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fading feast | su-mei yu

A Lamentation for Shrimp Pastefrom Gastronomica 9:3

I have been cooking with shrimp paste for decades. But it wasn’t until two years ago, on a visit to

Thailand, that I was able to see for myself just how elaborate the process of making it is. I happened

to be with my friend Suwanna and her nephew Juk in a neighborhood where one of the best shrimp

pastes in Thailand is sold. But the hour was late, and the normally bustling street was quiet; the

shop house itself was completely dark. But that didn’t daunt Juk. He jumped out of the car and

began rattling the shop house door. Soon a chorus of dogs was barking, and a shaft of light streamed

out through the metal bars. A shadowy figure slid the door open just wide enough for the slender

young man to slip through.

As we waited outside, Suwanna told me about the old woman who sold this famous shrimp paste.

She called her Pa (Aunt) Liam. Once renowned for her beauty, Pa Liam married a rich man who

turned out to be alcoholic and abusive. As a child Suwanna frequently saw Pa Liam with her face

black and blue and swollen. Some thirty years ago, Pa Liam’s husband suddenly died, and it was

then that Pa Liam was free to live her life. Today, she is known near and far for the excellent shrimp

paste she sells. “Wait until you taste it,” Suwanna said.

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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flavor flooded my mouth.

Shrimp Paste in History

Back home in San Diego, whenever I used a bit of this special shrimp paste, Pa Liam’s story tugged

at my heart, and each whiff increased my obsession with this ancient ingredient. As far back as the

eighth century, inhabitants of the coastal cities of Pattani and Nakhon Si Thammarat, located in

today’s southern Thailand but then ruled by the Malay Kingdom of Srivijaya, used shrimp paste in

their cooking. They shared this practice with people from other coastal nations in South and

Southeast Asia, including southeastern India, the Chinese province of Hainan, and the regions now

known as Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. These communities

harvested newly hatched shrimp, salted them, and spread them out on bamboo mats to dry in the

sun. Sun-dried paste could be preserved for months, if not years, making it an ideal cooking

ingredient for the tropics, where most fresh items spoil quickly in the heat.

Unlike their coastal neighbors, the medieval forebears of the Siamese pioneered a cooking paste

made from river fish rather than shrimp. These inlanders migrated from China to present-day

Thailand, settling on land close to rivers. Until the time of the first Siam kingdom (the Sukhothai

Kingdom established in 1238), they, along with their Laotian neighbors, employed a process similar

to that used for making shrimp paste elsewhere. They combined tiny, fresh river fish called kaphot

with roasted rice grains and salt and placed the mixture in large earthen jars to sit in the sun for

many months, even up to a year. The fish decomposed into a mushy substance known as pla (fish)

dnay (pickled)—fermented fish paste. After King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai occupied Pattani in

the fourteenth century, shrimp paste (kapi) became available, although it was reserved mainly for

aristocrats. Ordinary people continued to cook with fermented fish paste or fish sauce (nam pla).

Shrimp paste remained a rare and precious seasoning, and cooks from noble households used it to

create a new culinary repertoire.

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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 Ibrahim’s 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 Loubère, a French diplomat appointed by King Louis

XIV to the Royal Court of Siam in 1687. Although de La Loubère spent a mere four months in the

country, he kept a meticulous journal documenting the Thai people’s 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

Liam’s 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 paste—once 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.

Making the Paste

Suwanna had arranged for us to meet Pa Liam in the town of Phetchaburi the next day. Finally I

would learn how to make shrimp paste! As we approached, the dogs began to bark. An elderly

woman in a thin, white, cotton blouse and a sarong came slowly forward, pushing an office chair on

rollers. She peered through the bars and squeezed her eyes shut, temporarily disoriented by the

bright sun. Shielding her eyes with one hand, with the other she gathered loose strands of snowy

white hair into a haphazard bun. When she opened her eyes and saw Suwanna, a smile spread over

her face. She undid the large lock and loosened a heavy chain that held the door panels together. As

Pa Liam pushed the door open, the barking dogs raced out into the street.

With Suwanna as go-between, Pa Liam spoke easily about her life. She was born in Ban Bang

Taboon, a fishing village about ten kilometers from Phetchaburi. Her uncle occasionally fished for

freshly hatched shrimp, which he would salt and set out to dry in the sun. I asked Pa Liam if she

had learned how to make shrimp paste from her uncle. She laughed and said, “I don’t make it. I just

sell it.” Her answer disappointed me terribly—I had wanted to learn the process. But Pa Liam

continued her story. After getting married, she moved to Phetchaburi. Following the tradition of

Thai women, she decided to earn her own income even though she had married a rich man. She

opened a shop selling rice grown by local farmers. Whenever she visited her family, she would bring

back shrimp paste for her own use. Years later, when her daughters came home from university in

Bangkok to visit, she would give them shrimp paste to take back. They in turn shared the paste

with their friends, who begged for more. And so Pa Liam began to sell it commercially.

Pa Liam continued to reminisce until a couple of middle-aged women arrived, at which point

Suwanna abruptly got up, thanked Pa Liam for her time, and nudged me toward the door. Pa Liam

suddenly grew agitated. She grabbed a cane and tried to stand up. As Suwanna hurried me out the

door, I cried, “But where can I learn to make shrimp paste?” “Ban Bang Taboon,” Pa Liam repeated,

naming the village of her birth several times. “Just go to Ban Bang Taboon, and you’ll find plenty

of kapi makers.”

As we drove away, Suwanna apologized for our sudden departure. One of the women who had

entered the room was Pa Liam’s eldest daughter, an old schoolmate of hers. The daughter suffered

from mental illness, and Suwanna was occasionally a target of her violent fits; she didn’t want to

take that chance today. “Poor Pa Liam, her life is plagued with sadness and disappointment,” she

lamented. “As for you, we will look for shrimp-paste makers in Ban Bang Taboon.”

And so Suwanna and I journeyed to Pa Liam’s coastal village. We passed through green rice fields,

groves of tall sugar palms, and salt flats before driving into a sleepy town with modest shop houses

sandwiched in between weather-beaten wooden shacks thatched with palm fronds. On one side of a

dusty street a couple of immense homes stood fortified by thick brick walls, as if mistakenly

transplanted from a California suburb. In the wide gravel driveway of one house leaned a large,

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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 luck—her 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 Boon’s pail was a gelatinous, light gray mass—

tiny shrimp, no more than ten cupfuls, a full day’s 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. “Let’s

just hope it won’t 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 can’t compete with factories that don’t 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 ocean’s 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 don’t have enough to sell.”

Boon explained that Pa Liam’s 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 Loubère, 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 Half-

Moon in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1693), 35–36.

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