Northern Thai young jackfruit curry: jackfruit and pork ribs simmered in a broth of dried-chilli paste with tomatoes and cha-om or wild betel leaves, cooked for the new year and for weddings
Origin: Chiang Mai & Northern Thailand
From the journey of Jackfruit.
Kaeng khanun is the young jackfruit curry of northern Thailand, the old kingdom of Lanna. It is a brothy curry made without coconut milk, in the northern manner: the jackfruit and pork ribs or belly are simmered in a broth seasoned with a paste of dried chillies, garlic, shallots, and shrimp paste or thua nao, the fermented soya bean of the north, and finished with tomatoes and the leaves of cha-om, climbing wattle, or bai chaphlu, wild betel. It is eaten with sticky rice. The name carries a blessing. Khanun plays on nun, to support, and the curry is cooked at the traditional new year and for weddings for the luck of its name. The jackfruit was in the Thai kingdoms long before the first Europeans described it there. Nicolas Gervaise, a French missionary, called the jack tree 'un bel arbre fort haut', a fine and very tall tree, in the natural history of Siam that he published in 1688, and Simon de La Loubère, Louis XIV's envoy to Ayutthaya in 1687 and 1688, described its fruit as shaped like a large, badly rounded melon, with a grey skin worked like shagreen. The Thai name itself is taken by the linguist Roger Blench to be the Malay nangka, turned about.
Thua nao, the fermented soya bean of the north, gives an earthier curry than shrimp paste; many northern cooks use both. In the north the same young jackfruit is also boiled and pounded with chilli paste and pork as tam khanun.
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