Food From Northern Laos

Stand near an open jar of pla ra and you will know it before you see it. The fermented fish paste of Isan and Laos — padaek on the Lao side of the Mekong — has a smell that stops visitors mid-sentence and makes locals lean in like it is perfume. Both reactions are correct. Pla ra is the foundation flavour of an entire food culture: the salt, the depth and the soul of som tam, soups, dips and stews from Nakhon Ratchasima to Luang Prabang. Understand pla ra and the whole northeast starts to make sense. Fish, Salt, Time The method is older than the countries it feeds. Small freshwater fish — river fish, rice-field fish, whatever the wet season delivered — are cleaned, mixed with salt and roasted rice bran, packed into earthenware jars, and left to ferment. Months pass. A year is better. The fish dissolves into a thick, grey-brown liquid-paste with an aroma that can clear a room of unbelievers. The rice bran is not filler; it feeds the fermentation and rounds the flavour. Villages made pl...

Every region of Thailand has a hot-sour soup, and the northeast's is the least forgiving. Tom saep — the name means something like "boiled delicious," with saep being the Isan word for tasty in the way a slap is refreshing — is a clear, aggressive broth built on pork ribs or beef and its spare parts, hammered with chilli, sharpened with lime, and perfumed with the holy trinity of galangal, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaf. It looks like nothing: a pale bowl with bits in it. Then you take a spoonful. A Broth Built on Bones and Time Unlike the coconut-rich tom kha or the prawn-stock theatre of tom yum goong, tom saep starts with the animal itself. Pork spare ribs are the friendliest version; the traditional one uses beef — shin, tripe, tendon, whatever the morning market provided — simmered until the broth carries the meat's full weight. The long simmer is the point. A rushed tom saep is just hot water with ambitions. Into the pot go bruised lemongrass stalks, slices of...