Tam mak hoong (Lao papaya salad) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Tam mak hoong is an uncooked salad. Firm, unripe green papaya is shredded into thin strands and pounded in a wooden mortar with padaek—a thick sauce of fermented fish—and chili, the pounding bruising the fibers so the flavors soak in. That handwork with mortar and pestle is the heart of the dish, and it is made the same way in home kitchens and at market stalls.

Both the green papaya at its center and the chili that gives it heat came originally from the New World; until those crops crossed the ocean and took root in mainland Southeast Asia, the salad in its present form had no way of coming into being. The French envoy Simon de la Loubère, who stayed in Siam in 1687–88, wrote in his account of the kingdom (French 1691, English 1693) that the fruit the Siamese called "melons" was in fact the papaya. By the end of the seventeenth century, papaya had reached Siam. The mortar-and-pestle pounding and the culture of fermented fish sauce were long established here; when green papaya and chili arrived, the shape of this dish settled into place.

In Laos it is an everyday dish of the countryside that spread to the towns.

The origins of tam mak hoong come down to a few competing views.

One takes the Lao people as the makers of the original pounded green-papaya salad. A Thai travel poem of 1869, the Nirat Wang Bang Yi Khan, names som tam among the dishes eaten at the Bang Yi Khan palace in Bangkok, where the rulers of Vientiane had stayed. The poem does not say what the dish was made of, so it cannot be read with certainty as a green-papaya salad. The memoir of the Lao statesman Katay Don Sasorith (1958) is said to describe it as a Lao favorite in Paksé in the 1910s. Kristine Callis's study of the history of plant use in Laos (2005, North Carolina State University) writes that it is not known when papaya entered Laos, but that it had become part of Lao culture by the time of Pallegoix's visit in 1836. On this view the salad passed through Isan—home to many Lao—into Thailand, where it settled as som tam. None of these clues, though, shows directly that the dish began among the Lao.

The other view holds that the Lao tam mak hoong and the Isan Thai som tam are essentially one dish, and that which came first is undecided. Ingredients and method are shared, and Lao communities have long lived on both sides of the border. Some look to central Thailand for its beginnings. The Thai historian Sujit Wongthes suggests it arose in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century among communities of Chinese and Lao migrants there, while the food researcher Hanuman Aspler writes that som tam originated in the kingdom's Central Plains. The earliest known recipe in Thai print is said to be the som tam mamalakor in a 1929 cookbook, the Tamra Khraawp Lohk. That shows only that the dish existed by that year, not when or where it was born.

Tam mak hoong and som tam are treated as essentially the same green-papaya salad. Eaten widely across borders and peoples, it reflects less a question of who came first than a food culture that straddles Laos and Thailand together.