the miniature fruits of the Siamese court: a stiff paste of ground mung bean, coconut milk, and sugar moulded into tiny chillies and mangosteens, painted by hand, and dipped in agar until glassy
Origin: Thailand
From the journey of Mung Bean.
Thai court confectionery has a well-documented foreign parent. Maria Guyomar de Pinha, born at Ayutthaya in the seventeenth century to a family of Japanese, Portuguese, and Bengali descent and married to the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon, is credited by Thai tradition with bringing the egg-yolk-and-sugar sweets of Portugal into the palace kitchens, and the golden confections she is said to have taught, foi thong, thong yip, and thong yot, remain the aristocratic core of the Thai dessert repertoire. Look choup belongs to the same courtly tradition and applies the same impulse to a different material. A stiff paste of ground mung bean, coconut milk, and sugar is moulded by hand into miniature fruits and vegetables, chillies, mangosteens, mangoes, aubergines, and carrots, no bigger than a thumbnail, painted with food colouring using a fine brush, and then dipped several times in a warm agar jelly which sets into a clear glassy shell. They are amongst the most labour-intensive sweets in Asia, and they are made for weddings, ordinations, and New Year, and given as formal gifts. It is precisely the same instinct that produced the marzipan fruits of Palermo and Toledo, arrived at independently and with a pulse in place of a nut, and it is the clearest case anywhere of the mung bean being valued for what it does rather than for how it tastes.
Agar is essential and gelatine will not do: agar sets at room temperature, holds firm in a warm room, and gives the hard glassy shell these sweets require, whereas gelatine stays soft and weeps. Split hulled mung beans are wanted, not whole green ones, whose skins give a speckled paste. The paste keeps three days refrigerated and is easier to model when cool, so it can be made a day ahead. Once jellied, look choup should be eaten within two days and kept in a cool place rather than a refrigerator, where condensation clouds the shell. The same mung paste, without the jelly, fills a great many Thai sweets and is close kin to the fillings used across Southeast Asia in mooncakes and hopia. Making these is genuinely slow work and is traditionally done by several people at once, which is how the palace kitchens managed it.
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