Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [55]
Vithi stashes the food in the backseat and heads to the campus of Chiang Mai University, where he suddenly pulls off a central avenue into a field with no discernible tracks or trails for vehicles—or pedestrians, either. Bouncing up and down over ruts and holes, he pulls the car up to a small house, which we soon discover is a caretaker’s cottage for a living outdoor cultural museum, a collection of traditional houses brought here from various parts of Thailand. A young couple greets Vithi, their boss who oversees the museum, and hauls our groceries inside. The professor, still explaining nothing, leads us through the dark over to the large terrace of a historic teak home, lighted beautifully with rice-paper lanterns, candles, and a stunning full moon. Cheryl says in awe, “Absolutely magical!” and whispers to Bill, “I feel like the governess in The King and I.”
The host seats us on woven-rag cushions on the wooden deck, elevating us an inch or two above the floor to make cross-legged sitting more comfortable for a longer period. As we marvel at the surroundings, he tells us about the house. “It belonged to a country squire, who needed a spacious terrace for entertaining, always done outside.” Pointing to the two high peaks of the roofline, he says, “Unglazed terra-cotta tiles cover the roof, but the construction employs no nails, glass, or stone. Wood pegs hold all the joints in place.”
The elaborately carved lintels, representing the genitals of a water buffalo, ward off evil, Vithi indicates. Curious, Bill raises the logical question, “What’s the correlation between gonads and goodness?” The professor ducks the details as the caretaker couple reappears with large banana leaves to serve as a table setting for us.
The pair spreads plates of food on top of the foliage and gives us, for napkins, a roll of toilet paper, also used for the same purpose in many homes and simple restaurants. Vithi demonstrates how to eat the delicious meang kum, wrapping bits of ginger, shallots, chile, toasted coconut, roasted peanuts, lime on its rind, and dried shrimp into a betel leaf, then dunking the package into tamarind sauce and downing it in one bite. He then illustrates how to roll the sticky rice into small balls, and tells us to dip them into the curry or one of the two nam priks, also used to flavor the vegetables and sausages. Always eager about food eaten with the hands, we dive in.
The chile pastes stun us with their unusual tastes, way beyond the realm of our experience even as dedicated chileheads. “Do you notice the hint of menthol in the beetle version?” Vithi asks. “That comes from the insect and adds a wonderful counterpoint in flavor.” Both nam priks go well with all the food except dessert, which features langsats, a tropical fruit unfamiliar to us that resembles a leathery yellow fig. Vithi cracks open a shell to reveal teardrop sections of fruit with a lycheelike flavor that provide a luscious, refreshing finish to the fairy-tale picnic.
An evening that starts out seeming perfunctory becomes one of the most delightful of our entire trip. Thailand can jolt you in that way, setting you up for one kind of expectation and then offering the opposite reality. Like tonight, most of our experiences end happily, but the gears can slip just as easily and abruptly into reverse.
On the way back to the hotel, Vithi drives through an enormous overnight wholesale street market, telling us, “Markets operate somewhere in the city around the clock.” He screeches to a sudden stop in the flower section, several blocks of buds, petals, long stems, and short stems in a rainbow of colors, all