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Published: June 19th 2022
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Although they eat some very unusual shit in Thailand, cooking with poo is, thankfully, not literal. It's the cooking school of Poo, a lady from the Khlong Toei slum in Bangkok. Before starting her cooking school, Poo spent 14 hours a day cooking food and making live-in-a-slum money, about 200 bhat ($7usd) a day. But a bubbly personality, a pinch of escape-life-in-the-slum tenaciousness, a dollop of getting-a-business-started help from an Australian missionary, some very clever branding, a well-titled cookbook (
Cooking with Poo), and an endorsement from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver were the breadcrumbs leading her out of poverty. Despite the change in fortune, Poo didn’t move the cooking school into a shiny antiseptic space on Sukhumvit (i.e., the fancy part of town where poor people wear uniforms). Instead, she takes tourists to the ‘real’ market and into the ‘real’ slum where they can experience ‘real’ Thailand. This is business acumen brilliance: tourists will pay dearly for the mere hint of authenticity.
I found Poo because I entertain visitors. Every morning, the Poo bus ferries people from outside the five-star Emporium Suites hotel near our house to the Khlong Toei market. The ten-minute trip starts in the shadow of the Gucci
and Cartier stores and ends at the edge of the slum. Khlong Toei is the biggest wet market in Bangkok and is where most of the food on the streets and in the restaurants starts the day. In the market, there is the expected bewildering array of known and never-before-seen vegetables and tropical fruits; tables heaped with raw meat, Hannibal Lecter deboned pig heads, assorted animal feet, heads, offal and other parts shunned in cooking pots in the United States; huge silvery fish, clams, mussels, squid the length of my forearm, and 10 different sizes and shapes of prawns; live chickens, dead chickens, live eels, dead eels, live frogs, dead frogs, catfish flopping around in buckets and skewered on sticks barbequing; vats of steaming stuff, charcoal and wood smoking grills; low hanging multicolored awnings, plastic buckets, heaping baskets, metal poles at eye poke level, and the usual market mix of shoppers, sellers, local drunks, monks, cats, and guys in knee-high mucking boots pushing overloaded dollies through the narrow slippery lanes filled with yelling, jostling, boiling, frying, stewing, sweating, sloshing, swearing, stacking, slaughtering and shopping.
It is a sensory avalanche, encompassing all the sights, smells, and sounds in the spectrum
of life, death, and commerce. In other words, standard fare for cacophonous, head-on-a-swivel, assault on the senses, outdoor non-Western markets. The you’re-in-Asia fear factor aisle has baskets of insects and grubs and (first time I’ve seen this) vacuum sealed rats! Poo assures us they “are from countryside farm not city farm. Taste is like chicken.” I’ve eaten grasshoppers and crickets and grubs, and though I’d rather not eat rat, I probably have. Mystery meats on the streets of the world are not sourced from organically grass fed, antibiotic free-range, self-actualized animals. More than a few cats, rats, dogs, and insects end up in the meat grinder. Nonetheless, I’d greatly prefer bbq Mickey to the fist-sized water bugs if I had to choose.
Walking purposefully through the lanes of the market, Poo buys things briskly, loading us up with plastic bags while giving a running explanation of all the exotic foreignness and the evolving economics of the season: “Last week,” she says, “mangosteens cost 175 kilo and no good. This week 35 a kilo and see green leaves, not brown? Much better.” After the market, we drive 5 minutes deeper into Khlong Toei slum, park, walk across the train tracks,
and follow a fetid, garbagy, grey water canal that has been partially paved over and covered with ramshackle corrugated tin and wood homes. We turn off this walkway onto a narrow lane lined with two story concrete houses. The street is pleasantly shadowy and filled with potted and hanging plants, wind chimes, small marigold garlanded shrines, and clear evidence of indoor plumbing and electricity. She points out her childhood home and leads us into the house next door. A simple sign reads “Cooking with Poo.”
It is a one-room schoolhouse. Along one side of the room are a couple of tables with propane gas burners. Laminated and labelled pictures of Thai fruit cover the wall. There is a little kitchen where the ingredients are prepped by Poo co-workers and a couple of wooden tables where we sit. During class, Poo reviews ingredients, throws things into a wok, and abracadabra! a plate of vibrant redolent deliciousness appears. Wisely, the ‘cooking’ is carefully limited: ingredients are mostly prepped, but there is just enough student measuring of fish sauce, slicing of lemongrass, and mortaring and pestling of spicy green chilies and kaffir limes to convince you that you too can make delicious
Thai green curry in less than ten minutes.
While chopping, stirring and stir frying, Poo mixes in observations about how people in “my area” make these dishes with chicken feet and beaks; could never afford top sirloin and cashews; and thank you, the demo dishes are given to people in the community who don’t have enough to eat and a percentage of the school fees go to her neighbors as well. Certainly, one of the main ingredients in cooking with Poo is the message that here in the slum, in her area, people are poor but they, like her grandmother who taught her to pound the chiles in the mortar, are good and worthy of human respect. Over the next hour or so, Poo casually sprinkles this into the stir-fried rice noodles with black bean sauce, green curry with chicken and eggplant, and beef with cashew nuts. After each dish, we repair to the tables, marvel at our newfound culinary wizardry and eat. Three entrees later, we move on to the mango sticky rice course before finishing with the fruit spread. Two rows of bowls hold peeled and sliced pieces of durian, jackfruit, longan, rambutan, pineapple, mangosteen, lychee, papaya,
longkong, guava, red and white dragon fruit, pomelo, rose apple, tiny rose apple, snake fruit, santol, and one I can’t figure out. These are, like most everything else in Thailand, served with a mixture of sugar and salt. After nibbling our way from one end to the other, Poo asks us to leave a review on Tripadvisor, tells us we can buy her cookbook or an apron, thanks us more than any of us deserve, and wai’s us out the front door. Ten minutes later, we are back in front of the five-star luxury hotel; happy for having cooked with Poo.
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Siewch
Siewch
Did Poo Explain Her Nickname?
I’m curious whether Poo explained that her nickname means crab at the session you attended, or did she not explain it so as to maintain the mystery behind her business name?