There are few Thai dishes more famous than pad Thai, and the more popular it gets, the more questions it invites.
Before it achieved this celebrity, pad Thai was just another dish on the menu. All people wanted to know was where they get a good plateful. Today there are many more questions. Where did pad Thai come from? Who invented it? Many answers have been proposed, but since there is no concrete evidence to support any of them, the questions still stand.
One answer that is often heard is that pad Thai comes from Vietnam, where it is known as pho sao. The Vietnamese made this dish during the Ayutthaya period and much later, at the time of World War II, the Thais adapted it and called it pad Thai.
But there is another answer that others prefer, which is that pad Thai came into being during Field Marshal Plaek Phibulsonggram's first stint as prime minister, between 1938 and 1944. The idea was to get Thais to eat noodles, as the economic situation in the country was very bad during the war years. The cost of rice noodles was low, and since they were filling and were eaten with vegetables, bean sprouts and pork, they made a satisfying and highly nutritious meal. They were just the food for the situation at the time.
A policy was announced stipulating that wandering vendors must offer noodles for sale in every province, amphoe and school. The government's Public Relations Department printed handbooks explaining how to prepare noodles and distributed them everywhere, but it was never made clear which noodle dishes they were promoting.
It was a policy that incorporated conflicts, because Plaek was a fervent nationalist who wanted to completely rebuild the national identity. For example, he wanted Thais to stop chewing betel and playing or listening to Thai music. He wanted them to dress in Western clothes and wear hats. He hated Chinese culture and forbade the teaching or study of the Chinese language. But on the other hand, he supported having people eat noodles, a Chinese import. As for pad Thai, however, there isn’t any evidence or even a single reference linking Plaek to this noodle dish.
There is one more interesting fact relating to pad Thai and its origins. The noodles used to make it are sen Chan, a type of rice noodle made in Chanthaburi province. This choice is strange, because pad Thai uses wet or fresh noodles, while sen Chan is dried and chewy in texture. The Chanthaburi factory that produces it is small and its output is low, just enough to meet the local need for Chanthaburi noodles made with beef and a type of small crab.
These questions about the origin of pad Thai and the suggested answers are heard often, but if you are not especially interested in where the dish comes from and who invented it, a look at the social behaviour connected with it can provide some good insights into its history.
Rice noodle dishes served with broth or made by briefly boiling the noodles before preparation have been around for a long time. They were being sold in Bangkok before World War II, and in earlier times were sold from boats or by vendors who travelled around neighbourhoods with the ingredients and cookware suspended from a plank balanced on a shoulder.
Dishes made by frying noodles in a wok — guay teaw pad see ew (noodles fried with soy sauce), and guay teaw rad na (fried noodles topped with meat and vegetables in gravy), for example — were not sold on the street yet, but a small circle of people made them for themselves. Very few Thais knew about these dishes, but there was one fried noodle dish that everyone was familiar with — pad sen mee, the fried, very small-gauge noodles with vegetables and pork cooked at Chinese New Year.
This was considered to be an auspicious food that was made in every Chinese household. Thais got to know it because at the lunar New Year, Chinese families would invite friends to join them for a meal. In this way, the fried noodle dish became well known.
As for pad Thai, I believe that it is a Chinese dish. All of its ingredients are Chinese, from the sen lek (small-gauge rice noodles) to the bean sprouts, tofu, pickled condiments, pounded peanuts, small dried shrimp, duck eggs and Chinese celery leaves. The only really Thai ingredient is the pounded dried chillies.
When the dish was first prepared, it may not have included all of these ingredients. As with other foods with a long history, over the years new things were tried and incorporated into it. In outlying rural areas of the Central Plains region toward the end of World War II, pad Thai included only the noodles, bean sprouts, egg, dried shrimp and pounded chillies.
The Chinese cooks who made it wanted to differentiate it from their own pad mee dishes of the kind served at New Year’s, especially by adding the chilli to make it hot and spicy, and called it pad baeb Thai, or fried Thai-style. Over the years this term was shortened to pad Thai. Its evolution follows the social pattern whereby something new is introduced, then adjusted and improved by many hands until it reaches an ideal form that no one person could have achieved.
An interesting question is, what was pad Thai like once it reached this form, because today it is experiencing all kinds of changes and adaptations, and at a very quick pace. Old-fashioned pad Thai was made by frying some garlic in oil until it was crisp, then adding the noodles, a little water to soften the noodles and to keep them from sticking to the wok, and then putting in some tamarind water and palm sugar that had been stirred over heat until it became liquid. Then sliced shallots, sliced Chinese radish, chopped hard tofu and dried shrimp were added.
The cooking noodles were separated to make an indentation in the middle and a duck egg was broken into it and stirred with the spatula so that it coated the noodles. Before taking the noodles off the hob, bean sprouts and Chinese celery leaves were added.
When the pad Thai was put on a plate to be served, some pounded peanuts and powdered chillies were sprinkled over it. It was also essential was to scatter some pieces of sour fruit on top. The preferred fruit was shredded raw unripe mango. If sour madan (a shiny green acidic fruit) were in season, those were used. The vegetables served with pad Thai were banana flower, Chinese celery, fresh bean sprouts or bai bua boke (pennywort).
That was pad Thai as it used to be. Today there have been many changes. For one, almost all pad Thai shops now add fresh shrimp. Some restaurants and recipes also put in oyster sauce, and some also include a little coconut cream. The sour fruits have almost completely disappeared, especially in Bangkok, where you won’t see them at all.
Now you can buy powder for making instant pad Thai, and there are many shops that use it because it is quick and convenient. The day may be coming what a cook won’t need any kitchen skills at all to make pad Thai.
So, the questions people ask about the history of pad Thai — where does it come from, when did it first appear, who invented it — are still with us and are unlikely every to be answered accurately. But other questions — what was old-fashioned pad Thai like, what will its future be like, and how will it end up — are less likely to be asked, because these days nobody really seems to care.
