The champ in this twisted, gastronomic Olympiad generally is acknowledged to be the Icelandic dish called hakarl. This is cured shark meat that is cut into strips and, again, buried in the ground (preferably a gravel bed) for several weeks. Washing and air drying follows—although that doesn’t diminish the smell— and it, like all the others, it is best served with whatever local alcohol might be available. In quantity.
What has this got to do with Thailand? Not much, except that when it comes to rotten seafood, the Land of Smiles tops all of them. Here, fermented fish is not a specialty served seasonally or on holidays, it is an essential part of the diet and an indispensable ingredient for its cookery.
I’m talking about nam pla. This and its many Southeast Asian variations is made from rotten seafood and is produced by packing small fish—usually anchovies, but sometimes other fish, or even shrimp or squid—into barrels or crocks with salt or brine, and leaving it to ferment for at least a month and for up to a year, after which the liquid is drawn off and matured in sunlight before being bottled. It is then used in the same way salt is used in the West, or soy sauce is added to dishes in China and Japan. Unlike table salt, however, the brown liquid is highly nutritious, rich in protein and B vitamins.
(Crystallized salt is never used as a table condiment in Thailand, but may be added during cooking. Salt also may be added to some fruit juices or used as a dip, with or without sugar and chilis, for green mango, pineapple or other fresh fruit.)
What puts fish sauce into the why-in-the-world-would-anyone-want-to-eat-that? category is its smell. Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients (1988), erroneously likened the taste to “encountering Camembert for the first time.” In fact, Camembert is a mild cheese with a faint smell of mold, which is one of its ingredients, but Bruce knew fish sauce when it came into olfactory range. It took some getting used to, he said, “for those who haven’t grown up with it.” Others have made far ruder comparisons redolent of outhouses and the you-know-what that’s always found in them.
What few realize is that this pungent sauce has been around for a lot longer than Thais. In Classical Greece and Rome, virtually everything was seasoned with what they called liquamen, or garum, made from anchovies and other fish in much the same manner. Anchovies packed in salt, which lend their dizzying fragrance to numerous Italian dishes, are another inheritance from this kind of ancient fish pickling.
Nowadays, the stuff is found mainly in Southeast Asia, added to numberless dishes during the cooking stage, or after serving, or next to the main dish as the base for a dipping sauce, in Thailand usually combined with chopped chilis, fresh lime, and other ingredients. Variations on the same salty theme are manufactured in Vietnam, where it is called nu’o’c ma’m, in Cambodia tuk trey, ngan-pya-ye in Myanmar, and patis in the Philippines. In the United States, usually in shops in a city’s Chinatown, I find competition from producers in Vietnam and the Philippines, but everyone agrees that it is Thailand that exports the translucent, brown sauce in the greatest quantity. It probably doesn’t have to be said, but fish sauce keeps indefinitely on the shelf, without refrigeration. It’s already rotten, so what else could happen to make it worse?
What is not found so widely is pla ra, a runny paste created when fish is abused in the same fashion, this time with rice husks thrown in, and the whole sticky mess is eaten, usually using the fingers, with rice. I’ve been exposed to this quite a lot recently, now that I have a house in Surin, a province in northeastern Thailand where a jar of the stuff is never far from the dinner plate. I confess I have a jar of it in my kitchen in Bangkok as well, its lid screwed on as tight as handcuffs applied by a sadistic cop. Even so, I swear I can see an occasional bubble rise through the glop to the top and when my Thai-Khmer wife Lamyai opens the jar, the “fragrance” fills the kitchen like a hyena’s burp, the birds go silent in the neighborhood and geckos fall from my apartment walls. As I watch her dip her fingers into the stuff and lift a smear of it with rice to her lips, I remember that rice and fermented fish were the K-rations that sustained the Vietcong.
Although I think Scott and Kristiaan Inwood, authors of a small but delectable book called A Taste of Thailand (1986), overstated the case, I know what they were talking about when they said it recalled the “accumulated stench of putrefying corpses, abandoned kennels, dirty feet, stagnant bilges, and fly-blown offal.”
Lamyai calls this blasphemy, says such opinion smells worse than the goopy gray stuff clinging to her fingertips and lips.
Thai Aphrodisiacs: Food That Makes You “Strong”
Before getting into the hard facts, a caveat: what follows was performed at the direction of a magazine’s editorial staff; as I told my wife as we ventured forth on each expedition with firm resolve, “Honest, honey, I’m just doing research.”
What I learned, in a nutshell, was that Viagra and other pharmaceutical pick-me-ups may have acquired a sizeable following in the Land of Smiles, but there remained a number of gastronomical boosts that defied any challenge from a laboratory in Switzerland, or from all the counterfeit factories in India. At least that was so if you listened to the true believers, most notably the people who captured, cooked and sold the stuff.
Before venturing into one of the countless restaurants that specialize in birds’ nest soup—clustered densely in Bangkok’s Chinatown and in southern Thailand where many of the nests are “harvested,” from the Phang Nga Sea south to Hat Yai—I did a little reading on the subject. This led me to wonder why the first person to climb to the top of a dark, bat-infested sea cave on a rickety bamboo ladder and saw nests made largely of bird saliva, thought this messy bit of housekeeping would make a yummy bowl of soup. Rhino horn, at least, was phallic in shape, more or less, and it wasn’t too long a reach to think that a tiger’s parts might convey the strength and stamina of what the Guinness Book of Records called the most dangerous man-eating animal on earth. Why the nests of birds that, just before their breeding season, fed on gelatinous seaweed that made their salivary glands secrete a glutinous spit, with which they constructed their nests, was added to this aphrodisiacal list may forever remain a mystery.
All that said, on a visit to Hat Yai I happily ordered a bowl and while waiting, talked with the restaurant proprietor. He told me that the dried nests took up to a full day and night to clean, soak, and rinse, and that there were myriad ways of cooking them, but all required the addition of other ingredients—minced chicken and egg white, ham and wine, chrysanthemum petals and lotus seeds, for example, to replace the nutrition totally removed by the cleaning, soaking, and rinsing of the nests. This then was baked inside a coconut or pumpkin, or stuffed inside a chicken and double-boiled, or merely simmered as any other soup.
Although there was a market for dried and packaged nests in Asian groceries and Chinese herbal shops, where it cost upwards of three hundred dollars for about an ounce, making it nearly worth its weight in gold, it sounded like a lot of work and I wasn’t surprised when I was told that virtually all birds’ nest soup was consumed in a restaurant. However, I was assured, with the customary grin and wink, that the stuff delivered what was promised. So it wasn’t a dinner-and-a-movie date, but dinner-and-then-go-back-to-the-hotel-as-quickly-as-possible experience. On the way home, my wife apologized for giggling.