Mae Khrua Hua Pa: Siam's 1908 cookbook, its weighed recipes and lost dishes

Mae Khrua Hua Pa (แม่ครัวหัวป่าก์) is the cookbook by Lady Plean Passakornrawong (ท่านผู้หญิงเปลี่ยน ภาสกรวงศ์) that most people call the first Thai cookbook. What set it apart from kitchen knowledge passed on by eye was that most recipes are weighed, not “add enough”. This article covers where the book came from, whether it really was first, how to convert its old units to grams, and why some of its dishes have disappeared from Thai kitchens.

Who wrote it, and when it began

Lady Plean (1847-1911; some sources give 1912) was the wife of Chao Phraya Passakornrawong (Phon Bunnag), a minister under King Rama V. In her preface she says the recipes came from three places: what she remembered and cooked herself, what she asked of people who knew the old texts, and what she adapted from foreign cookbooks.

The book did not appear all at once. It began as a food column in a periodical, and here the sources disagree on the date.

• English Wikipedia says the recipes first appeared as journal articles from 1888.
• An article in the Thai history magazine Silpa Wattanatham says the column, called Paka Wicha, ran in the periodical Pratithin Bat Lae Chotmaihet, sold from 1889 (B.E. 2432), for six issues, the life of that magazine.

The book itself is clearer. For her 61st birthday and 40th wedding anniversary, on 4 May 1908 (R.S. 127), she printed the collected recipes as a keepsake in 400 copies. Demand was such that it was reissued in 1908-09 as a five-volume set.

Was it really the first?

“First Thai cookbook” has stuck to Mae Khrua Hua Pa for a long time, but another book was printed earlier.

	Tamra Kap Khao	Mae Khrua Hua Pa
Author	Mom Som Jeen Rachanupraphan	Lady Plean Passakornrawong
Printed	R.S. 109 (1890) per a Thai academic study; R.S. 107 per a Siamese recipe archive	Book in 1908 (column from 1888-89)
Size	66-page pamphlet, 1,000 copies	Five volumes
Organisation	Recipes in the order written, no chapters	Five volumes of eight chapters each
Measures	Published index gives steps, no quantities	A whole chapter on weights and measures

A study on ThaiJo of Tamra Kap Khao says that book “was acknowledged as the first Thai cookbook”. The other side counts Mae Khrua Hua Pa because it is systematic and far more widely read. So the answer depends on what you count. Printed first: Tamra Kap Khao. First complete, influential system: Mae Khrua Hua Pa.

What is inside

Lady Plean planned something bigger than she finished. She meant to divide the work into four parts: Thai dishes, foreign dishes, drinks, and household management including family remedies. Only the first part, Thai dishes, was ever printed, in five volumes.

Each volume has eight chapters. Chapters 2 to 8 repeat in every volume: rice, curries, plated dishes, dips and relishes, sweets, fruit and snacks (volume 5 has no chapter 8). Chapter 1 changes:

• Volume 1: food trays for monks, offerings to spirits and teachers
• Volume 2: observations on eating
• Volume 3: weights and measures
• Volume 4: cleanliness
• Volume 5: shopping at the market

A small detail shows how well it sold. Every legitimate copy was stamped inside the cover with a fig-fruit seal, to stop over-printing and stolen copies being sold.

Worked example: converting kaeng sano noi to grams

Kaeng sano noi (แกงโสนน้อย), from volume 3, is a curry almost nobody knows today. Its weights are in Thai units. Use 1 baht = 15 g, 1 salueng = ¼ baht = 3.75 g, and 1 fueang = half a salueng ≈ 1.9 g.

Ingredient	In the book	In grams
Snakehead fish	32 baht	32 × 15 = 480
Fresh prawns	32 baht	480
Salak fruit	16 baht	240
Water	30 baht	450
Fried garlic	6 baht	90
Pork	5 baht	75
Lard	3 baht	45
Good fish sauce	2 baht	30
Fresh chili	1 baht	15
Coriander leaves	1 salueng 1 fueang	3.75 + 1.9 ≈ 5.6
Pepper	1 fueang	≈ 1.9

The pot comes to about 1.9 kg. Fish, prawns and pork add up to 480 + 480 + 75 = 1,035 g, more than twice the 450 g of water, so this is a curry thick with meat, not a brothy one. The 30 g of fish sauce over almost 2 kg is about 1.6%. The book adds that if it turns out too salty, you may add a little sugar. The method: fry garlic in lard, stir-fry pork, prawns and fish, add the salak, pour in the water, add fish sauce just before it boils, then finish with chili, coriander and pepper.

In an old Thai recipe, “baht” is a weight, not a price. Multiply by 15 for grams.

Fifteen grams is the value most tables use. Some sources give 15.2 g, and gold is traded at 15.16 g per baht. A difference that small does not change the dish.

Lost dishes, and why they went

Dishes in old cookbooks did not disappear for one reason.

• Tastes changed. Kaeng sano noi was popular for a time, then faded as people’s preferences moved on. Salak, which gives it its sourness, is no longer an everyday city ingredient.
• They turned into something else. Lady Plean took the seasoning set of stir-fried rice vermicelli and made khao phat mi, a fried rice with pork, prawns, sea crab, chicken, yellow tofu, fermented soybean paste and garlic chives, topped with omelette, chili and som sa citrus peel, as a dish to make at home.
• The ingredient became off-limits. Some royal dishes, such as one made from sea turtle eggs, are gone because the turtles are protected. Tamra Kap Khao uses soft-shelled turtle, bamboo rat and ground lizard, which the ThaiJo study notes are far less common today.

Massaman curry is often mentioned too. Wikipedia records Mae Khrua Hua Pa as holding the first recorded massaman recipes, but a recipe archive reading the older Tamra Kap Khao finds a massaman-type curry name there already. The safe statement is that Mae Khrua Hua Pa is among the oldest records.

Common mistakes

• Saying the name comes from cooks of Hua Pa in Sing Buri. That story spread through tourism leaflets around 1996, but “hua pa” meaning a cook appears in a court record from 1808 and in Dr Bradley’s dictionary of 1873.
• Reading “baht” as a price. It is a weight. Use the table above.
• Following old recipes to the letter. Some ingredients are protected or rare. Treat the book as historical evidence, not a reason to seek out protected animals.
• Treating every recipe as “pure tradition”. Lady Plean herself says some were adapted from foreign books, and some scholars see the format as inspired by an English household-management book. It is a picture of upper-class Bangkok cooking at one moment, not a fixed national standard.

Summary

Mae Khrua Hua Pa began as a magazine column around 1888-89, was printed as a 400-copy keepsake in 1908, and grew into a five-volume set. Its weighed recipes are easy to use today: multiply the baht by 15. “First cookbook” is open to debate, since Tamra Kap Khao was printed earlier, and the dishes that vanished did so for different reasons, from changing tastes to wildlife protection.

Sources

• Mae Khrua Hua Pa — Wikipedia
• Cooking terms in Thai cookbook: Tamra Kapkhao — ThaiJo
• Mae Khrua Hua Pa, the first Thai cookbook: “pak” means mouth (Thai) — Silpa Wattanatham
• The recipe for kaeng sano noi, a royal curry over 100 years old (Thai) — Silpa Wattanatham
• MKHP_as_is archives — Thaifoodmaster
• Thai units of measurement — Wikipedia