Songkran

Songkran is an annual festival celebrated in Thailand... over the course of three days during the traditional Thai New Year. It takes place from 13th to 15th April every year.

The first day is dedicated by the locals to cleaning their houses, and the second day is all about spending quality time with their family over a scrumptious Thai feast. The third day is spent offering food to monks after which locals and visitors take to the streets for a massive water fight. This act of dousing each other with water is traditionally to cleanse and invite good luck for the upcoming year.

One of the most popular dishes to be eaten at a Thai feast during this time is pad thai. The main ingredient in Pad Thai is rice noodles which are stir-fried. So, if you were to roughly translate Pad Thai, you’d have to say the dish is stir-fried noodles Thai style. The actual name of the dish, Kway Teow Pad Thai hints at possible Chinese origins. Kway Teow in Chinese, refers to rice noodles.

It is likely that some early version of the dish came to Thailand with settlers crossing from southern China who brought their own recipe for fried rice noodles. Certainly the cooking style, stir-frying, is Chinese, and most food historians credit the Chinese with the invention of noodles. Nevertheless, the flavors and textures are pure Thai.