Pad thai Period COrigin theory CVerified

Pad thai is a Thai street-stall dish: rice noodles stir-fried in a wok and brought together with the sourness of tamarind and the salt of fish sauce. It is sold along the street as everyday food for ordinary people.

It reached its present form somewhere between the 1940s, when the government urged people to eat noodles, and the 1960s. At what point across those decades the recipe settled is still not known.

Rice noodles, and the way of stir-frying them in a wok, both came originally from China, carried to Thailand by Chinese immigrants. The name pad thai (ผัดไทย) means 'Thai-style stir-fry': it puts the word 'Thai' on a fried-noodle dish that came from China.

There is a tradition that pad thai is an old Thai dish. In the eighteenth century, during the Ayutthaya kingdom, Chinese trading merchants brought over a fried-noodle dish, and it became pad thai: so the tale goes.

The record that can be read, however, points the other way. Stir-fried rice noodles themselves came to Thailand from China centuries ago, but the dish pad thai is said to have been invented in the mid-twentieth century. The historian Chatichai Muksong points to a weekly menu in the April 1962 issue of a housewives' handbook, where 'pad thai noodles' appears, and regards it as the first mention of that name in a written cookbook. The name pad thai (ผัดไทย) means 'Thai-style stir-fry.'

So when was it born? Here two views sit side by side. One holds that it arose as a national dish under the first government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram (1938-44). In 1942, it is said, floods damaged the rice paddies of the Chao Phraya delta, and the government launched a campaign urging people to sell and eat noodles. There are also reports that, through a campaign called 'noodles are your lunch,' a pad thai recipe was sent to eateries across the country and pushcarts were handed out to street vendors. A peer-reviewed journal article and a scholarly book take the same view. The article treats pad thai as a Thai-ized version of Chinese kuaitiao and as one of the nationalist policies the Phibun government spread from the top down. The book says Phibun wanted a symbolic Thai national dish to counter the cultural influence of the country's Chinese.

The other view belongs to the historian Chatichai Muksong of Srinakharinwirot University. He points out that what the Phibun years promoted was fried noodles, and that their recipe was not the same as today's pad thai. According to him, that 1962 menu lists 'pad thai noodles' for Monday lunch and 'fried noodles' separately for Thursday. He argues that pad thai emerged in the 1960s, as foreign tourists arrived in growing numbers and Thailand set out to present its 'Thainess,' as a dish expressing the identity of Thai cuisine.

The two accounts remain unsettled, and the date still floats within a span of decades. Yet both make pad thai a dish of the twentieth century. It was not an old dish handed down from the eighteenth century but a new one, shaped in the middle of the twentieth.