Asian Ingredients: what are the cult favourites?

Are there 'prestige' Asian ingredients in your pantry?'
Are there ‘prestige’ Asian ingredients in your pantry?’

I’m looking into your pantry. I can see the boutique olive oil that you bought at the farmer’s market, the balsamic vinegar you snuck home in your luggage on your trip to Italy, and I know you grew that kale in your garden. Your salt is pink, your butter comes in a roll and your paprika is in a bright coloured tin pushed to the front of your spices. But hang on, where are your cult-favourite Asian ingredients (and I am not talking about the coconut oil)?

I rarely see must-have Asian products in people’s pantries. There seems to be a randomness in the selection of Asian ingredients for home use. When I ask people why they chose a certain type of noodle or soy sauce, they normally shrug and mumble something about the recipe. Of course it must be noted that I am not of Asian heritage, nor are most of the people of whom I ask this question. I am not coming from a home tradition that binds me to certain brands and products or even regions of production. I think the same can be said for Italian food, however, but I will wager that people can tell you a story behind the reasons they chose the Italian food in their stash. There doesn’t seem to me to be the same market for curated prestige products in the Asian ingredient sector as there is in other sectors. But why?

There are several things at play here, I think. For starters you won’t find a bottle of fish sauce in the pantry that you have stashed in your luggage to bring home after a trip. No food-stuff is worth that risk. Secondly, I acknowledge that the term ‘Asian’ covers a huge percentage of the world’s cuisine, therefore the pit of ingredient options is diverse and arguably infinite (just walk into an Asian grocer and pause for a minute to count how many countries are represented). Unless you know what you are looking for or are willing to take an adventurous risk, it can be overwhelming. The influencers, wherever they are, are not talking to me (nor to the owners of the pantries I peek in).

To be honest, I’m pretty happy about this because it means that every time I step into an Asian grocer it’s an adventure. I have my favourites all over the city – each one has its own specialty. I look for brands I recognise from my years living in Asia and I try out treasures that take my fancy. When I want to pretend that I am in a different country, I step into an Asian grocer and buy something I have never seen before. As a result my pantry is full of the favourites of my little cult-of-one. Over the next few weeks I will share with you some of my ‘discoveries’.

[Note: just like Henri Mouhot ‘discovered’ Angkor Wat, I use the term ‘discoveries’ to mean ‘find something that hundreds-of-thousands/millions of people already know about’].

Let me start with my number 1 cult favourite: Red Boat Fish Sauce.

The number 1 cult Asian ingredient (in my cult-of-one) Asian ingredient
The number 1 cult Asian ingredient (in my cult-of-one)

It ticks all the boxes:

  • Delicate, layered flavour that is gentle enough to use uncooked in a dipping sauce
  • Made on Phuy Quoc Island in Vietnam where [some of] the best fish sauce in the world is made
  • It’s a bit tricky to find
  • Has a beautiful label

So those last two points seem to be a bit vain, but you have to admit that many of the prestige products in your pantry tick those boxes too. After all, it’s not just the taste – it’s the story and the aesthetics too, isn’t it.

Please let me know about your treasures. I’d love to know what I should be looking for next.

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“It’s stinkingly, punishingly, consistently furnace-hot in Laos”

The Mekong in the dry season Luang Prabang Laos - the country is in drought
The Mekong in the dry season Luang Prabang Laos – the country is in drought.

It’s May. Laos is in drought. The view of the often swollen Mekong is obscured in places by sandbanks. Other rivers are heading towards being a trickle too. A friend in Laos just told me that it is “stinkingly, punishingly, consistently furnace-hot” at the moment – and that’s in the north. What must it be like in the south? In January the uplands were jeweled with icicles. It was so cold that buffalo were dying and people did not have enough warm clothes. Right now there are record temperatures. These extremes are dazzling.

You might be waiting for me to start ranting about climate change or even about dams on South-East Asia’s rivers. Not this time. This time my focus is micro. It’s a comment on how visceral and primal weather and climate can be when you are living a subsistence life. For families who rely on the crop their grow or the fish they harvest to feed themselves, extreme seasons mean months of hardship. In many communities, owning a buffalo is a form of savings account. It is not only an important labour saving device, but it is an asset that can be sold in hard times. When one of these animals dies from cold, a family’s savings and therefore their buffer, is wiped out with it. If a crop fails and the family has to eat their seed-rice to survive, then there is nothing to grow the next season’s crop with. To be hit with multi-seasonal severe weather events can only be eating into the resilience buffers many families have accumulated, increasing their risk if something else bad happens.

I also wonder about the effects of weather fluctuations on people who spend so much of their time living in the weather. For me, going from house, to car, to building, to shop, to car, to home, I can feel myself separated from the elements. The weather is something to check on an app and to mitigate using appliances and clothes. I am forced to think of it when I speak to my Farmer-Father who starts every conversation wanting a detailed description of any rainfall we have had, but otherwise, it is not really part of my day. What does it do to your day-to-day existence when your day is shaped by the temperature, by the way the land is affected by the rain? I wonder about what it is like to live when your activities for the day are dictated by what the weather is like.

We recently built a house. When we finally moved in, it was surrounded by sticky clay-mud. There was no gas for heating or cooking. No hot water. For a few days I remembered what it was like to visit a rural Lao village. As we peeled our muddy boots off, bathed in tepid water in the laundry trough, ate what we could cook on the barbeque and piled on the blankets and clothes at night to stay warm, I had a sliver of insight in what it’s like to be dictated to by the weather. It’s not that I have never been uncomfortable before, that I have never spent any time outside, or even that I ignore the weather (I grew up on a farm, after all). It’s just that this time I was thinking of the people in rural Laos for whom a more extreme example of this experience is a daily reality.

Photo Credit: Joy Nguenboupa

 

 

Why I lament the demise of the travel guidebook

My beloved vintage Vietnam Lonely Planet guidebooks
My beloved vintage Vietnam Lonely Planet travel guidebooks

“When we were in Bangkok we caught an Uber, found accommodation using AirBnB and booked our budget carrier flights online.” My friend counted these marvels off on her fingers.

I blinked and felt a little crack form between my memories and life as I know it. “Did you even take a guidebook?” I asked in a hushed voice.

“No way,” she said. “Just my phone.” I ordered another coffee. It was going to take more than one to process this information.

To be fair, I probably wouldn’t take a guidebook to Bangkok anymore either, but that is only because I have the Thailand Lonely Planet memorised. As for Uber, anything that takes away the conflict and tension with a taxi driver can only make the world a better place.

“So how did you know which town to go to next?” I asked. For me, travel guidebooks are not about the individual businesses that they highlight – in truth, part of the game is to actively find the place that is not in the book –  it is the fact that it provides a written map. I can enter a country at any point in the book and the next entry will be the next closest town. I can curate a chain of places to visit and then fill in the gaps with discoveries.

“I dunno,” she said. “I just did.”

I guess that planning travel using digital tools is like people who learn how to write a book using a computer rather than longhand. I learned to write using a wordprocessor and even if I write longhand, I cobble it together as though it was on a screen rather than writing using a thoughtful flow. My travel planning brain is programmed for a written guidebook rather than a pick-n-mix device, but it wasn’t this that made me feel regret for the demise of The Book. It was the impermanence of the online medium.

I have recently been trying to supplement my memories and notes about some of the travels I did in the early 2000s. Google dredged up images and facts that hydrated my memories, but I realised that rehydrated, they were a bit distorted. Google couldn’t give me the snapshot-in-time historical information that I needed. I turned to the most sentimental shelf in my bookcase – the out of date travel guides – and opened a heavy, peeling, annotated guidebook.

And there it was: the border crossing between Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and Laos was not yet open; Lai Chau was not yet submerged; the museum at Khe Sanh Combat Base was freshly minted. It was not the height of journalistic integrity to raise my old Lonely Planet my fundamental primary source, but the moment I opened it, my memories returned to their proper shape.

 

If you want to hear an interesting podcast discussion about the mind-hurting array of travel planning tools available, have a listed to this Talk Travel Asia podcast that sparked the idea for this post.

Expat Eyes vs Traveller Eyes: A new city

Gate in Hanoi's Old Quarter
Gate in Hanoi’s Old Quarter

There is a special colour and blurriness the first time you see a new city. So much is new and therefore your eyes and brain can only see it in chunks. Tourist-chunks are different to new resident-chunks. Even if your first few expat weeks are spent in a hotel or apartment along side the tourists, you are not going to see the same things.

As an expat, your memory does not feel the need to remember every detail of what it is seeing because it knows that it will be back. It knows that it is going to see those details in the daylight, the night and the rain. This means that you will probably never get around to going into that famous cathedral, but that’s not what you are thinking about when you are standing on the curb, swaying a bit with the intensity of the task ahead. You see the post office, but instead of thinking: “That’s a beautiful building. What’s the best angle for a photo,” you think: “That’s a beautiful building, there’s the front door, but I think that the door to the parcel section must be around the back there”. You don’t explore the town by getting out the guidebook and heading for the most interesting museum. You strike out to find the laundromat. The traveller and the new resident both see the knotted tangle of power-lines overhead, the little girl selling postcards and the chicken tethered to the road sign, but one stops to take a mental (or actual) photo, the other keeps looking for the laundromat.

This is how it was in Hanoi (and every town we lived in after that). When I first attempted to cross the road – to navigate the infamous surge and swirl of motorbikes and bicycles that Vietnam is so famous for, I stepped out with magnified dread thinking that this is how I am going to have to cross the road every I want to get to the other side. Forever. I was seeing the city through the crisp eyes of someone who was going to have to navigate those twisted old streets on a bicycle. By memory. Probably carrying take-away noodle soup in the basket. I was not seeing it through the eyes of someone who could escape and recover in a safe bubble.

Hanoi’s Old Quarter was a lesson in charm. Despite the noise, smells and people flowing and bumping in and out of my personal space, I was able to walk around it all day, delighted by what was around the next corner. The tradition of clustering enterprises together and naming the street after them, delighted me every time I tried to translate a sign. Whilst the swirl of colour in ‘Silk Street’ was irresistible (right up until the day I left), it was the practical things I took note of as we bumbled up and down each street on that first day. Bamboo ladders – three shops in a row. “If we need a ladder, we can get one here,” I noted to myself. We never did need one, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility that we might.

The spirits are around when you are pregnant

Monks

There is something about being pregnant that heightens your sense of spirituality, superstition and coincidence. The same protective instincts that give you the willpower to refuse soft cheese and wine, tune you into formerly unimagined threats to your unborn child. You look for signs of whether you are having a boy or a girl – you have a low belly (boy), high belly (girl). Your dreams and cravings all have special meanings (sweet food – sweet girl). Like two of my friends on their ‘babymoon’ at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, you look for a divine flash to give you insight into your new child. A little girl ran up to them clutching the souvenirs she was selling. She patted my friend’s bump.

“You have baby?”

“Yes, soon.”

“You must name it Quinn.” And like Mary hearing the angel singing that the baby’s name would be Jesus, they did.

This sense pulses when you live in a country full of people who take the spirits seriously. At seven month’s pregnant, Laos was a country where the spirits were loud and it was with more than just a sense of cultural respect and politeness that I didn’t go to the funeral of our housekeeper’s husband.

“You can’t go,” a friend said to me.

“Why not? It’s important.” This family was special to us and I wanted to show them that I cared.

“Because the spirit is too strong. His spirit is restless and looking for a home.” She waved her hand around, indicating that this ‘home’ could be anywhere but probably would be in my baby.

“Until the body has been cremated, you can’t go near it. Best if you wait until his ashes are in the Mekong and his spirit has a home in the temple.”

So I stayed home. Out aloud I did it for convention and courtesy. Rubbing my belly, I knew that I didn’t want to risk it.

When I finally went around to our housekeeper’s home to pay my respects, the dog streaked out and bit me on the leg. As I backed away and rode to the doctor for a rabies shot, I wondered whether the spirit really was settled yet. I chose the route that did not go past the temple.

Five years after leaving Laos, I sat in my car in Melbourne’s west waiting for the rain to stop. I was overdue with my third child and was deciding whether my craving for pho was overriding my caution about waddling across the wet road to the market or not. It was one of those days that never really got light, where the rain fell close and cold. Through the windscreen I saw a flash of orange and even though it was out of context, I knew exactly what it was. There is nothing quite the same colour as the saffron robes of a Lao or Thai monk, and although this was the first time I had seen them slopping through chilled rain, they were unmistakable. This little procession of monks was collecting alms, donations of food to sustain them for the day. Dawn in Luang Prabang, Laos would see streams of these men and boys shuffling down the road. The lead monk was usually head-down in reverence and meditation. The seriousness and intensity in the procession petered out as it reached the smallest child trotting along at the end of the line, distracted by the anticipation of his first meal since yesterday’s lunch. My little Footscray parade were all head down. I doubted their umbrellas were stopping the raindrops from rolling down their necks and I was sure that only the most mindful of meditators could possibly be conducting that hungry march with good grace.

It’s clear in Laos that monks are important and an outsider is quick to understand that they are icons of spirituality. I watched them with wide eyes, holding my belly. I knew that this was a sign of something significant and wondered if I should chase them down to give them some breakfast.

By the time I had fed the metre, the monks were out of sight. I lumbered across the road to the market for my noodles expecting to see them lined up to receive offerings of food into their brass alms baskets. They had disappeared so I turned to choose a noodle soup with as much chilli as I could take.

That afternoon my husband came home early from work. He was edgy with anticipation and couldn’t concentrate at his desk. At the local café sneaking coffee and carrot cake, I told him about the monks and showed him the fuzzy photo I had taken with my phone. With a fork full of cream cheese icing raised to my mouth I stopped dead. “You’d better go and pay now. My waters just broke.”

Our third son was born after an hour and a half of labour. He was pink, squishy and full of life. As I held his squelchy little body I could feel the world’s quota of love expanding.

A couple of days later indulging in some email checking on my phone, I started to cry. I read the news that one of our dearest friends from Laos, a sassy New Zealander who had a story about visiting almost every country in the world, had died. Her breast cancer had taken over. The alms procession had started her day for years and my senses tingled as I thought of my Melbourne monks. I looked back at the email and saw the date. I did a quick calculation of time zones and saw that she had died at the same time my waters had broken. As her life ended, my little boy’s life began. I like to think that their spirits gave each other a hug as they passed each other.

‘I know it’s a First World Problem but …’

“I know that this is a First World Problem but …”

I hate that phrase. Aside from the fact that we stopped using the First/Second/Third World thing when the Wall came down,  it’s heavy with assumptions about what other people worry about or value. I know that the speaker is usually well meaning. I also know that she (It’s usually ‘she’) is self-conscious about the things that interest or concern her and that she feels pressured to justify them. To me it dismisses the fact that if you stopped to think about it, I’ll bet that there are lots of people in the ‘Third World’ that have exactly the same problem as you, or at least a version of it.

For example, I was recently discussing garden design with a friend. We were talking in detail about plant placement and selection. There were going to be a lot of plants and they were going to be expensive.

“I know this is a First World Problem but …”

“(Here we go),” I thought.

“… I really don’t know whether to get five manchurian pears for the back fence or seven. They are gorgeous, but maybe I am overdoing it. There might not be room for the water feature.” I gritted my teeth. On the surface of it, she was saying that wanting to live in a beautiful space was a ‘First World Problem’. Underneath, I know she was mainly being self-deprecating to try and compensate for what she felt was an extravagance. That’s fine, but saying that extravagance is a ‘First World Problem’ implies that everyone in the ‘Third World’ must be constantly obsessing about life-and-death matters such as where their next meal is coming from. It’s saying that they have no time to worry about aesthetics.

Sure, there are many, many hungry people living in developing countries who are vulnerable to shocks. They live on the edge of life-and-death matters in a way I can’t really comprehend. The proceeds from a row of manchurian pears would be more than their annual family income, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to live in a pretty space. When I worked in Laos I led teams in designing aid programs. We went into communities and worked with people to identify needs and priorities, this included working with the children. One of the ways that the children participated in the program design was to draw a map of their village the way they would like it to be. Usually these pictures would have nice houses, a well-resourced school, places to play and lots of crops and livestock. Without fail, the girls would spend a chunk of their time painstakingly using every felt-tipped pen in the packet to cover their maps with flowers, trees and lawn. When we asked them why they did this they looked at us as though we as dumb as a coconut: “Because we want our home to be beautiful!”

The first time I heard that answer, I knew that there were even more commonalities between people than I had thought before. For these girls, having a beautiful space to live in was one of their highest priorities. They were sometimes hungry, they were only going to get a primary education (if they were lucky), they had to cart their water from a kilometre away, but they still wanted some flowers in the garden.

To be fair, sometimes finding the universals in a ‘First World Problem’ takes a bit of work. Whenever I get into a discussion about this topic, I am dragged back to an occasion where my husband and I were both struck dumb by a phone call. We were in the work car driving between Hanoi and Son La in the northern mountains of Vietnam. We had come straight from a field visit where we had shared tea and sticky rice with the village leaders sitting on the floor of their stilt house. We had been discussing the current rice crop and the barriers to selling it. My husband’s phone rang and I almost knocked it out of his hand as I rolled into him flung by the car taking a hairpin bend at speed. We were looking out of the window down the mountainside through the plum trees to the squat H’mong houses set away from the road. Children in traditional, hand-woven clothes carted firewood along the side of the road and pointed and waved to us when they saw our white faces peering out of the window.

“Mate!” My brother-in-law’s voice came through the phone from London. This in itself was worth remarking on because it was amazing that there was phone reception. “Mate,” he said. “I’m just ringing to see if you want any silver collar stiffeners?”

“Do I want what?” asked my husband, shoving a finger in his ear so that he could hear better.

“Collar stiffeners? The silver ones. Like the ones we had at the wedding? I’m in the shop right now.”

“Collar stiffeners?” My husband looked at me and I said something that no doubt contained a swear word. I looked at my husband’s shirt. To be fair, it had long sleeves and a collar, he wasn’t one of those aid workers who wore t-shirts and hiking boots to work, but it was coloured to hide the fact that nothing could be kept white for long, and it was unbuttoned at the neck with the sleeves rolled up to give some sort of relief from the heat and humidity. “Nah, mate. Thanks but I don’t really need them.”

It is very hard to argue that a lack of silver collar stiffeners is not a ‘First World Problem’. Especially when your daily reality is working in a poor and remote corner of the world. Don’t get me wrong, Universal is not the same as Not Trivial. Silver collar stiffeners are quite possibly the most trivial thing ever invented and a lack of them should not rate as a problem. The fact that they even exist attests to the fact that there are unacceptable priority mismatches in the world. In this blog I am not going to try to trivialize genuine need and suffering or be a cultural relativist who insists that everyone’s view and experience is equally valuable and important. Instead I am going to try to find the themes that make us human, help us empathise with each other and increase my own understanding of the worries, joys and priorities that we can all relate to if we get the chance to think about it.

In the meantime, can everyone please stop saying: “I know that this is a First World Problem but …” How about saying: “This sounds a little shallow but …”, instead. Or better still, just say what’s bugging you and own it.

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