Near the wok and on the dining table in Thailand you can nearly always find a bottle of fish sauce. It’s salty, smelly, and indispensable. High-quality “naam pla,” as it’s called in Thai, comes from fresh fish that are allowed to ferment for more than a year. The resulting reddish-brown brew is high in protein and lots of other good stuff.
Most Thai food wouldn’t really be Thai without fish sauce, and so by extension most Thai people wouldn’t really be Thai without it. The stuff is so essential to life here that apparently sometimes it gets used for purposes it wasn’t designed for.
A colleague at work and I found ourselves caught up recently in that most ancient of male pastimes, the trading of injury stories. I described the time when I gashed open a toe while walking around the refugee camp in flip-flops; no clean water was handy so the Cambodians suggested that I pee on it. My friend countered with a childhood tale of a bad burn; his auntie reached for the bottle of fish sauce and gave him a good squirt.
A Thai doc confirmed for me that this home remedy, while still used by some well-meaning parents, is counter-productive. Fish sauce may indeed contain all the essential amino acids required by the body for growth and regeneration, but only if consumed—not applied topically.
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