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.

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.

Preparations…

We plan a trip East in search of warmth, ambrosial food and tropical gardens and fauna.

Itinerary:

Bangkok, Penang, Melucca, Singapore, Ha Noi, Da Nang, Saigon, Hua Hin, Chiang Mai

On the wishlist: food, cookery lessons, fishing trips and the tropical gardens of the former Malay Straights Botanic Gardens and Forestry department.

Faunawise, we understand the Penang gardens are run by a troop of long-tailed macaques, for example. We have a visit to an elephant rescue centre slated for our Chiang-Mai stage. Tigers, Leopards, Crocodiles… in the mega diverse zone we are visiting, indigenous animals recall childhood visits to zoos; exotic, dangerous and beautiful animals will be around us somewhere, but in their own space.

Waiting at Calcott bus station with England’s damp January winds whistling around the sarong and tugging at the chinstrap of the pith helmet will be chilly, but half a day later sultry conditions will prevail and we will be glad of our light packing.

As our 6-week Grand Tour ticks past, the Earth will tilt, and we hope for friendlier days when we return.

At 54 excitement can be a rare sentiment, but I am enjoying a frisson of anticipation as like many of our ancestors, we voyage East in search of spice…