Khao Soi Period COrigin theory BVerified

Lao Khao Soi is a bowl of hand-cut rice noodles in a red sauce of tomato and minced pork, with fermented soybean served alongside. It belongs to Luang Prabang and the country around it, made in noodle shops and home kitchens — not feast food but ordinary daily fare. The rice noodles, the pork and the fermented soybean are all long-established local foods, on Lao tables from early on.

The tomato is the newcomer. A New World crop, it spread into the Old World along the sea trade and found its way into Southeast Asian kitchens. Two things meet in this bowl: rice noodles made and cut by hand, and a sauce of tomato and minced pork simmered down to a deep red.

Behind the bowl stand the caravan traders who came over the mountains from Yunnan into Laos. They probably carried more than cargo. The cooking of their own kitchens is thought to have met the rice noodles of the place and become a bowl sold in the noodle shops of Luang Prabang.

The year itself cannot be pinned down. No mention of the dish in writing has yet come to light, and the best that can be offered is a rough estimate: somewhere between the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. In Luang Prabang, shops still cut their rice noodles by hand.

The name Khao Soi is shared with the egg-noodle curry of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, but the two bowls are separate lineages. Hand-cut rice noodles under tomato and minced pork on one side, egg noodles in coconut curry on the other: they share neither their main ingredients nor their method, and no source traces them back to a common ancestor. A shared name is not shared descent. In Lao the words mean 'cut (soi) rice (khao)' and name the hand-cut noodle itself, and the closest relative is the Shan Khao Soi of Myanmar — likewise hand-cut rice noodles under a sauce of tomato and meat.

The tomato enters the written record of Southeast Asia later than one might expect. The earliest appearance so far known is on Ambon in the Moluccas, where Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense describes the Tamatte grown in garden beds and used in the kitchen; its author died in 1702. On the Vietnamese mainland the fruit is recorded in 1790, in Loureiro's Flora Cochinchinensis. In neighbouring Upper Burma it is called abundant in 1860, in Mason's Burmah. No source has yet been found that places tomatoes in the Lao interior in the mid-seventeenth century, and there is no footing on which to carry this bowl back to the middle of that century.

In the nineteenth century the caravans of the Yunnanese Muslims — the Haw, or Chin Haw — travelled to and from Yunnan, Burma, Laos and northern Thailand, and only a few of the traders settled along the way. Yunnanese Muslims are thought to have first settled in what is now northern Thailand in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That is the account of an essay in the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, written from the side of the trade. It follows the caravans and the migrants, not their food, and it does not say when they settled in Laos. The story that the bowl came from the Yunnanese is carried by food writers and encyclopedias, and it stands today as the settled account.

What stays undecided is who made it first. Migrants from Yunnan may have carried in a finished dish; or the bowl may have grown up in northern Laos under the influence of their trade, out of local rice noodles and a sauce learned along the road. No source separates the two, and both readings stand. The Yunnanese caravans came into Laos, and the bowl is told as one of theirs: that much can be said. Only the first move remains open.