Fish and Seafood

Appears in
The Original Thai Cookbook
The Original Thai Cookbook

By Jennifer Brennan

Published 1981

  • About

In the swift stream

You washed the fish,

Rubbed them with ocean salt.

Noto

The Gulf of Siam is enclosed on three sides by the sprawling coastline of Thailand. Rarely more than fifty meters deep, this warm, rich sea teems with plankton, which provide food for the vast abundance of fish, both variety and quantity.

The arteries of Thailand are inland waterways, nearly two thousand miles of superb fishing. If all this plentitude were not enough, fish are found in every flooded rice paddy, swamp, ditch, canal and pond. Bangkok itself is a spider’s web of canals or klongs and, being at sea level or slightly lower, the city floods during the rainy season when the tides are high. The quiet, little soi, or lane, where we lived would become a rushing river six inches deep when the rains came; with the flood would come the fish, wiggling down the roadbed and playing tag with the vehicles.