Livia Gershon at JSTOR Daily:
Pad Thai is among the most popular offerings at Thai restaurants all over the world, thanks to its distinctive yet approachable sweet-sour-savory flavor profile. But as food writer and critic Alexandra Greeley writes, it started out as a deliberately nationalistic dish.
Greeley notes that it’s a bit of an odd choice for an iconic Thai food, since its cooking technique—stir-frying—and main ingredient—noodles—come from China. People arriving from China’s Guangdong province probably put together the first dishes of stir-fried noodles, meats, and vegetables served in Thailand.
It was Thailand’s authoritarian mid-twentieth-century prime minister, Plaek Phibunsongkhram, usually known as Phibun in English, who created the pad Thai phenomenon. Soon after he took office in 1938, he changed the country’s name from Siam to Thailand, meaning “land of the free.” During his time in office—all but four years from 1938 to 1957—he worked to modernize the country and create a “Thai Great Tradition” that would unify the country culturally and politically.
More here.
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