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Above: Ta daeng or red-eye shrimp paste. Photograph by Su-Mei Yyu 2008 Moments later, Juk reappeared with a big grin and two large plastic bags. Unable to contain herself, Suwanna loosened one of the rubber bands. A sultry smell of sea air and sun-baked sand immediately filled the car. Suwanna pinched off a tiny piece and offered it to me. An intensely briny
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Beginning in the sixteenth century, the accounts of travelers to this region were highly derogatory, claiming that the local inhabitants ate rotten food unfit for cooking or eating. Most notable among these critics was a Persian diplomat named Ibn Muhammad Ibrahim, who had arrived in Siam in 1666 with an entourage of cooks. He established a grand kitchen much envied by the Siamese ruler King Narai, who made frequent requests for the loan of Ibrahims cooks for his state banquets. Yet, unlike King Narai with his admiration for Persian cuisine, Muhammad Ibrahim described the Siamese and their food with contempt. A more objective foreigner was Simon de La Loubre, a French diplomat appointed by King Louis XIV to the Royal Court of Siam in 1687. Although de La Loubre spent a mere four months in the country, he kept a meticulous journal documenting the Thai peoples cultural, social, and political history. In one chapter, Concerning the Table of the Siamese, he wrote: Their sauces are plain, a little water with some spices, garlic, chilbols, or some sweet herb, as baulm. They do much esteem a liquid sauce, like mustard, which is only cray fish corrupted, because they are ill salted; they called it Capi.
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Discriminating Thai cooks buy shares of shrimp paste from villagers they have come to know, asking the maker to reserve premium pastes made at the end of the rainy season or at the beginning of the cool season. Alternatively, Thais seek out traditional markets, where they buy from vendors they have come to trust. The vendors shape the paste into large mounds, which they sell in enamel bowls; less expensive pastes are packaged in plastic containers. The color of shrimp paste varies. Pa Liams paste is brownish-burgundy, with a smooth, creamy texture. She gives it the poetic name of ta dum, black eyes, in reference to the many visible pin-sized specks in the pasteonce the eyes of the shrimp. Lesser-quality paste using more mature shrimp is often slightly pink and is called huung daeng for red tail or ta daeng for red eye. Other pastes, made from a mixture of shrimp and other microorganisms harvested from the shallow water close to shore, are dark brown in color.
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crudely written sign: Fresh shrimp paste for sale. A nearby house had a messy front yard with several metal tables, plastic basins, and earthen jars scattered about. As I stepped out of the car, the familiar smell of salted, dried fish hit me hard. I walked over to the tables. Some were caked with a dark burgundy mass over which flies buzzed in the hot, humid air. An overweight woman in her thirties came from the back of the house. Suwanna asked whether anyone was making shrimp paste. She smiled and said we were in luckher husband had just returned from harvesting shrimp. He was preparing a new batch on his boat, and she invited us to watch. We followed the woman to the side of the house, where several wooden boats were stacked neatly on top of one another. Beyond the boats flowed a tributary lined with dense mangrove forests. A deeply tanned young man wearing a floppy cloth hat and holding a bright blue, plastic pail stood inside one of the boats. I asked permission to join him. He nodded his assent with a broad smile and introduced himself as Boon. In the bottom of Boons pail was a gelatinous, light gray mass tiny shrimp, no more than ten cupfuls, a full days harvest. He sifted through the pail with his hand, picking out rocks and unwanted particles. He then slid the mass into a large plastic bag and dipped it into the tributary before hoisting it back onto the boat. After shaking the bag several times, Boon let it rest for a minute before carefully draining the water. He then transferred the shrimp back into the pail and sifted through it again. Boon repeated this process several more times until he was certain that only shrimp remained in the pail. He then poured the mass into a very fine, plastic mesh strainer, tapping it lightly against the boat to rid it of water. He scooped up a couple handfuls of coarse salt from a nearby bucket and mixed it with the shrimp, again tapping the strainer lightly against the boat until no more water dripped through the mesh. Boon explained that if he were doing this on a very hot, sunny day, the shrimp would turn pink within minutes. Now, because it was overcast and already late, he would wait until the next day to spread the mass out to dry. Lets just hope it wont rain, he said. Rain is the worst enemy, causing the drying shrimp to grow sour and rot. We stepped off the boat and walked over to one of the metal tables in the yard. Boon pinched off a piece of the dark burgundy paste I had noticed earlier. It had been drying in the sun for several days. Boon spread the paste over his fingers, showing me how smooth and uniform it was. It had taken ten kilos of fresh shrimp to make a single kilo of this exquisite paste.
I asked if I could buy some shrimp paste from him. Boon shook his head no. All of his shrimp paste had already been spoken for. Even so, business was not as good as it had been. He struggled to harvest enough of the hatch-ling shrimp to make a decent batch of paste. In recent years hundreds of hectares of forest along the bay have been clear-cut to make room for commercial shrimp farms. Pollution from waste, chemicals, and artificial feed are killing off mangroves. As a result, to harvest wild shrimp fisherman must now travel farther out into the bay, stay longer at sea, and spend more of their profits on fuel. Boon spoke wistfully. His wife comes from an old fishing family that has been making shrimp paste for more than a hundred years. But his will be the last generation to do so, he believes, since he doubts that his children can earn a living from the sea. We cant compete with factories that dont care what they use for their shrimp paste, he explained. They mix fish, different-sized small shrimp, and sometime bigger-size shrimp together. Boon walked over to a large, pinkish spread and pinched off a bit for me to see. Where the tiny shrimp he
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had prepared for his paste were invisible to the eye, here I could see specks of whitish, whole dried shrimp among the pink mass. This was the low-grade red eye. In the past, coastal Thai villagers were able to make high-quality shrimp paste because the beaches were not so congested with tourists. But increased human traffic along with more commercial fishing has damaged both the oceans ecosystem and the livelihoods of the villagers, especially those who depend on the minute shrimp that are rapidly disappearing from the local waters. Boon now has no choice but to make some lesser-quality shrimp paste. Customers want to buy our shrimp paste. We warn them that not every batch is the same, he confessed. Most customers seem not to care, but some give him money in advance to reserve whatever good paste he is able to make. Boon suggested that I try to buy paste made in Petchaburi. I immediately mentioned Pa Liam, and his face lit up. Pa Liam is our customer! She has been buying our shrimp paste for at least thirty years. In fact, her latest order could not be filled because we dont have enough to sell. Boon explained that Pa Liams family, like many others, no longer makes their own shrimp paste. Elderly Thais do not want to go out to sea to harvest shrimp. Boon will do it as long as he can. He looks forward to going out on the water, hugging the mangroves and hoping for a good harvest. Making shrimp paste gives him freedom and the pleasure of being alone, something he will miss when the ocean can no longer provide a decent catch for shrimp paste. Boon believes that this ancient tradition and way of life will disappear with his generation. Savor the taste of the good shrimp paste you have, he told me before Suwanna and I left. One of these days it will be no more than a dream.
notes
1. Simon de La Loubre, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (London: F.L. for Tho. Horne at the Royal Exchange, Francis Saunders at the New England, and Tho. Bennet at the HalfMoon in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1693), 3536.
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