Pad Thai was invented by the Thai government | Hacker News Reader

Pad Thai was invented by the Thai government

scmp.com

47 pointswallflower27 comments

A similar example is the shopska salad[0], known throughout the Balkans as a symbol of either Bulgaria’s Shopsko region in particular or Bulgaria as a whole, but in fact this dish under that name only goes back to the 1960s or so and was part of a national marketing campaign. (Incidentally, tomatoes, cucumbers and white cheese form the colours of the Bulgarian flag, which do make this an even more apt cultural export, but I’m not sure that was intended.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopska_salad

Wow I had no idea! I did always seem suspicious that a traditional salad was so modern.

Definitely not the first or last political figure to try to make their favourite food iconic. I think the more interesting detail buried in there is that for all the nationalistic sentiment behind its promotion, it was originally a Chinese diaspora dish, even incorporating the Chinese words for noodles which are also the names of popular dishes in Malaysia/Singapore

> even incorporating the Chinese words for noodles which are also the names of popular dishes in Malaysia/Singapore

What words are those? Mainland mandarin uses 面 mian. (In this use, the character has the sense "flour"; 面 is technically short for 面条 miantiao, "flour strips". But in practice it's always 面, never 面条.)

I see the article says this:

> It was originally called kway teow pad Thai – kway teow being “rice noodles”

That "teow" is a good match for 条, but I'm stumped as to the "kway".

> it was originally a Chinese diaspora dish, even incorporating the Chinese words for noodles

(sorry for the overlapped quote)

The use of Chinese words for noodles doesn't really imply that the dish was originally Chinese, similarly to how English using an Aztec word for tomatoes doesn't imply that pizza originates with the Aztecs. I know Vietnamese is riddled with words borrowed from Chinese; Thailand didn't have that level of exposure, but a foreign ingredient is pretty likely to come with a foreign name.

All I'm really saying here is that if there was an obviously indigenous noodle dish, it would be totally unsurprising if the name of that dish referred to noodles, and also unsurprising if the word for noodles was borrowed from China even though the dish wasn't. Words have a lot of staying power.

I'm taking into account the article's description of it as probably first being cooked by the Chinese diaspora as well as the linguistic borrowing. [Char] Kway Teow is a standard Chinese diaspora menu item across SE Asia (the words refer to flat rice noodles and I believe are Hokkien rather than Mandarin) although the Singaporean/Malay versions have [multiple] different approaches to spices and sauces. All food cultures overlap of course, but it's probably a less distinctively Thai dish than the curries and spicy salads (the former of which are arguably even better known to Westerners)

"Kway teow" is a common term in Singapore, which has far more Chinese than Thai influence. I would suspect the term is Hokkien or Teochew rather than Mandarin dialect.

You are talking about different thing. Noodle 面条 in Chinese is wheat noodles, not rice noodles. Kway Teow = 粿条

Thanks.

>Chinese disapora

>Mainland mandarin

Chinese diaspora in SE Asia is largely Hokkien or Cantonese speaking.

For one thing, I specifically contemplated that, as you can see in my phrasing.

For another, that point isn't relevant here. The Chinese diaspora in the US is also largely Hokkien or Cantonese speaking, but note that we got "chow mein" 炒面.

Pho is literally "rice skin" in its Chinese characters, while it looks more like Yunnan "rice threads", "rice skin" is popular in Guangdong. Not sure about its history, the wikipedia indicates some link to Chinese workers, it also does sound like "fen".

> regarded his home country as backward and was determined to remake it

There's a fine tradition of Thai leadership doing this, another notable one being Rama V, who introduced forks and spoons to replace chopsticks (which is what you should be eating your Pad Thai with if you're trying to get the authentic experience :-P)

Turkey has been through this a number of times. I suppose both Singapore and to a lesser extent Korea count too.

> which is what you should be eating your Pad Thai with if you're trying to get the authentic experience

Really? Up here in Chiang Mai, chopsticks are the primary eating tool available at most pad thai shops.

I think that is what he means

Fork and spoon throughout most of Thailand unless you are eating noodle soup. Pad thai, pad si ew, mii korat are common noodle dishes that aren't soups and it is always fork and spoon.

I can't find a reliable online source to back this up (I think I read it in Welty's "The Thai & I") but I seem to recall that Thai culture predominantly dined in the Indian style using their hand before adopting fork and spoon.

Seems plausible. Thailand borders the Confucian Sinocentric cultural complex but it was never part of it. The writing system was always based off of an Indian, Sanskrit base and the religion is the kind of heavily Hindu influenced Buddhism that prevailed across the North of the subcontinent up until the Muslim invasions.

This appears to be a new version of the word 'invented' that I haven't previously encountered.

>“He simply had this particular version of a Thai noodle that was made by his housekeeper in his kitchen and he really liked it,” Van Esterik says.

He didn't invent the dish in itself, he invented the pad Thai as a national dish.

It was chosen as a national dish by the government, which seems completely uncontroversial.

Then the Pad Thai is about as Thai as the Apple Pie is American.

More recently, I believe Thailand had been paying chefs to set up Thai restaurants overseas as a way to promote tourism. Don't have a source unfortunately, but read it recently in some news

You might have read it here on HN [0] 9 months ago

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17770707

Pad Thai was maybe the most accessible food I have eaten in Thailand while still being recognizable as Thai food.

The rest tends to be insanely hot, weird, or both, at least for westerners. Definitely worth it, but the experience can be painful.

It is understandable that they selected Pad Thai as a national dish if their plan was to build a national identity and promote tourism as well.

Scmp website has way too much fancy JavaScript making my iphone lag and not resulting in a better reading experience

It’s a bit busy and the progressive loading takes a while, but it’s far from causing my iPhone to lag. What phone are you using?

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