Mainland Southeast Asia · Volume 41, The Coconut and the Court

Massaman

Name: Massaman
Total time: 3 h
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: Angkor and Ayutthaya
Ingredients: 1kg beef flank, or another collagen rich cut; 200g massaman curry paste; 6 cardamom pods, toasted; 600g sweet potato, peeled and chunked; 200g onion, quartered; 80g roasted peanuts, skinned; 1.5 cups thick coconut cream; 5 cups thin coconut milk; 100g tamarind liquid; 200g palm sugar; 1 tbsp fish sauce

Thailand

Massaman, slow braised beef with sweet potato and peanuts in a deep spiced curry: a wide bowl of a deep reddish brown curry, tender cubes of dark braised beef and soft golden sweet potato chunks visible beneath its rich surface.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 3 hours

Researched: 8 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

The name derives from Persian musalman, Muslim. The trade origin is plausible and widely believed rather than documented from a named period source; what is textually certain is King Rama II's poem, 1809 to 1824, which names massaman directly as the jewel of curries. Thai Muslim communities themselves reportedly call this style of curry salamat rather than massaman, and their version runs saltier and richer than the sweetened style now most associated with Thailand internationally, itself already a step removed from the tradition it draws on.

by Thailand

Ayutthaya's own contact with European and Persian trade runs deeper and earlier, and deserves the same care in separating what is well evidenced from what is merely plausible. The kingdom traded documented relationships with China, Vietnam, India, Japan, Persia, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England and France. The Portuguese thread is earliest and best attested as a military and diplomatic relationship, Portuguese mercenaries serving in King Naresuan's personal guard after Afonso de Albuquerque's 1511 capture of Malacca, but this research could not confirm a specific culinary transfer traceable to that early contact. What it found instead is better, because it is genuinely dated and named. Maria Guyomar de Pinha, known in Thai as Thao Thong Kip Ma, of mixed Japanese, Bengali and Portuguese descent, headed the royal dessert kitchen at the Ayutthayan court under King Narai and King Phetracha, and is credited with introducing and adapting a family of Portuguese derived egg and sugar sweets into what are now treated as canonically Thai desserts: thong yip, thong yod, foi thong, the golden egg threads close kin to Portugal's own fios de ovos, thong prong, thong muan, sangkhaya coconut custard and several others. This is exactly the kind of dish this volume's own animating idea would predict handled honestly rather than absorbed silently, a specifically dated, specifically named, genuinely foreign transfer that became, and remains, thoroughly and unambiguously Thai in practice, and the chapter names her directly rather than gesturing vaguely at Portuguese influence. The Persian thread, by contrast, is real but thin for food specifically: strong for Ayutthayan court dress under King Narai, and the specific, widely repeated claim that massaman curry entered Thai cooking directly via seventeenth century Persian and Indian Muslim merchant contact rests on inference from the trade relationship's existence and the dish's own Persian derived name, musalman, meaning Muslim, not on a named period source describing the dish itself.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 3 hours.

Ingredients

1kg beef flank, or another collagen rich cut
200g massaman curry paste
6 cardamom pods, toasted
600g sweet potato, peeled and chunked
200g onion, quartered
80g roasted peanuts, skinned
1.5 cups thick coconut cream
5 cups thin coconut milk
100g tamarind liquid
200g palm sugar
1 tbsp fish sauce

Method

Heat the coconut cream alone until it splits and the oil rises. See Rung 2.
Fry the massaman paste in the separated fat with the toasted cardamom until fragrant.
Add the beef and coat thoroughly.
Add the thin coconut milk and simmer slowly until the beef is tender, around 2 hours.
Add the sweet potato, onion and peanuts, and simmer until the potato is tender.
Season with tamarind, palm sugar and fish sauce, balancing to a rich, only gently sweet finish.

What a modern chef changes

The long braise, and the paste's own South Asian ancestry, both taken seriously.

Rung 2

Method

Consider a low, long braise in a Big Green Egg run at a stable indirect temperature for the beef stage specifically, closer to the slow, patient cooking the dish's own long history suggests than a rushed stovetop simmer.
Toast and grind the whole warm spices, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, fresh in the dedicated spice grinder, rather than relying on a shop bought paste's pre-ground spice, the clearest single improvement available for this dish's South Asian register.
Season toward the saltier, richer Thai Muslim style rather than the sweetened mainstream version, and say so, giving the reader the choice rather than defaulting silently to the more diluted register.

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