Why a Pad Thai Recipe?
Perhaps the most well-known Thai dish here in the United States is Pad Thai, or Thai-style fried noodles. This sweet-salty-sour dish is made to order from food carts all over Bangkok, where the smell of frying chicken, egg and garlic wafts down almost every soi as corner cooks peddle their wares. And every street cart has its own style, so you could eat a different Pad Thai recipe five times a day and never have the same dish twice. It’s almost impossible to stay hungry in Thailand. There is food everywhere. A little history on the dish: my Thai cooking teacher told me a story of Thai prime minister Luang Pibulsonggram decreed the Pad Thai recipe as a national Thai dish sometime during Word War II, and that the Thais hold it up as a very important recipe in their culinary history. Further research told me that Pibulsonggram popularized the dish in an effort to reduce rice consumption so there was more to export to other countries, and some sources also say that after the war, the Thai
