One night recently I had a sudden urge of a Somtum, Thai-style papaya salad. When I’m in San Francisco, it’s easy enough to just zip down to Clement street for unripe green papaya, the main ingredient for the salad. Down here in Santa Cruz, on the other hand, it’s a bit of a trek over the hill to San Jose.
Not in the mood for the drive, I had to find a suitable alternative, and an idea came to me to use French haricots verts beans in place of shredded green papaya. Well, it’s not exactly an original idea, I just had the same salad over at my friend Kit’s house a while back. She, in turn, got the idea from an old Thai cookbook called Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens. The book, which came out in the late ‘70s, was probably the first book that adapted Thai recipes for the American kitchen. Needless to say, it’s rather obsolete now, making substitution for things that are by now ubiquitous even in normal supermarkets. But I do have fond memories of trying a few recipes in that book when I first moved to the U.S. and didn’t quite know where to find ingredients I needed.
So I made the salad, using thin haricots verts from my friend Joe’s Dirty Girl farm that I just got. You can use regular green beans for this if you can’t find French beans. I don’t cook my beans because Joe’s Haricots are so young and delicate, and entirely delicious uncooked. If you want to use regular green beans, give them a try first; they might need to be blanched in boiling water to make it just a bit more tender. If you need to pre-blanche the beans, remember to shock the beans in cold ice water immediately after the quick bath in boiling water, to keep the bright green color and prevent the beans from overcooking.
