Yellow Curry with Shrimp

Thirty years ago, in 1986, I experienced Thai food for the first time and the rest, as they say, is history.

My world-traveling friend, Laura Cooper, was in town between trips. As we strolled down Harvard Square’s Mt. Auburn Street (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), a Thai woman caught our attention. She had a slight build and shoulder-length jet black hair with thick bangs, which described 95% of Thai women at the time. She looked to be a bit older than us—we were all of 25.  Standing outside a restaurant, she handed us a Dendrobium orchid. My random knowledge of this particular species stemmed (no pun intended) from my brief stint in California working at a family friend’s flower stand. As it turns out, the sum total of my lifelong knowledge of flowers started and ended there: Alstroemeria, Freesia, Anthurium—impressed yet? But I digress…as I often do.

I would later nickname the Thai woman “Butterfly” because she flitted around the restaurant. I’m not sure that I ever did come to know her real name. Little did I know at the time that all Thais are given playful nicknames as babies and these nicknames are often used throughout their lives in place of their legal names, except on legal documents! Unlike American nicknames, which are usually shortened versions of one’s given name, Thai nicknames are frequently drawn from animal names (e.g., pig, crab, spider, tadpole), skin color (e.g., red, black, orange), or physical traits (e.g., fat, small, dimpled).

Laura asked me if I had ever eaten Thai food and when I told her I hadn’t, she insisted I try it. I considered myself the adventurous sort, so we ducked into the restaurant for lunch.

The tinkling of the Thai classical music, the gold-leafed décor, and the tantalizing aroma instantly seduced me. Only my tastebuds were left to be titillated.

Being the globetrotter that she was, Laura had been to Thailand and had recently visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp along the Cambodian border, which closed later that year. Based on her familiarity with Thai food—not to mention her intimate knowledge of me—I readily accepted her recommendation that I try the yellow curry with shrimp.

While we waited for our meal, she entertained me with stories of her Thai travels and launched her pitch to convince me to go there. My only foreign travel experience had been a 2-week trip to Belgium the year before. I had done so at the encouragement of my then-supervisor, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The thought of traveling alone to parts unknown was not intimidating to me for some reason, but I figured I should at least be able to place the country on a world map before buying an airplane ticket—and at the moment I wasn’t sure of the difference between Thailand and Taiwan!

The food was served in an oblong dish trimmed with a hand-painted traditional blue and white “pineapple” pattern that is ubiquitous throughout Thailand. (These days, however, the patterns are more often than not stenciled rather than hand-painted.) A neatly formed mound of steaming jasmine rice sat to one side of the dish, while the curry rested next to it, seeping slightly into the base of the rice mound.

The utensils provided were a fork to the left of the place setting and a tablespoon to the right. Laura explained that Thais eat with a large spoon in their right hand and use a fork in their left hand to nudge food onto the spoon. No chopstick skills required!

That yellow curry with shrimp, which would become one of my staples at the Siam Garden over the ensuing year, was simply divine. It was sweet, sour, salty, and spicy all at the same time. Bite-sized chunks of fresh onion, whole cherry tomatoes, and succulent pieces of pineapple punctuated the perfectly cooked shrimp.

I decided then and there that any country with food that tasty was a place I needed to visit!