How I Started Cooking Thai Food

In the What's Cooking thread I told the story of how I got into Chinese cooking. Here's how I got into Thai cooking.

In the 1980s we at Digital Equipment Corporation's Central Software Engineering facility in Nashua NH were joined by several of our colleagues from DEC's office in Reading, England. Among them was Colonel Ian Philpott. He was fond of Thai cooking and some of us engineers frequented an excellent Thai restaurant in Nashua called Bangkok Oriental Cuisine that served Thai and Laotian cuisine. The proprietor was Mowl Wolfe, who was from Bangkok. The chef was Muoi Khuntilanont. At first I didn't like Thai food very much because of the fishy character imparted by fish sauce and shrimp paste. But eventually I acquired a taste for it just as I had with oyster sauce in Chinese dishes.

Hot and spicy items on BOC's menu had one, two, or three flames next to them. There were two three-flame dishes. One of them was the beef salad called larb nur. I usually stuck to the two-flame dishes but one day I ordered larb nur and asked Mowl Wolfe to make it as it would be made in Thailand, no compromises for Western palates. She asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that. I said yes and she said that the dish comes with a soup and that should help if it's too hot. I knew I was in trouble when the soup arrived with a red bird's eye chile floating in it. The dish was blazingly hot and Mowl Wolfe just smiled at my beet-red face and the sweat streaming down my forehead. She told me that in her village growing up the women used to sit under a tree and eat bird's eye chiles from a bowl as though they were potato chips.

Ian Philpott fell in love with Muoi Khuntilanont, they got married, and after Ian retired from DEC they moved to Thailand. Col. Philpott resurfaced on the Usenet newsgroup rec.food.recipes where he published recipes for many of his wife's dishes. You can find most of them here.

And so I added Thai cooking to my repertoire.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Another great story, complete with happy endings.

I had not had much Thai food, certainly nothing even close to authentic, when we moved to Anchorage, Alaska, but there was a restaurant there we loved. It was called the BANG KOCK, an unfortunate situation involving misspelling and a miscalculation on the part of whoever ordered the signage: eight separate roof-mounted large letters in two groups of four necessitated by a bump in the roofline that had not been taken into consideration when designed. Locals tended to pronounce the name with emphasis on the second syllable.

Thanks for story (and link to recipe page)
Was the larb nur a minced meat salad like the larb/laab we're used to? I don't think of that as one of the spicier Thai dishes (it has chiles, but not usually truly fiery in my experience).
I'm a little wary of most US Thai places- too much sugar, not enough heat- but love going to Sripraphai and other authentic places.

Yes, the larb nur was minced beef. In fact, raw minced beef, sort of a Thai version of steak tartare.

-Paul W.

It was called the BANG KOCK, an unfortunate situation involving misspelling and a miscalculation on the part of whoever ordered the signage: eight separate roof-mounted large letters in two groups of four necessitated by a bump in the roofline that had not been taken into consideration when designed.

Mowl Wolfe told me that when she first opened Bangkok Oriental Cuisine she had trouble keeping a straight face whenever someone ordered a Coke. Apparently "Coke" sounds almost exactly like a Thai slang word for female pubic hair.

-Paul W.

In the What's Cooking thread I told the story of how I got into Chinese cooking. Here's how I got into Thai cooking.

In the 1980s we at Digital Equipment Corporation's Central Software Engineering facility in Nashua NH were joined by several of our colleagues from DEC's office in Reading, England. Among them was Colonel Ian Philpott. He was fond of Thai cooking and some of us engineers frequented an excellent Thai restaurant in Nashua called Bangkok Oriental Cuisine that served Thai and Laotian cuisine. The proprietor was Mowl Wolfe, who was from Bangkok. The chef was Muoi Khuntilanont. At first I didn't like Thai food very much because of the fishy character imparted by fish sauce and shrimp paste. But eventually I acquired a taste for it just as I had with oyster sauce in Chinese dishes.

Hot and spicy items on BOK's menu had one, two, or three flames next to them. There were two three-flame dishes. One of them was the beef salad called larb nur. I usually stuck to the two-flame dishes but one day I ordered larb nur and asked Mowl Wolfe to make it as it would be made in Thailand, no compromises for Western palates. She asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that. I said yes and she said that the dish comes with a soup and that should help if it's too hot. I knew I was in trouble when the soup arrived with a red bird's eye chile floating in it. The dish was blazingly hot and Mowl Wolfe just smiled at my beet-red face and the sweat streaming down my forehead. She told me that in her village growing up the women used to sit under a tree and eat bird's eye chiles from a bowl as though they were potato chips.

Ian Philpott fell in love with Muoi Khuntilanont, they got married, and after Ian retired from DEC they moved to Thailand. Col. Philpott resurfaced on the Usenet newsgroup rec.food.recipes where he published recipes for many of his wife's dishes. You can find most of them here.

And so I added Thai cooking to my repertoire.

-Paul W.

Great story, Paul. Apropos of nothing, I hadn't realized that you were a DEC employee. I cut my teeth on DEC equipment: DECSystem-10 (KA model), VAX 11/780, then several different microVAXen. I still have a copy of "VMS Internals" sitting on my office bookshelf, and I have enduring fond memories of assembly language programming on the DEC-10, learning the timing of all the different NOP functions (fastest on KA was JFCL, whereas KI was JRST if memory serves). It wasn't until years later that I realized that the DEC-10 instruction set was an early example of RISC computing. Ahh, the memories...

I would say rather that the PDP-10 instruction set was one of the last examples of old-school 2nd generation computer instruction set designs. In the vacuum tube and discrete transistor days there was no microcode and you couldn't waste circuitry on decoding and executing complicated instructions. Everything had to be done on a load-operate-store basis. RISC represented a return to that philosophy. We in the compiler development group found RISC a mixed blessing. On the one hand you didn't have to figure out which complex instruction to use. On the other hand you had to do a better job at optimizing the instruction stream to get decent performance. We joked that RISC meant "Relegate Important Stuff to the Compiler".

-Paul W.

"Relegate Important Stuff to the Compiler"...

...which will do a better job than the human, anyway.

I would say rather that the PDP-10 instruction set was one of the last examples of old-school 2nd generation computer instruction set designs. In the vacuum tube and discrete transistor days there was no microcode and you couldn't waste circuitry on decoding and executing complicated instructions. Everything had to be done on a load-operate-store basis. RISC represented a return to that philosophy. We in the compiler development group found RISC a mixed blessing. On the one hand you didn't have to figure out which complex instruction to use. On the other hand you had to do a better job at optimizing the instruction stream to get decent performance. We joked that RISC meant "Relegate Important Stuff to the Compiler".

-Paul W.

I see your point. True enough. FWIW, the most mind-bending example of assembly language coding I've ever encountered was the RIM-10b bootstrap loader. Self-modifying code and a finite-state machine FTW!