MEAL TICKET. Soup up

When on holiday, some people look forward to escaping the daily grind of the grocery shop and the kitchen, while, for others, spending their time-off buying veggies or deboning ducks is a dream come true.

I’m definitely in the latter camp; I never miss going to a neighbourhood food market while on holiday, if I can help it. Full of unfamiliar sights, peculiar produce, bustle and snack possibilities, it’s a lovely way to spend a morning, even if luggage restrictions mean you can’t buy much. Scoping out stalls that are star attractions, watching regulars haggle, looking hopeful till someone offers you a taste of something and taking photos of things to Google later more than make up for it. I also like taking cooking classes while on holiday. However good you are in the kitchen, there’s always something new to learn about the cuisine and the history of a place. A shopping-cooking kind of class combines both activities: A market tour with the chef-instructor followed by a hands-on cooking session. As a bonus, you get a souvenir you can actually take back — the experience of cooking and eating something new, as well as the recipes, tips and techniques they send you off with.

A few months ago, my partner and I took a class in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the Galangal Cooking Studio. We began with an early morning visit to a small neighbourhood market, where vendors were selling bushels of mushrooms, bundles of gourd vines, dried discs of fermented soy beans, litchis, starfruit and watermelon. We went round with Opal, our sunny instructor, to survey the different kinds of oils, sauces, noodles and curry pastes, then she helped us buy finger-size ginger roots, pea aubergines, gnarly Kaffir limes and sheaves of sweet basil, holy basil and lemon basil.

Back at the cooking school, we got to work over an alarmingly animated, jumpy gas flame. For the first course, which was soup, we simmered what our instructor called a “soup bundle” of lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal in water till the room filled with their fragrance. Then we added chilli paste and prawns, stirring in sugar, lime juice and fish sauce at the end, as well as a mysteriously useless tomato.

As we finished each course, we plated it (“Beautifully,” instructed Opal) and carried it through to the dining room to eat. Two kinds of soup and salad went down easy, but were followed by larb kai chicken salad, khao suey and pad thai. Ordinarily, being invited to eat pad thai at 11 am would make me go weak in the knees, but there was so much food that I couldn’t possibly finish it all. The instructors offered to pack it up, but we contemplated spending a monsoon night bathed in the pungent waft of dried shrimp and pork khao suey, and declined.

But it was those smells I was thinking of now, and I would have happily filled my bedroom with them. January in Paris always arrives as a drizzly, grey killjoy after the hectic festivities of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, reminding you that it’s back to work on Monday, and you should step on the scales to see if eating all that Brie was really a good idea. A week of festive eating had certainly left us feeling stodgy and starchy in the soul. Contemplating our half-empty fridge, I felt distinctly uninspired. Fresh, bright flavours were called for, I thought.

As luck would have it, I was passing through the 13th arrondissement, Paris’s Chinatown. When the bus to Tang Freres, the Asian supermarket, stopped right in front of me, I knew it was a sign, and I jumped on. Getting off at the entrance and barrelling straight in, I ignored the fascinating noodle aisle, the piles of leafy vegetables, the dragon fruit and the lacquered ducks, and made straight for the ingredients I had listed on my hand. What the household really needed for a January reset, I considered, was soup. Tom yum goong , to be precise — that complex, spicy wallop of a soup. As a bonus, it’s quick and essentially idiot-proof.

I went home and simmered the Kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal in shrimp stock, then added the chillies, chilli paste and oyster mushrooms. I turned down the heat to gently poach the prawns, then went to look up the cooking school’s instructions for the sugar, lime juice and fish sauce and the garnish of spring onions and coriander.

Soup was served. It made for three big bowls of an aromatic, hot and sour prawn broth with the citrus herbiness of lemongrass and the peppery bite of galangal. A limey, spicy heat spread through us, buoyed by the savouriness of the shrimp.

You can never really recreate a dish from your holiday; things taste different in different places, different kitchens and under different hands. But what you taste while travelling stays with you, expanding your repertoire and your waistline, and, sometimes, they can even restore you to a holiday frame of mind. The tom yum soup, that hot and sour sinus-clearer, was just what we needed to face January. That, and throwing out the weighing scale.

(This is the concluding piece of Meal Ticket)

Naintara Maya Oberoi is a food writer based in Paris;

Twitter: @naintaramaya

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