Melucca

Nyonya cooking, Melucca

A walk across the bridge on the way to Melucca’s busy China town; on the left looking down river out to sea is the old fort. Originally Portguese, then Dutch, then English, this hump commanded the harbour.

Water monitor, malaka river

In the river, reptile heads are held above the surface. Too short and blunt for crocodiles, and the flicking toungue gives away its owner; a water monitor hunting rats and water birds. Orioles fluting in tamarind trees, pester-power tuk-tuks pink-painted and sparkly to catch the eyes of 2-year old princesses tinkle with toddler pleasing music, tour ferries chug up the river with cargos of sightseers. Melucca has an “up-and-coming” feel to it. It is probably a very good place to buy real estate.

We finally discover a nyonya restaurant that is not closed for the holidays. This is a shabby back room with access to the river. We settle on wobbly furniture on the tow-path, feet from the malaka river’s thick brown liquid and read the laminated plastic menu sipping cold Tiger beer.

We go for squid in dark soy, and a slow-cooked curry. This cuisine rivals Thai food. It has the same flavour “architecture” with the salt, sweet, sour and chilli base. Then it has extras such as lime leaf, coriander, galangal etc. Both dishes are utterly delicious and are polished off in short order.

Botanical Gardens

Penang Botanical Gardens: Forest trail

A short bus ride out of Penang, where terra-cotta roof tiles continue to fire in perpendicular sun, the Penang Botanical Gardens offer a break from urban noise and heat as they have done for 150 years.

Cut into the island’s hills by a small river, this v-shaped valley was dedicated to plant science by British Victorians in the mid 19th century. Fifty odd years after Joseph Banks fathered exploratory botany, British colonial botanists, inspired by curiosity as well as profit, invested in tropical botanical gardens in the Malay Straights – this is the third after Singapore and Melucca.

This is a Kew hothouse minus the glass… and there are some additions.

Mynah birds flit around, investigating waste bins, cruising cafe terasses and staking out picnics. There seem to be no starlings; this einstein-bright tropical mimic fills the same niche.

In the lofty understory of the surrounding rainforest, bright yellow orioles call. Like the European relative, the Black-naped Oriole sounds like a child experimenting with a christmas whistle. The flutey timbre echos through the tropical canopy…

Butterflies bigger than small birds settle on mosses that grow on the small waterfalls.

A large turtle suns himself on a boulder in the river.

… and at any point in the park visitors may see the long-tailed macaques, large grey and rather elegant monkeys roaming in a family troop.

Long Tailed Macaques at Penang Botanics

We watched them from the shade of an Indian cafe near the park entrance. A mother had her infant pinned to the grass with a black leathery foot. With the baby spreadeagled and with a look of blissful resignation, his mother was riffling slowly backwards through his fur with her right hand as one might thumb the pages of a book, while with the left she was picking out specks and popping them into her mouth. The look of close concentration on her face I have seen on humans as they focus on a computer game or a mobile phone.

Kew with extras.

Penang’s Drains

It hasn’t rained here for 3 weeks, the locals tell us. Penang’s streets are dry as tinder. Tropical storms which frequently deliver 20cm of rain in a day, are bypassing the region to the north. Hoses are out in gardens. Hanging baskets drip-dry on balconies after a careful watering. Tropical leaves, fat and thick, orientate to the zenith. Penang’s numerous UNESCO-protected broad greens (ancient polo and cricket playgrounds for British Officers) are now a dusty khaki. The air shimmers like oil in a hot wok.

To cope with the next rains when they finally come, every street has a copious storm drain, usually on both sides. These are U-shaped concrete trenches 2 to 3 feet deep and about a foot wide.

In London these unannounced concrete street ha-ha’s would break so many legs and ankles at pub-closing time they would be quickly covered over. In this muslim state, where a single beer costs as much as a delicious, hearty meal, folk are steady on their pins all day, and pick their way across these obstacles as part of daily life.

It is possible to live life outside the stifling, protective maternal embrace of British Health and Safety Legislation, and it is insightful that what the British have opted to ban is danger, not beer.

I observe that there is no tax revenue from danger.

What happens when the immovable wall of British Alcohol Consumption is hit by the unstoppable force of British Health and Safety Legislation? Surely beer-drinking is at least as dangerous as playing conkers?

With little throughput, Penang’s storm drains begin to fill with an insalubrious mix of rubbish, discarded meals, the micturations of ancient gentlemen caught short on their way back from the tea house, piles of fruit too overripe for sale, the cadavers of feral cats and dogs and with just enough runoff from pavement washing, and the perfect steady 35oC temperature this grisly melange begins to produce what one could call, the Penang pong.

The rains are awaited with increasing impatience.

Rice

A bag of rice

To take a guess, at least 10% of the customers in this down town Penang supermarket have never tasted either bread or butter in their lives.

Noodles and rice are their staple feculants and it is this latter we seek, as we have brought doggie bags of sumptuous nyonya curry back from Pearly Kee’s cookery course and need some rice to eat it with.

This ought to be easy. Malaysian families live on rice, and the supermarket is full of the Neapolitan ice-cream of Malay skin tones. They will stock rice; most Malaysians are multi-lingual and will know what the word “rice” means. What could possibly go wrong here?

I make the prediction that there will be a whole aisle dedicated to the stuff, and there will be pallets piled with 15kg sacks of it. We can’t miss it, I foretell.

We do miss it. This oddly shaped shop is disorientating and full of secret caverns. A store manager is here though, let’s ask and get this done – Hello, we are looking for rice?

‘lice??

Ask a UK Tesco store manager which aisle for the live badgers and he will look no more perplexed than this monoglot Malay shop assistant. His face is contorted with the effort of concentration and comprehension.

Posed this unexpected linguistic problem, I reflect that rice is a pretty international word and there seems little point in the circumstances, in going through all the very similar sounding list of eurolanguage versions. I go for Portugese “ahhoz” which does sound different in the hope of raising a spark of recognition, and then, scraping the barrel since noone will admit to any knowledge of Japanese here, I try “gohan“. Now it’s like I’m asking, not for a bag of every day starchy cereal, but for a live female, yearling badger on a lead with a diamond encrusted collar. At this stage my interlocutor’s face now looks like he is in great pain. The agony of international communication seems to be overwhelming him. He is calling security – no wait – a friendly-looking polyglot colleague advances with a smile to save the day. All is not lost. Working together pooling our collective ingenuity and resource, we may still meet the colossal challenge of finding a small bag of rice in a Malaysian supermarket.

What you want? I just want Rice… AAAaaaaahhhh! Yes!! Lice!!

At last the sun of comprehension ascends over the horizon. A brief exchange in malay with Mr. Monoglot. Much mirth on both sides. I am quite delighted to see how much amusement I have brought into the lives of these two gentlemen today.

Is easy! You go out here, is lestaulant, there is lice. You buy you eat.

It’s fair enough – I am, quite visibly and audibly, a man so abandoned by god as to be anglo-saxon and consequently some sort of semi-sentient neanderthal from the frozen north. An idiot, capable of who-knows-what sort of spectacular acts of brainless tomfoolery. Manifestly he thinks I have knuckled past and refused the wares of the scrum of high pressure, rice-pushing restaurateurs that hunt clients on the pavement just in front of the shop entrance and then that I’ve lumbered in, hungry as a horse and begun to pester his long-suffering supermarket staff with fatuous requests for them to prepare me steaming bowls of cooked rice so that I can (presumably) sit cross-legged on the floor of aisle 12 and eat it with my fingers. Now this has all been cleared up, all that is required it to coax the cretinous snowman (he may never have seen a supermarket before) back out to the rice hawkers in the hope that he will this time have the common sense to purchase what he wants.

The desire to sigh petulantly, roll my eyes, or close them in ironic prayer to the god of calmness and restraint begins to well up within me like an inexorable tide.

Canute-like I set my jaw against such sentiments and explain calmly, politely and meticulously that I would like to purchase a small bag of rice that I can cook for myself at home. Would they perchance have such a thing in their shop?

Light dawns again and we set off at last for the supermarket’s rice cavern. There after all are the 15kg bags piled high on pallets, as prophesied and a whole aisle dedicated to the cereal with all types and pack sizes. I take a deep breath and thank my multi-lingual guide.

The Malay word for rice is Beras.

Pearly Kee

Roots: Pearly Kee in her favourite place on her favourite topic.

Pearly Kee is the granddaughter of a Victorian Sugar tycoon. She is the daughter of his 6th. son. She has a stormy life story to tell; loss of her mother at an early age, brought up by “strict aunts”, having to pay her way from age 6, health issues and dead-end jobs have marked her life. But this Penang, Malaysia native is bright, happy and superbly knowledgeable about cooking, dietary medicine and culinary botany. She reminds me a little of that other Malaysian Chinese prodigy, James Wong. And like James, Pearly too is an evangelist. A day in Pearly’s cooking school is a breathless whirlwind of experience, information, trial, error and success.

Taxied from their quarters, her cookery school students’ day starts at the Penang wet market where Pearly starts a whistle stop tour of her favourite stalls. Taste this, notice this, look at the way she is doing this, the market is the ultimate visual aid for entry-level nyonya cookery students, who leave this first stage of the day course with a mouth full of flavour and head full of information. Tapioca root contains vitamin B18, helpful for cancer patients; Chinese market stalls are arranged in terms of how the veg is grown, not how it’s cooked. Listen up and don’t get lost – Pearly’s pearls of wisdom are coming thick and fast. We sampled steamed rice noodles flavoured with pandanus, peanut muffin, ripe small banana and sipped iced coffee.

The key phrase mentioned early in the day which smashed any expectations of a cosy, unchallenging curry cooking course was “the Chinese eat holistically”. This was a blunt declaration backed up with overwhelming evidence, one example after another, that the Chinese, for thousands of years and still now, see no difference whatsoever between medicine and cookery.

In 2012 the BBC rated the British National Health Service as the 5th. largest employer in the world with its 1.7 million staff. At 26 million employees (factoring up health staff per capita), an equivalent Chinese Health Service would dwarf the world’s top 20 biggest employees summed up together. A bureaucratic organisation bigger than most countries would probably be very hard to run and may never exist. By necessity, then, China’s people take ownership of their own well-being as they have always done. So the Chinese are not going to stop cooking their “medical cuisine”. Maybe the British should start doing so?

All this considered, Pearly’s Njonya cooking class was never going to be limited to recipe-following. This would be a journey into complex medicinal studies, the biochemistry of plants, meticulous food hygiene, diet science, and just for an encore, a trio of restaurant-grade nyonya dishes cooked by the students in Pearly’s delightful tropical herb garden using wet-market produce nibbled and sampled the same morning. Her customers never realised they were such excellent cooks. I am going to cook differently as a result of this course. I will:

– wash vegetables in a bowl of water with crushed galangal – mix coconut milk/cream with water or stock – use more cooking fat in the curry than I have done (“3 elephants” – 3 Tbsp per portion) – be a lot more generous with the garlic – cook more meat on the bone and avoid chicken breast, for example – Take advantage of cheaper meat cuts and slow cook them – see pork in dark soy. – Consider the well-being of my family when selecting what to cook. A big subject, but a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.A truly outstanding day of learning, recommended to all health-conscious curry fans.

Snakes and Silk

At Bangkok’s snake farm, visitors learn about the diversity of snake species in the country. The farm is associated with the adjoining hospital which treats snake bites and cases of rabies.

Britain has 4 species of snake of which one has a poisonous bite. Thailand has 150 species of which 20 have a toxic payload. Intended primarily to incapacitate its prey (sometimes suprisingly large) as well as for defence and deterrent, snake venoms vary with species. Some attack the blood, and stop the prey by preventing oxygen from getting to muscles and brain. Others prevent the nervous system from functioning, leading initially to paralysis, making the meal easier and then to respiratory failure. Myotoxins disable muscles, cardiotoxins the heart.

There are up to 9,000 snake envenomation cases in Thailand per year and 94 deaths in a bad one. Thai population levels are similar to the uk.

So this hospital is kept busy and the attached farm and visitor centre seem to have a twofold purpose: incidence reduction through education, and treatment through the development of antivenoms.

It seems that by treating a horse or a sheep with non fatal levels of a snake’s venom, the animal’s metabolism naturally develops a defence. The principal seems to be similar to vaccination, though no doubt this is complicated biology. Blood is drawn from the treated ungulate and the serum extracted for use as medicine.

So Bangkok’s snake farm creates a stock of antivenom for each of the country’s 20 nastiest serpants; great news for the 24 people a day who are going to call on its services. If ever public funds were well spent, it is here.

This is not a game. King Cobras (powerfully neurotoxic, and the world’s longest venemous snake reported over 5 meters long) are common within the bounds of Bangkok itself – so cheek by fang with 6.3 million people.

It is not hard to imagine conscientious and doting Thai parents making sure they bring their little ones here to the “snake zoo”. Outside of swimming pools, rarely is fun so well combined with

Tight handling: aggressive Thai snake held by expert keeper.

useful education and sensible risk managment. Plenty of snakes on view, many showed off live (in thai and english) to a cautious and somewhat reticent audience, many 5-year-olds amongst them (“who would like to come down and touch this beautiful animal? …. What noone?”)

Entrance fee is derisory and pointlessly tiny. Go there and support this excellent institution – superb.

A little way across town is Jim Thompson’s “House on the Krong”. Across the canal from a muslim neighbourhood, Jim Thompson, American WWII soldier, secret agent and entrepreneur set up his centre for the revival of the Thai silk industry after the war ended. He’d been active in the expulsion of the Japanese from the country, and stayed on there after hostilities ceased.

Carp Pond, Jim Thompson’s house

On his inspiration and request, his neighbours across the canal began to produce world class quality cloth including the naturally coloured “Golden Thai Silk” not available anywhere else. As mastermind and part-owner of a prosperous export company Jim became a man of means and spent some of his cash transporting some typical wooden thai village houses to his plot in central Bangkok. In the city’s bustling midst he created a small Buddhist-inspired haven, with carp and turtle ponds and a curiously diverse collection of chinese and buddhist ceramics.

The jewel is definitely in the lotus in this delightful museum.