Toddy palm cakes at Pad Thai

Toddy palm cakes at Pad Thai

Colony Square Shopping Center in Mount Prospect, as I've written before, is extraordinarily rich in culinary interest. On a recent day, we visited two highlights, Istanbul Market and Pad Thai restaurant.

Heavenly scents waft from the open kitchen at Pad Thai, a slightly dressed-up storefront. If you wangle the right seat at a table, or on the long wooden banquette, you can watch the staff scurrying around, stirring pots and dishing up plates of delicious food.

There's nothing too exotic on the main menu, but the food we've had was good and fresh. Don't look for a Thai-language menu with additional options -- I asked, and was told that they have few Thai customers "and it's better if everybody gets the same." The clientele seems widely multi-ethnic.

On our recent visit, we started with som tom, papaya salad, decent, but perhaps not as vibrant a version as some; crisply fried, cigarette-shaped spring rolls called "Thai baby rolls," and filled with cabbage, shredded carrot and bean threads; fairly good chicken satay, served in a ceramic boat; and an appetizer called "Thai pot," described as "grill pastry," which had to come out before we realized it was potstickers -- stuffed with vegetables, bean threads, black mushrooms and lively Thai herbs. They also offer such dishes as sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf, fish cakes and fried squid, as well as larb and several other salads.

It was hard to choose an entree, since they offer several duck dishes -- I love duck! -- including a curry; a substantial list of seafood options; and some out-of-the-ordinary noodle dishes like kao soi, here made with chicken breast. Ultimately, we decided on spicy basil beef, which had plenty of herbal flavor, and "Bangkok chicken," which turned out to be chunks of white meat in crunchy batter, lightly drizzled with sweet tamarind sauce. It was quite good -- but it occurred to me too late how much better it would have been with the addition of some chilies.

One thing that makes Pad Thai stand out a bit is a longer-than-usual dessert list, which appears to include some genuine Thai sweets rather than made-up-for-the-farang desserts.

We were intrigued enough to order one we'd never heard of: toddy palm cakes. What came out was a trio of small, round, spongy cakes, not too sweet, served hot in cute banana-leaf boats, exquisitely fragrant, though less flavorful than their scent.

I asked the owner what they were made of, and he said, unsurprisingly, "toddy palm fruit." Since I'd never heard of this either, I did a bit of research.

The toddy palm, it turns out, is also called the sugar palm, wine palm, fishtail palm or palmyra, and can be any of several species of palm tree including Caryota urens, Borassus flabellifer and Arenga pinnata). These trees grow up to 100 feet high with trunks as big as 5 feet around at the base. While growing wild from the Persian Gulf to Vietnam, they're commonly cultivated as a crop in India, Southeast Asia and Malaysia. The trees also can be seen in Hawaii and Florida.

Toddy palms get their name from their main product: the sweet sap collected from male trees. Milking the trees requires dexterity, since the juice comes from treetop shoots, typically tapped by hand by skilled climbers. Some 7 gallons of sap flow from each tree daily.

In palm-growing regions, people drink the fast-fermenting sap, or toddy (nam dtahn sod in Thailand), straight, as well as distill it to make arrack. Lime paste rubbed inside the clay collecting pots will prevent fermentation, and then the sweet toddy sap can be boiled into a crude sugar (called jaggery in Myanmar) and made into molasses, palm candy and vinegar.

Toddy palm fruits are also prized. Each female palm may bear 6 to 12 bunches of about 50 coconut-like fruits per year. The fruits, three-sided when young, grow to be rounded or oval, and about 5 inches wide with a smooth, leathery, brown shell that turns nearly black after harvest.

Mature fruits contain a solid white kernel, something like coconut meat but much harder, nested in long, tough, coarse, white fibers coated with juicy, yellow or orange pulp. These fruits are roasted and peeled, then their fresh pulp, rich in vitamins A and C, can be sucked directly from the wiry fibers. The pulp is also sun-dried and pressed into a sticky cake (called punatoo in Sri Lanka).

In young fruits, the kernels are hollow, translucent, and jelly-soft, in a sweet, watery liquid. One pierces the shells with a finger and sucks out the juice. Young fruits are also roasted and broken open for the jelly-like kernels. Left whole or sliced into rings, the kernels are canned in clear, mildly sweetened water. Small fruits may also be pickled in vinegar.

Another food source, the palm's seedlings can be peeled and eaten fresh, sun-dried, raw or cooked. They also yield starch, or sago, which may be made into gruel, with rice, herbs, chili peppers, fish or other ingredients.

I haven't tried this recipe, but it looks similar to what Pad Thai serves.

Toddy palm cake
Khanom tan

2 cups rice flour
1/2 teaspoon yeast
2 cups palm sugar
1 cup coconut cream
1 cup toddy palm pulp
2 cups coconut milk

Mix together the rice flour, yeast, sugar and coconut cream; blend for 30 minutes. Add the toddy palm meat, blend again, cover with a damp, thin cloth and expose to the sun for 2 hours. Pour into small banana leaf containers, steam in coconut milk on highest heat for 15 minutes.

Pad Thai
847/472-9000
Colony Square Shopping Center
2310 S. Elmhurst Road
Mount Prospect IL 60056

wow, thank you for an incredibly well researched post! This was really informative.

Yes thanks for a great post, I really enjoyed reading that - now I just wish I could find these items a little closer to home - anyone know of a restuarant/grocery store with these not as far away?

Interesting article from the Bangkok Post deplores the disappearance of traditional Thai foodways and fruit desserts such as toddy palm cake.

Luk tan, the fruit of the sugar palm, used to make the moist, yellow, cake-like khanom tan is also on the wane because ripe ones are available in limited quantities, and then only in season. The khanom tan itself has an old-fashioned look, and no longer seems to suit the taste of the younger generations of Thais.

All of these different types of fruit and the dishes made from them were once part of one of the world's most diverse and vibrant culinary cultures. Their gradual disappearance will diminish and impoverish our culture if nothing new and equally good comes in to replace them. But is there anything new on the dessert menu that can truly take the place of krathawn loy kaew or the classic khanom tan?