Vol. XXX · The Cuisines of the World Plate 6 of 11Southeast Asia, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, fish sauce, nam pla, nuoc mam, lime, tamarind, palm sugar, chilli, herbs, lemongrass, galangal, balance, salty sour sweet hot, nam jim, yam, sambalF

Southeast Asia.

A Thai cook tastes a dressing and adjusts it by three bottles: fish sauce, lime and sugar. Each one also changes how the other two taste.

Across mainland and island Southeast Asia, rice is the staple — sticky glutinous rice in Laos and northern Thailand (XXI.2), jasmine rice elsewhere — and fish is the protein and the seasoning. Fish sauce (nam pla, nuoc mam, patis) is anchovies fermented with salt for a year or more: about a quarter salt and rich in glutamate, it seasons like soy sauce does in China (XIV.7). Fresh pastes pounded in a mortar — chilli, garlic, shallot, lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, kaffir lime, shrimp paste — are the base of curries and sambals; herbs (Thai basil, coriander, mint, Vietnamese perilla, sawtooth coriander) are added raw by the handful at the end.

The organising idea is balance. A Thai salad dressing (yam) or dipping sauce (nam jim), a Vietnamese nuoc cham, a Malaysian sambal, all set salty fish sauce against sour lime or tamarind and sweet palm sugar, with chilli heat over the top. The tastes interact (XI.11): sugar softens sourness, salt suppresses bitterness and lifts savour, acid sharpens salt; so the cook adjusts each in small steps, tasting, until no single one dominates — "hot, sour, salty, sweet" in a single mouthful. The workshop mixes a dressing.

Below: the perceived tastes of a 500 g salad dressed with the tablespoons of fish sauce, lime juice and palm sugar you choose (fish sauce about 25 % salt and 1 % glutamate; lime 6 % citric acid; course flavour bench with taste interactions), and its balance score.

What you will learn

Know Southeast Asian staples and fish sauce.
Balance salty, sour, sweet and hot.
Make a Thai dressing and nuoc cham.
Use fresh herbs and pastes.

Workshop

Per tablespoon: fish sauce 15 mL ≈ 18 g, about 4.5 g salt and 0.18 g glutamate; lime juice 15 mL, about 0.9 g citric acid; palm sugar 12 g. Concentrations in a 500 g salad. Course flavour bench (Stevens's law, interactions); balance against a savoury target (teaching).

Salty, sour, sweet — then heat and herbs

In the flavour bench a 500 g salad with fish sauce alone scores 0.40 for balance; adding lime brings it to 0.49; a spoon of palm sugar as well, 0.63. Doubling the fish sauce drops it back to 0.44. Each addition changes the others: the sugar does not make the dressing taste sweet so much as it softens the lime's edge and rounds the salt.

Nam jim for grilled meat or a yam salad: pound 2 garlic cloves and 2–4 bird's-eye chillies with a pinch of salt; stir in 1½ tbsp fish sauce, 1½ tbsp lime juice and 1 tbsp grated palm sugar until dissolved. Taste: it should be hot, sour, salty and sweet at once; adjust by half-teaspoons. Toss with sliced grilled beef, shallots, cucumber, tomato, mint and coriander just before serving. Vietnamese nuoc cham thins the same balance with water (about 1 part fish sauce, 1 lime, 1 sugar, 3–4 water) for dipping spring rolls. Fish sauce keeps for a long time but darkens; store it cool and closed.

At the stove

Mix a dressing of fish sauce and lime only, taste it, then add palm sugar a little at a time. Note when the sourness softens.

Garum, the fermented fish sauce of ancient Rome, was made the same way as nam pla — small fish layered with salt and left in the sun for months — and traded across the empire in amphorae; it vanished from European cooking after Rome, while Southeast Asia never stopped making it.

Terms

Fish sauce: Fermented anchovy and salt: about a quarter salt, rich in glutamate.
Nam jim / nuoc cham: Thai and Vietnamese dipping sauces.
Palm sugar: Sugar from palm sap, rounder than cane sugar.
Galangal: A ginger relative, sharper and piney.

Southeast Asian cooking balances salty, sour, sweet and hot: fish sauce (about 25 % salt), lime or tamarind, palm sugar, chilli, with fresh herbs. The tastes interact: adjust in small steps, by taste.

Sources

S. S. Stevens, Psychophysics, Wiley, 1975: taste intensity grows as a power of concentration; exponents near 1.3 for sucrose and sodium chloride. The course uses teaching exponents near the published ones.
A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.