where the women work for the living, are just as apt to get them ready as the women.
There is no making of bread or pie or cake or pudding—no roast, no gravies, no soups. Even vegetables are seldom cooked at home, but are prepared by others and sold in the markets or peddled about the streets. There they buy boiled sweet potatoes and green corn, and stewed fruits and curries, and roasted fish, and nuts and peanuts and bananas, sliced pineapple, melon and squash; and pickled onions and turnips are sold through the streets of Bangkok and Petchaburee just as pickled beets are in Damascus.
Curry is made of all sorts of things, but is usually a combination of meat or fish and vegetables. If you want an English name for it that all can understand you must call it a stew. The ingredients are chopped very fine or pounded in a mortar, especially the red peppers, onions and spices. The predominant flavor is red pepper, so hot and fiery that your mouth will smart and burn for half an hour after you have eaten it. Still, many of the curries are very nice, and with boiled rice furnish a good meal. But sometimes "broth of abominable things is in their vessels," as, for instance, when they make curry of rats or bats or of the meat of animals that have died of disease; and they flavor it with kapick, a sort of rotten fish of which all Siamese are inordinately fond. Its chief peculiarity is that it "smells to
