Want to eat like a king? You already are, says Chef McDang
To most people, royal Thai cuisine is an object of fanciful imagination or second-hand research. To celebrity chef, teacher, writer, TV personality and royal descendant Mom Luang Sirichalerm Svasti -- better known as Chef McDang -- it was everyday grub.
And not just everyday grub for him -- everyday grub for all Thais. The nephew of Queen Rambhai Barni dismisses the practice of some Thai restaurants that claim their cuisine is made with recipes that came from the royal palace, as nothing more than marketing gimmicks.
“There is nothing grand or magical about the royal cuisine,” McDang says. “We ate the same stuff that ordinary Thais eat.”
The only differences, he says, were the quality of the ingredients and the final presentation.
Nothing would be served with bones, peels, or pits in it. For example, fried pla tu (Thai mackerel), the quintessential accompaniment to nam prik kapi (shrimp paste-based relish), would be painstakingly deboned with tweezers then reassembled to resume the original whole fish appearance. All vegetables and fruits would also be meticulously peeled and carved.
Teaching Thais about Thai cuisine
Though people’s curiosity, understandably, may be more about his privileged life and food celebrity status, the former resident of Sukhothai Palace has a greater goal to accomplish -- to educate the Thai people on their own cuisine.
A man known for his candid opinions, McDang speaks wearily about how Thai people have taken their cuisine for granted.
He says he's baffled by how “everybody is going crazy” over the recent controversy surrounding non-Thai chefs claiming a stake in the Thai cuisine market right in the heart of the kingdom.
Agreeing with some informed observers, McDang puts the blame on the apparent apathy of his compatriots, saying “Thais don’t like to go back through our history.” The straight-talking chef adds that while a few Thais actually do know the history of Thai food, “the rest of them don’t know jack shit.”
For this reason, without government support, the jaded-yet-determined McDang says he put up nearly 4 million baht of his own money to publish what he considers a long overdue comprehensive textbook on Thai cooking -- “The Principles of Thai Cookery.”
McDang’s first English-language book, it focuses not on the formative years of his life but what he believes to be the formative principles of Thai cuisine.
Click through to page 2 to read more about Chef McDang and his new book.
