances, as a mid-afternoon hangover cure. Mine involves tom yum paste, stock, lots of lime juice, tomatoes, ginger and spring onions as the necessary ingredients with lemongrass and coriander and mushrooms and whatever as optional gap fillers. I highly recommend it to the suffering. Forget echinacaea, tom yum is up there with gazpacho as a panacea. Be that as it may, the tom yum at the Chiang Saen Riverside Restaurant left mine for dead. This is what it looked like before I started eating, a great tureen full of goodness bubbling over a spirit lamp.

The ingredients were just as you’d expect – ginger, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, little onions, a couple of types of mushroom, lemongrass, tomato, turmeric, chilli, CATFISH, lime juice, I guess – but the soup itself somehow wafted into divine realms of intense, definitive tom yummery. Eating this was a fully conscious ecstatic experience, all too brief, yes, but with no attendant agony apart from some suspect bits of catfish which I jettisoned. I was feeling quite reasonable before I ate the soup so can only speculate as to the extent to which it could heal and revivify the sick. Vastly, I speculate. I just kept right on dishing out little bowls of soup from the central tank until there was no more soup to go. When I reached this sad juncture, I had an inkling of why it had all tasted so good.

Check out the residue! Handfuls of pickled green chillies and whole dried red chillies and lemongrass spears, slabs of ginger and galangal, lime leaves and baby onions! There, my friends, lies the secret of tom yum, the road to good health and humour.