Pad Thai Was Invented by a Wartime Dictator

On June 24, 1939, the country of Siam officially renamed itself Thailand. The man behind the change was Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, prime minister since December 1938 and an admirer of Mussolini's brand of authoritarian nation-building. Between 1939 and 1942 his government issued twelve "Cultural Mandates" — rules on what citizens should wear, sing, salute, and call themselves. One of the lesser-known mandates concerned a national dish.

Phibun's Public Welfare Department promoted a stir-fried rice noodle dish, distributed free noodle carts, and circulated a recipe. The dish was pad thai. The campaign had two simultaneous goals. The first was practical: World War II and flooding had cut Thai rice supplies, and the government needed people to eat noodles. The second was nationalist. Phibun was running a sweeping anti-Chinese campaign, including pushing ethnic-Chinese vendors out of street food, and a "Thai" noodle dish gave the state a cultural alternative to a noodle market dominated by Chinese cooks.

The recipe was a piece of hybrid food politics. Wheat noodles, a staple of Chinese cooking, were out; rice noodles, made from a Thai grain, were in. The flavor base — tamarind, fish sauce, palm sugar, dried shrimp, peanuts — pulled from existing southern Thai and Teochew Chinese cooking but was assembled into something the government could brand as new and Thai. The name made it explicit: pad thai means "stir-fried Thai."

The campaign worked. Pad thai entered Thai daily life through subsidized carts and stayed there, and by the time it migrated onto American menus in the 1980s, its origin story had thinned to "traditional Thai noodle dish." It is traditional now. It was also, in 1940, propaganda.