Nan gyi thoke Period COrigin theory CVerified

Nan gyi thoke is a noodle dish much loved in Mandalay, in Upper Burma, where it is also called Mandalay mondi. Thick, round rice noodles are boiled, topped with a little chicken curry, and tossed with oil and toasted chickpea flour, with a small bowl of broth served alongside. It is one of the Burmese mixed salads known as thoke, and it is everyday fare in small eateries and at home.

The rice behind the noodles, the chicken on top, and the chickpea flour that gives the dish its toasty savor are all native ingredients that have long been used in Myanmar.

The rice noodles themselves were already being bought and sold in Burma in the late nineteenth century. The first volume of The British Burma Gazetteer, published in 1880, describes, in its chapter on manners and customs, women vendors setting out low tables at night-time theatre performances and selling cigars, sweets, rice vermicelli and cakes. The 1921 revised edition of Judson's Burmese-English Dictionary gives separate words for "vermicelli of Burmese manufacture" and "vermicelli of Chinese manufacture", so Burmese-made rice noodles had a name of their own as a kind of food.

Neither book names nan gyi thoke. Still, buying rice noodles from vendors and eating them was already part of life in Burma by the late nineteenth century.

A certain origin legend clings to Mandalay's noodle dish. A queen of King Mindon of the Konbaung dynasty (reigned 1853-78), pregnant, is said to have craved worms. In response, villagers dressed thick rice noodles with garlic oil, and that, the tale goes, was the beginning of the noodles. It is a glossy palace anecdote, easy to tell as an origin story.

But the tale is off the mark twice over. First, what it describes is not nan gyi thoke itself but a separate dish from the Sagaing region, Khotaung mont di. Second, no independent record from the time stands behind this royal tale. The Burman, an account of Burmese life arranged by topic that J. G. Scott published in 1882 under the name Shway Yoe, shortly after Mindon's reign ended, contains no word for a salad of thick rice noodles. The book does not set out to list individual dishes, so its silence alone proves little. Even so, the palace story cannot be taken as evidence of how the dish came to be.

So when, and by whose hand, did nan gyi thoke arise? No primary source recording the dish's first appearance has been found. One description that names the dish and sets out how it is made is the headnote to a recipe in Naomi Duguid's cookbook Burma: Rivers of Flavor (2012). It calls the dish a Mandalay classic and has the noodles topped with a little chicken curry and tossed with toasted chickpea flour and oil, but says nothing about when or how it came about. English Wikipedia states that the noodle salad "originated as a street food from Mandalay", citing MiMi Aye's cookbook Mandalay (2019) without a page number, and says nothing of when that was.

This is as far as the record goes. Rice noodles were sold by vendors in Burma in the late nineteenth century, but no record has yet been found of when this particular dish, the noodles dressed with chicken curry and chickpea flour, became a Mandalay specialty. The palace legend turned out to belong to another dish, with nothing from its own time behind it. Where nan gyi thoke truly began is still unknown.