My Introduction to Som Tam (or, Green Papaya Salad)

-->

It’s not often that dinner out is interrupted by a furious woman bursting into the restaurant and screaming in a language you can’t understand; nor does it often happen that your meal is interrupted by three uniformed policemen doing their best to restore calm as the entire restaurant staff, from cooks to waiters, gathers en masse to shout back in the same incomprehensible language.  

What were we to do? We had theater tickets and had to eat before 7:00. We’d found the one restaurant in town that was open on Easter Sunday. Despite the fact that it was completely empty, we’d sat down and ordered our food. Eyes on our watches, we were getting very hungry. And there we sat as the battle lines formed, doing our best not to pry into what clearly wasn’t any of our business. All evidence suggested that we weren’t going to be eating anytime soon.

Just as we were thinking we ought to leave, a plate of spring rolls made it to the table. Not the vegetarian ones we’d ordered, but we devoured them anyway. Not bad. Then something arrived that looked sort of like a plate of noodles. We hadn’t ordered any noodles, but the fight was still raging, more policemen were arriving, clearly the waiters had more important things on their mind than our dinner, so, gratefully, we tasted them. 

And immediately realized that what we were eating was 1) not noodles at all; and 2) not just good, but magnificent. Turns out that we’d been given precisely what we’d ordered—Som Tam, or Green Papaya Salad—without having realized it.

No doubt many of you already know that green papayas can be shredded into spaghetti-like strands (sort of like the aptly named spaghetti squash), but we, who didn’t know this, imagined we’d been given a cold noodle salad.

Live and learn, as they say. Papayas have long been one of my favorite fruits and there are few things I like more than a bowl of papaya cubes sprinkled with lime juice. But when I think papaya, I think orange—whether the pale orange of an apricot or a cantaloupe, or the more vivid hue of a persimmon, carrot, or pumpkin. I don’t think greenish-white. Somehow or other, green papaya salad had never made it onto my radar screen. Well, consider me a convert.

Sour, salty, spicy, and sweet: what could be better than that classic Thai blend of lime juice, fish sauce, chili peppers, and just a touch of sugar? When it’s stirred into  shredded green papaya, green beans, tomatoes, and chopped peanuts, the result is addicting. Trust me.

Knowing I’d need another fix—and very soon—I googled Green Papaya Salad right away and found not only dozens of recipes, but also—much to my delight—that in order to make it, I’d need a shredding tool sold under the names of Thai Kom Kom Miracle Knife or Kiwi Pro-Slice Peeler. With this amazing little gizmo, I am now able to reduce an unripe or green papaya to spaghetti-like strands, thus being able to re-create at a moment’s notice the salad we’d all but inhaled despite the shouting, doors slamming, and sirens that accompanied our introduction to Som Tam. 

Som Tam (Green Papaya Salad)

(adapted from, literally, dozens of recipes)

2 green papayas, peeled & shredded

½ lb string beans, cut into 1” lengths, blanched until crisp-tender & 

plunged under ice water (Thai yardlong beans are traditional)

2-3 plum tomatoes, seeded & chopped

½ cup chopped unsalted peanuts

Dressing:

                                                      ¼ cup Asian fish sauce                 

½ cup lime juice (to taste)

2 tbsp sugar (palm sugar is tradition, but brown will do)

1 tsp minced garlic

2 Thai bird’s eye chilies (or any other chili pepper), minced

A few tablespoons dried shrimp (traditional, but the salad’s fine without)

Toss the salad ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix the dressing ingredients together and pour over. Stir well. Garnish with chopped cilantro before serving.

[Note: traditionally, this salad is pounded together, ingredient by ingredient, in a mortar and pestle and no doubt there are many purists who insist the salad can be made in no other way. I’ve heard the same claimed of pesto sauce—that it doesn’t taste authentic unless the basic and garlic are pounded in a mortar and pestle. What can I say other than acknowledge that according to such purists, neither my pesto nor my som tam is authentic. Somehow, I can live with the shame.]

Epilogue: It turned out that the shouting concerned who owed or didn’t owe whom money. The apologetic & embarrassed owner didn’t want to charge us for the meal, but the food was so good, we insisted. Not only that, we’re going back for more.

“To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish” (Yiddish Proverb)

-->

As a child, I had one association with horseradish. Passover. On the seder plate it was called maror—Hebrew for “bitter herb”—but my parents tended to call it by its Yiddish name of chrain. Although it was supposed to remind us of the bitterness of years of slavery in Egypt, I was always partial to horseradish. Not the prepared stuff you buy in tiny little jars, but the freshly grated variety, moistened with vinegar and seasoned with a bit of salt. Today you can find horseradish root at the supermarket just about anytime, but back then it was stocked once a year, a few weeks before Passover. As soon as I saw a chunk of the deceptively odorless root in the refrigerator, I knew what to expect. My father’s annual ritual of horseradish preparation. 

Come the weekend before Passover, he’d get to work, peeling the root, chopping it into manageable pieces, and tossing it into the food processor with some vinegar and a pinch of salt (no doubt he also added a few spoonfuls of sugar). A few seconds of pulsing was all it took. But the drama of the ritual lay in the opening of the food processor. As I recall, he would don a surgical mask for the moment of truth, because the fumes that wafted out of that processor would otherwise have knocked him out. Try it. You’ll see. 

Horseradish doesn’t have a smell when it’s whole. When it’s been cut, however, it releases the same compound that’s responsible for the sinus-blasting and eye-popping pungency of wasabi and mustard, to both of which it's related (and which, not coincidentally, are two of my other favorite flavors).  That mucous membrane-irritating compound has a purpose other than that of adding savor to my dinner or serving as a symbol of bitterness; it protects the plant from the chomping teeth of an unsuspecting herbivore—like a horse, for instance, after whom the horseradish is not in fact named and to whom it’s positively poisonous. “Horse” used to mean “strong, large, or coarse,” as in horse chestnuts or a horse laugh (not “hoarse laugh” as I always thought, but “horse laugh”).

Now if a knife can break enough cell walls to release the acrid compound, just imagine the potential of the whirring blade of the food processor. And if the odor is sharp enough when the root is being cut or grated on a chopping board on the countertop in a well ventilated kitchen, just imagine the ferocity of the pent up odors when they’re suddenly released en masse. Most recipes I’ve read merely advise you to avert your face when you remove the lid of the processor; my father, more cautious still, resorted to desperate measures.

Some of the horseradish he’d put in glass jars; to the rest he’d add some boiled beets (or were they pickled beets?) for a touch of sweetness. But for me, only the white stuff would do. For me, gefilte fish was incomplete without it, as was the brisket, the charoset, and the matzah. Without horseradish, the meal lacked savor. To me, it was horseradish that defined Passover.

But I’ve since found out that Passover isn’t alone in claiming the root or in bestowing its nose-clearing pungency with symbolic resonance. In much of Northern Europe, a traditional Easter dish is Horseradish Soup, called Bialy Barszcz in Poland. Rich with sour cream and kielbasa, the soup is spiked with a hefty amount of grated horseradish—symbolizing Jesus's sacrifice—and traditionally served with hard-boiled eggs, symbolizing his rebirth.

Slavery in Egypt or Jesus’s sacrifice. A lot of symbolic weight to put on the shoulders of a root that’s simply trying to protect itself from being eaten by a grazing herbivore. Or by me.

Whether it's Easter or Passover you're celebrating, here's how to prepare your own horseradish. For every pound of horseradish root, you'll need about a half cup of white vinegar and a teaspoon and a half of salt. Peel & coarsely chop the horseradish. Place it in the food processor with a few tablespoons of the vinegar. Pulse until the horseradish has broken down. Add the salt and enough of the remaining vinegar to get a pasty consistency. If you must, you can add a few teaspoons of sugar or a peeled medium (uncooked) beet. Purist that I am, I add neither.

Addendum: After having spoken with my parents (two of my closest readers), I have two corrections to make. First, it was my mother—not my father—who peeled and chopped the horseradish, in addition to making the chicken soup, matzah balls, gefilte fish, brisket, and virtually everything else (no doubt, she'll want me to credit the guests who bring the kugels and desserts, but blog posts—like Academy Award acceptance speeches—have to know when to call it quits).  Second, my father alerts any of you tempted to try making your own horseradish that the surgical mask alone is not sufficient to protect you against the fiery fumes that will emerge when you twist off the top of the food processor. In addition to the mask, he advises goggles.

On pancakes, flapjacks, hotcakes, griddlecakes, hoecakes, johnnycakes . . .

Last week marked two holidays associated with food: Valentine’s Day, when, as they have since the 15^th century at least, lovers regale one another with sweets and flowers; and Shrove Tuesday, the day when one feasts on the rich foods one won’t taste again until the lean days of Lent have come and gone. In New Orleans, it’s called Mardi Gras, literally “Fat Tuesday,” and but I’m partial to the British name, Pancake Tuesday (or just plain Pancake Day), which has always struck me as a bit silly (sorry all you Brits!). Think of it: of all the foods you could indulge in if you were to throw caution to the wind, would it be pancakes that came first to mind?

But apparently the British have long loved their pancakes. The word first appears in a 15th century cookery book, but I doubt the recipe would feature at your local IHOP: it called for pepper, mace, cloves, saffron, and "if thou wilt," a little minced pork or veal. By the time of the 1615 The English Housewife (the full subtitle of which is “Containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman; as her skill in physic, cookery, banqueting-stuff, distillation, perfumes, wool, hemp, flax, dairies, brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household”), Gervase Markham provides a more familiar recipe, with the addition of some sweet spices, for what he rather immodestly calls “The best pancake”:

To make the best pancake, take two or three eggs, and break them into a dish, and beat them well; then add unto them a pretty quantity of fair running water, and beat all well together; then put in cloves, mace, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and season it with salt: which done, make it thick as you think good with fine wheat flour; then fry the cakes as thin as may be with sweet butter, or sweet seam [fat, grease, or lard], and make them brown, and so serve them up with sugar strewed upon them. There be some which mix pancakes with new milk or cream, but that makes them tough, cloying and not crisp, pleasant and savoury as running water.

Markham may have preferred pancakes made with water, but his recipe would be self-defeating as far as Shrove Tuesday is concerned when the point is to eat up as much butter and cream as possible (it isn’t called Fat Tuesday for nothing). And such pancakes aren’t only eaten; they’re also tossed in the air in a custom known as “pancake races,” held in villages throughout the UK since long before Markham put pen to paper and continuing to this day. The most famous such race, according to Ronald Hutton’s The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, “is confined to adult women [who] run from the market square to the church, using standard-sized frying pans in which each pancake must be tossed at least three times en route.” Regulations are strict: all contestants must wear aprons and headscarves, and the course run must measure exactly 380 meters/415 yards.

I’m not aware of any such custom here in the US, but what we lack in the way of pancake racing we more than make up for in the quaint and quirky names we give our pancakes. Flapjacks, for instance, for which The Dictionary of American Regional English provides the following synonyms: "Flapjack. 1. A pancake. Also called clapjack, flapcake, flapover, flatcake, flatcjack, flipjack, flipper, flopjack, flopover, slapjack.”

And that’s not to mention the more familiar hotcake, griddlecake, hoecake (perhaps cooked on hoes propped over an open fire), or johnnycake (traditionally made from Rhode Island’s Narragansett white-cap corn and often believed to have evolved from “journey cake”). 

All this history aside, my own personal pancake preference tends toward a heartier batter than the one Markham touted in his English Housewife. I’d rather my pancakes not be quite as flat as, say, a pancake. Since I've almost always got a container of buttermilk in the fridge and a box of baking soda in the cabinet, I can stir up thick batters at a moment’s notice. Like the following one, which is sort of Scottish (the oats and the buttermilk) and sort of American (the maple syrup) all at the same time, and so should satisfy eaters on either side of the Atlantic.

                                                   Oatmeal Pancakes

(makes about 12 4” pancakes)

              1 cup rolled oats                                  2 tablespoons sugar

              1 cup buttermilk                                  1 teaspoon baking soda

              1 egg                                                    1 teaspoon baking powder

              1/2 cup water                                       2 tablespoons maple syrup

              1 cup all-purpose flour                        3 tablespoons vegetable oil

                                                          

Pour the buttermilk over the oats & let stand for 15 minutes or so. Add everything else and stir until incorporated. Ladle about ¼ cup of batter onto a hot griddle (which I don't bother to grease) & when the the edges look firm & the bottom is golden-brown (you can peek under to check), flip to cook the other side. You don’t need me to tell you to serve the pancakes with whatever you like—syrup, jam, cinnamon & sugar—but I will say that oatmeal pancakes are especially good with warm apple sauce or apple slices sauteed in butter and sprinkled with cinnamon & sugar.