Pla tu sathia in Samut Sakhon

I’ve been a low-key fan of the Spinners for a while now. I really do think one of the great love songs of the past century is “Do You Think I’m Falling in Love” — up there with Peter Gabriel and the boom boxes, Robert Smith with his Mary Poole, the Police and the umbrella and whatever else prompted their song. Every Gen X girl dreams of songs like that eventually written for them, but none of these songs really captures the uncertainty and vulnerability of actually falling in love, not the certainty but the gradual realization and all of the happiness but also terror that this means. I feel all of that in the Spinners song, even in the easy tempo and lovely melody and beautiful voice. To copy from Greg Kihn, “They don’t write like that anymore.”

Another song I really love — if only for the first 4 minutes — is, of course, “Rubberband Man”. It’s a song I don’t play often because, let’s face it, it lasts forever and ever and doesn’t end until you’ve given up all hope for the next song to begin. At least, I really believed that until I listened to it, again, on the way to Hua Hin where I am thinking of living for 50 percent of the time, but that’s neither here nor there and not a story for this post. I realized, finally, after hearing it for so many times, that the latter half of the song is a series of variations on a theme, a “jam”, as it were, the band jamming until the song has reached its natural end, playing just like the Rubberband Man himself. Sometimes a couple of the variations sound similar, and sometimes there’s a big twist, but the theme is still there, even if what you hear is a little different.

The Thai “tom” — always spelling “tom” in English even if it’s really “thom” — is one of Thailand’s best known yet simultaneously underrated categories of food. It’s also one of Thailand’s oldest. Everyone knows “tom yum goong”, or thinks they know it, even when the broth is muddied up with some kind of milk and it tastes like sweet-and-sour cream. Chef Andy Ricker once called it a “cliché”, but it’s only a cliché because it’s so good (when it’s a clear broth) that everyone knows it, just like “London Calling” was a good song until everyone used it when the characters — even the freaking “Friends” crew — went to London because no one has any imagination or creativity (though what other song could be used for London? “Solsbury Hill”? And everyone agrees the Paris equivalent is “Ça Plane Pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand, yes? What would you use instead? “Do You Hear the People Sing?”)

There are many other “toms” besides tom yum, an entire family tree of “toms” that precede and follow it. There’s its close sibling, the night market standard “tom leng”, made up cleverly of the cheapest butcher’s cut there is, the pork or beef spine, boiled with a boatload of chilies that pile up on the bone so that it looks like the diner is the world’s bravest caveman when you take a picture (because that’s the whole point of this dish, the picture). Then there’s arguably the one more famous than “tom yum”, the “tom kha”, named after galangal but based on a coconut milk broth and usually featuring chicken. It’s the Taylor Swift of Thai soups, perfectly fine, one supposes. And finally there’s what some believe is the “big daddy” of “toms”, “tom kloang”, a true Central Thai creature sweetened with tamarind juice and fresh tamarind leaves, which might be analogous to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, if a soup could sing gospel and play electric guitar at the same time.

Among all of those “toms” (and there are many others), one is “tom khem”, which roughly translates to “salty soup”. Unlike some of the others, this one is Chinese-inspired, with lots of soy sauce and palm sugar but without the star anise and cloves used in a Chinese-style “pullo”, spices that some Thais find to be smelly. Just like its cousins, it is frequently served as a soup, but there are times when it’s allowed to reduce down to almost nothing, making whatever’s in the pot the main player all on its lonesome. That’s the idea behind the dish “pla tu tom khem”, or “Thai mackerel in salty soup”: sometimes served as a soup, but just as often served as a fish dish after all the broth has been lost to the ether, probably because the cook was off listening to the entirety of “Rubberband Man”.

Samut Sakhon (and neighbor Samut Songkhram, really) are all about Thai seafood; after all, they are home to most of the seafood markets that supply Bangkok eateries. That’s why, when you go to these provinces, you want to try a truly Thai seafood — pla tu, Thai mackerel, a sea fish that, like Thais themselves, likes to play with boundaries. In pla tu’s case, it’s in the brackish water at the mouth of the river where pla tu thrive, somewhere neither truly sea but not river either.

At Khun Toom Restaurant in Samut Sakhon near Mahachai Market, the pla tu is served in a “sathia”, the local word for “tom khem”, piled over an inky pool of soy sauce and confit garlic and garlanded with a fresh tangle of coriander leaves. It’s not cooked for so long that the bones melt into the flesh; unlike aristocratic Thai families, the cooks here don’t have time for that (maybe if they listened to Jethro Tull? But who would wish this fate on anyone?). But if you are willing to spend the time and enjoy a bit of a challenge, the pla tu pile makes for a nice early dinner with a plate of rice, especially these days when it’s constantly raining and it feels like the world is about to end.

Khun Tum isn’t just known for its Thai mackerel. Their most famous dish is, of course, crab: either simply steamed, with an abundance of orange roe obscenely spilling out onto the plate, or already picked and stir-fried with green peppercorns, torn makrut lime leaves and sneaky smashed green bird’s eye chilies.

There are a ton of restaurants just like Khun Tum in Samut Sakhon (and Samut Songkhram), all variations on a delicious theme. Like “Rubberband Man”, there are different (again, delicious) variations that set them apart from the others; the sweet-and-sour “tom som” with deep-sea pomfret at Jay Meaw in Samut Songkhram comes to mind, as does the “pla tu tom madan” (Thai mackerel soup with sour cucumber) at Khun Ja Restaurant. Of course, if you don’t like the theme (that would be seafood), the variations would be very tedious indeed. But if you are a fan, why not clear some time out from your schedule and give it a whirl?

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