The cuisine of Isan, the northeastern region of Thailand, covers a wide range of specialties, but the most widely celebrated of them all is the so-called trinity of Isan: grilled chicken (kai yang); a spicy salad (som tam), most commonly featuring green papaya; and cooked sticky rice (khao niao)—the triune ensemble that has won hearts and minds the world over.
In this version, the salad is made with carrots, once considered a novel cold-climate vegetable grown only in certain areas in Thailand but now a part of modern Thai cooking (papaya was foreign to Southeast Asia before it was introduced by European traders). I first tasted the salad 20 years ago at a carrot farm in the province of Phetchabun and since then have come to prefer it over the green papaya version.
