Kobkaew Naipinij and Ning Naipinij
Kobkaew Naipinij and Ning Naipinij are a mother and daughter team who teach at the prestigious Rajabhat Institute Suan Dusit Royal Cooking College in Bangkok. They have written about and taught classical Thai cooking collectively for more than 30 years. Let's meet them now. In the following interview, Ning Naipinij answers the question throughout as her mother's English is limited.
In Western culinary education, one of the first things you learn is how to care for your knives and make various knife cuts. What do Thai culinary students learn first?
They need to learn the pastes first. The chili pastes are the heart of Thai food.
Do people still make these by hand at home?
In the past, it was almost mandatory for every family to have a mortar and pestle because chili paste is key to our meals—breakfast, lunch and dinner. The women needed to be able to make pastes that way. But the lifestyle has changed. Women work, traffic is bad, and the blender has come to Thailand. So only 20 to 30 percent of Thai families keep using the mortar and pestle. Markets and supermarkets provide ready-made chili pastes. They're easy to find everywhere.
Tell us about the role of street food in Thai culture?
Street food is fun! Although we cook well at home, we still love to go for street food. Some people eat at home in the morning, but many go out early and on the way to school or work they stop somewhere to eat in the market. Breakfast might be soybean milk with a deep-fried Chinese croissant, or congee with minced pork or minced chicken or with an egg and sliced ginger.
My mother loves to go to the temple in the morning. She goes to the street vendor she likes best and selects the best thing they have for the monks because Buddhists believe that if we give good things, then good things will wait for us in our next life. And since her son is a Buddhist monk living in the forest far from home, she thinks when she offers food to a monk, her son will get food from somebody else.
Why is Thai food so spicy?
My mother says people didn't eat such spicy food when she was young. Everything was milder. She thinks it may be because the next generation is eating so much candy that they need spicier food. Her food is not too spicy. Especially in the north and central part, they don't eat much spicy food. You probably went to restaurants that serve people who drink alcohol, and that's why they make the food more spicy.
What are the big differences between food in the north and south?
Throughout the country, we mainly eat rice and fish, but the taste is different. In the north and central part, it's milder because they are close to China and Myanmar. In the south, they're closer to Malaysia and they have absorbed a lot of the spice culture of India and Malaysia. Many centuries ago, the Indian and Thai people exchanged culture through Buddhism. The monks from here went there, and monks from there came here. So southerners developed a culture of spicy food.
What is the structure of a Thai meal? And please describe how Thais eat.
Let me explain meal by meal. Breakfast is not too complicated because we are in a rush to get to work, so we eat one or two things, like congee or soybean milk with Chinese croissants. For lunch, nowadays people are working and have one hour, so we eat one dish like fried rice or noodles.
Dinner is the big meal. We eat in a communal way. We have the staple rice and accompaniments, such as a soup, which would be either curry or broth; and vegetables with nam prik (dipping sauce). We balance tastes, textures and nutrition. If you have something spicy, you have to have something that cuts the spiciness. If you have something soft, you have to have something that's crunchy. If we have pork, we need to have something else without pork.
We eat with the spoon in our right hand to scoop the rice, and we use the fork as the helper. We scoop the accompanying food, like the curry, with a serving spoon onto our rice. Then we might add a little chili or a little bit of vegetable to the rice in our spoon, and we use the fork to make it proper and scoop it into our mouth. But if you go to rural areas, where farmers live, they might not have such good manners. They might eat with their hands or only the spoon.