FoodOde: Papaya Salad
On Bangkok's streets, the most elemental food I have ever tasted.
I SPOT HER limes first. Then the rest of her becomes visible.
It is a summer day in 2014, and I am walking down the busy street near my office in Bangkok, freshly returned from 10 days abroad, lamenting that I’m going to have to settle for a fast-food lunch I don’t really want because I don’t have time for anything else.
Then, amid the bustle of purposeful pedestrians, I see the tiny woman and her limes. She is sitting on the step of a bank (of the financial, not river type), guarded from the blistering sun by a shallow overhang. She is surrounded by baskets, plastic containers and a thicket of plastic bags.
Encased in one is a ceramic mortar and pestle. And when I see a container of tiny, angry chili peppers, I know that I have stumbled upon a sidewalk iteration of a Southeast Asia roadside institution: a one-woman operation, quietly selling what is effectively (despite what the pad thai partisans say) the national dish of Thailand.
Papaya salad. Som tum — literally, “pounded sour.” Refreshing. Bracing. Spicy. Sweet. Elemental. I am an enthusiastic carnivore, but this I could eat forever. Perhaps I will.
I ORDER in broken Thai, picked up through years of hearing it out of the mouth of my fluent father. I then spend the next three minutes watching as she carefully — but delightfully roughly — assembles ingredients in the wooden mortar as if she’s done it 10,000 times. Which I suppose she probably has.
First she counts out seven narrow red bird’s-eye chilies (I ask for extra spicy, phet maak) and bruises them in the little ceramic bucket alongside some lime quarters and garlic cloves.
Then come fresh tomatoes and, from various plastic containers, palm sugar, fish sauce and a yellow paste I don’t recognize.
Next goes in the freshly shredded papaya, also bruised gently with the pestle. This is not the ripe, deep-orange papaya of tropical-fruit fame; its pale-green slivers start to absorb the sweet-salty-umami liquid that is pooling at the bottom of the mortar.
Finally the mixture is joined by tiny dried shrimps, peanuts and a few slivers of shredded carrot. A few more bangs with the pestle, and ingredients become recipe. The concoction is complete.
She produces a tiny plastic fork and extends it to me. I proceed with a Thai street-food ritual: tasting your som tum directly out of the mortar to make sure it’s prepared exactly to your specifications. Maybe not Health Department SOP, but I hardly care.
Taste reverberates in my mouth. It’s complex. It’s simple. Somehow it’s both. She shepherds it into a Styrofoam bowl, then into a gossamer plastic bag. She holds it up to me and smiles.
I eat it vigorously and immediately. Scarf it, even. Total cost: 30 baht, or about 96 cents. I pay triple.
As for my bank-step vendor, I go back to see her the next day. And the next. I keep going back. Then, after a couple of weeks, I show up one midday and find the step empty. She and her limes and other accoutrements are gone without a trace.
For the next nearly four years of living in Thailand — and while visiting neighboring Cambodia and Laos, where the dish purportedly originated — I will make sure to find street papaya salad at least once a week. I will do it wherever I see cheap roadside restaurants, som tum carts or vendors like her — folks sitting alone on corners with baskets of supplies, waiting to make one of the best dishes in the world. As my then-little boy tells me at one point: “Dad, by now you’ve gotta be at least 5% papaya.”
A few recipes and a bit of further reading (plus a song!):
The Curious History of Som Tum (Thai Ginger)
Som Tam: The Origins and Recipe (Akyra Destinations)
Decoding Som Tam, Thailand’s Delicious Papaya Salad (Michelin)
Green Papaya Salad (Rosa’s Thai)
Mae Kha Som Tam (“Papaya Salad Merchant”), from “The Sound of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam in Thailand, 1964-75”
Note: I wrote an early version of this when I first started Unsorted but Significant and had a very small audience. I’m posting it now, with a few updates, because it fits perfectly into my recent FoodOde series.
Will try the recipes. I always cook with mango and throw them in salads.