The politics of sticky rice

The official rice of Thailand — the rice that fills the bags exported to Hong Kong, the rice the prime minister eats at state dinners — is jasmine, hom-mali, fragrant long-grain.

The unofficial rice — the rice eaten daily by perhaps a third of the country, and by almost everyone in Laos — is khao niao: short-grain glutinous rice, soaked for hours, steamed in a conical bamboo basket, eaten with the right hand, pinched into a small ball to scoop curry or grilled fish.

The two rices belong to different botanical and cultural worlds. Jasmine is a non-glutinous Indica variety; sticky is a Japonica variety with a recessive waxy gene that produces almost pure amylopectin and almost no amylose. They cannot, in any practical sense, replace one another. The dishes built around each are different. The household economies that produce each are different. And the political weight of each is, still, deeply different.

How rice became hierarchy

The story Bangkok tells about itself, as a kingdom and as a state, is a story of jasmine: of cleared paddies, of reliable irrigation, of crops that ship well and store well and earn foreign exchange. The kingdom's nineteenth-century reformers decided early that long-grain non-glutinous rice was the rice of statecraft, and that sticky rice — labour-intensive, water-poor, eaten by people too remote from the capital to count politically — was the rice of subsistence.

Across the Mekong, in the kingdom that became Laos, the calculus was different. The geography would not support large-scale paddy. The people did not want it to. Sticky rice grew on the slopes, was harvested in single annual cycles, was eaten by everyone, was shared at temple festivals and weddings. Laos's national identity, to the extent that any country's identity is reducible to a grain, is a sticky-rice identity 1.

Isaan and the long quiet shift

For most of the twentieth century, Thai migrants from Isaan — the dry, eastern plateau that shares more with Laos than with Bangkok — went to the capital for work and ate rice they did not recognise. Sticky rice stayed home. When you ordered «khao» in central Thailand, the question of which rice never came up. It was assumed.

What's changed in the past twenty years is that Isaan food has gone, in stages, from invisible to fashionable to genuinely loved. Som tam — the green-papaya salad of the northeast — sits next to pad thai on every export menu. Larb, jaew, naam tok, sai oua: northeastern dishes are now the dishes the rest of Thailand wants when it wants comfort. And these dishes were never going to be eaten with jasmine. They demand sticky rice, the way certain wines demand certain bowls.

There's a soft political dimension here. The rehabilitation of Isaan cuisine is bound up with the rehabilitation of Isaan voters as a constituency, with the cultural confidence of a region that for a long time was framed by Bangkok as backward. None of this has happened by accident. None of it has anything to do with rice — and all of it has to do with rice.

What the basket teaches

The conical bamboo steamer used for khao niao — the huat — is a beautiful object. It nests over a clay pot. The rice steams over the water without touching it. The result is a grain that is firm, slightly springy, faintly sweet, with the structural integrity to be pinched and dipped without falling apart. To watch a Lao grandmother form a perfect ball of khao niao with her right hand is to watch a small piece of physics performed with utter casualness.

There are several recipes in this collection that use sticky rice — laap, naam tok, sai oua, mango sticky rice, khao tom mat — and we have written them assuming the rice itself, properly soaked and properly steamed, is something the cook will produce on the side. It is not optional. The dishes live or die on the rice they are eaten with.