When I moved to Thailand in 1993, I remembered Edmund G. Love, a long-ago friend in the United States. He was a New York advertising guy back in the 1950s who almost threw his life away with booze, becoming a street person for a while, spending his nights on subway cars. Happily, he sobered up and wrote a book about his experience called Subways Are for Sleeping. It became a successful Broadway musical. I met him a few years later when he was researching a follow-up book based on the idea of eating his way from A to Z in the restaurant listings in the Yellow Pages of the Manhattan telephone directory.
Perhaps it was in Ed’s memory that when I decided to live in Bangkok, I vowed to try at least one “new” food each week on the street, because I saw so many I wasn’t being offered in restaurants, and often couldn’t identify. What better way to get to know the country than to consume its vastly varied cuisine.
Ed Love died about the time he got to “M.”
I figure it’ll be another five years, maybe longer, before I exhaust the possibilities on the street in Bangkok. And then I have all the choices offered in the north and south of the country, where I’m assured there is even more variety.
Country Cookin’
I was traveling in northern Thailand with a group of visitors from Europe, when our van suddenly pulled over to the side of the road. The only Thai in the group, besides the driver, said he’d seen something he wanted to share with us, and as we climbed out of the vehicle, he pointed to some people standing around a small fire in a rice field, about twenty meters from the road.
The fire was of a size you’d expect to see built for warmth in a cold climate. But this was Thailand, so that didn’t explain it. Nor did it appear they were cooking, because I couldn’t see any firewood, food, utensils, grill or wok—only flames and smoke. Why, I wondered, would a group of what appeared to be rice farmers end a day standing around a small bonfire?
As we watched, one of the men in the group added more dry grass to the flames, and our Thai friend, Yutakit Wanischanond, explained. The farmers were preparing a snack to eat before returning to their homes. The questions remained: what were they cooking, and how?
As the flames died and the ashes fell away, we saw what appeared to be an upturned metal can, large enough to have held about four gallons of cooking oil before it found its present use. One of the men removed the hot can with two sticks, revealing a small chicken and what appeared to be a rack of ribs.
We were being beckoned to join the farmers. As we approached, it all became clear: the chicken and meat had been impaled on lengths of bamboo that were stuck into the ground, then covered with the up-ended metal can, which formed a sort of oven around the meat. After that, dry grass had been piled into a mound, burying the can, and set ablaze. More fuel was added until the meat was cooked.
Gingerly, one of the women with a knife cut away some of the chicken and pork into bite-sized pieces, serving them to us on a piece of banana leaf. One of the men then produced a bottle of hooch, the home-brewed rice whisky called lao khao. Some of my fellow travelers objected, saying they couldn’t take food from a poor farmer’s mouth, but Yutakit explained that refusal would offend. We ate. The pork fell off the bone and disappeared in my mouth as if made of meat-scented air, and from a single glass that was passed around the drink’s husky heat prepared my palate for more meat.
Once upon a time, everybody cooked outdoors and every mealtime was a variation of what we now call a barbecue. In the distant times to which I refer, there were no Webers and fancy gas grills. Nor even simple grills. Charcoal hadn’t been “invented” yet. There were no pots and pans. Probably it was a while before the notion of a spit was conceived. There was only blazing wood and meat that was tossed casually onto the coals of the fire at the mouth of the cave, turned with a stick once or twice before serving, charred on the outside, still bloody in the middle.
I was a Boy Scout when I was young, so cooking over a wood fire wasn’t entirely new to me, though I think my buddies and I got more pleasure from setting fire to things than from eating over- or under-cooked chicken and beef that our moms purchased for the camping trip.
Many years later, I lived in the northern California woods, cooking all meals over a wood-burning stove with a massive metal pipe to take the heat and smoke up and outside the house without, we all prayed, setting it aflame en route. This stove also provided the heat for the house. I recall that after years of cooking over gas in my previous homes, learning to regulate the heat in a wood fire was somewhat dodgy, and precarious.
It wasn’t until I moved to Thailand and built a home in a small village in the northeast that I learned how truly wonderful cooking this way could be. Here I was reconnected to the past by my genetic mealtime memory, transported back to pre-industrial times, and to countless millennia earlier, to the basic yet subtle succulence of cooking at its simplest and most eloquent over wood.
In time, wood became increasingly expensive and hard to find in many places, and for a while coal took its place. Coal was easier to store than wood and often easier to get, and it left less ash, but coal fires were as smoky as wood fires and more toxic, releasing dangerous pollutants into the air. Then came gas and electricity and nothing was the same again. If you lived in a modern city in the West, wood and coal fires—for heating as well as cooking—by the mid-1900s were banished in the name of convenience and health. But not so, yet, in much of the world.
Today, cooking over wood remains so pervasive it’s blamed for deforestation, as poor villagers roam farther from home to find combustible fuel. Illegal logging and other environmental abuse, together with rampant development, are responsible for much greater loss, of course. No matter how the argument rages, in the foreseeable future for tens of millions of people, wood will remain the kitchen fuel of choice because it is the only affordable one.
In Thailand, and in most “developing” nations today, there are several ways of cooking over a wood fire. One of the most basic involves placing three large rocks (cement building blocks will suffice) in a triangular pattern, building a wood fire in the middle and balancing the metal pan or grill on top of the rocks. Other country cooks own a clay, portable cooker, or brazier, that serves the same purpose, with wood or charcoal set alight beneath a metal grill or metalware placed on top. Many insist that only a charcoal or wood fire can provide the desired heat for certain dishes and keep a small brazier in use long after acquiring a gas or electric stove. In my apartment building in Bangkok, the Thai family next door has one of these on the balcony. Many others are used by vendors cooking food on city streets.
At a recent new year celebration at my home in rural Isan, the men in the family slaughtered and butchered a hundred-kilogram pig, throwing the first slabs of meat directly onto the coals of a large, open wood fire nearby, turning them with a stick, precisely as it was done in prehistoric times. After a few minutes, the hot flesh was retrieved from the coals, sluiced with water to remove the ash, then cut with a machete into bite-sized chunks and served with a chili, garlic, green onion and fish sauce dip.
Meanwhile, the women took other butchered cuts and prepared them over four more wood fires. One was for boiling the pig’s feet and head in a large pot, another for grilling, a third for stir-frying bits of pork with fresh-cut vegetables, the last for deep-frying strips of skin and fat. The succulent odor of the cooking flesh blew every which way in the shifting breeze, bubbles of grease so small they were invisible, blending with the smoke in a fashion that made me think, “Hey, capture this scent, bottle it, and sell it as an after-shave!”