Thai cuisine, a fascinating past
Sunday, 17 Jun 2007 15:53
If cuisine is about cooking style and food, then its features must be related to people, race, history, tradition, culture and science. In comparing cooking styles of the Thais (actually ‘Tais’ rather than ‘Thais’) and the Chinese more than two thousand years ago, both peoples shared the land of present day China but cooked differently.
The Chinese had already developed the rice steaming technique but the Tais were still boiling their rice. With evidence of rice-husk imprints on 5000-year-old pottery jars and rice seeds radio-carbon dated at 4000 years before Christ, both peoples slowly changed their habits of eating wild rice to cultivated rice of glutinous and non-glutinous varieties.
