Dying for Dying food |
Perhaps I’m some old-fashioned champion of comfort and traditional food culture. I am into food that works, food that soothes and makes all that daily grind come to a smooth stop. Unctuous pleasures that take the irk out of work. I eat good food so I can digest a meaningful culture and lifestyle. So pardon me if I’m not into food made by machines, some of them even disguised as cooks. Ok, so that kind of explains why I occasionally take a stroll off the beaten track and digest and commentate on some slow-mo encounters I had with old world food here and in the region. It helps keep the grey matter at the height of its current functional best and set its imagination alight as to the whats, hows and whys of makan. If I knew it’s heritage, I would have a very good idea about its current relevance and definitely, about where the flavours are heading. Recently, a group of very well intentioned school kids sought some time from me to discuss a project on food heritage. A quick size up – I asked if they knew where curries originated from. Some of the more interesting answers were Japan, England and China. It was not funny to me at all. I think it came from their family holiday trips to the land of the rising sun over a meal of katsu curry-don, or their research that revealed England’s new national dish is actually the chicken tikka masala (a type of drier curried chicken) or even that fact that Dad’s favourite comfort hawker food is the Hainanese scissor-cut curry rice. A couple of them suspected its India. I really want to do a lot more for their project (more like a mission and a quest). Gotta undo what their folks did and seal that severed makan umbilical cord they had when they came, bleary eyed and hungry, unto this delicious world. Which brings me back to the opening paragraph about the joys of slow and old world makan. I spent six days in Indonesia about 3 weeks back doing the usual, seek, eat and devour (otherwise known as “research” in my dictionary). One of the pleasures of such an exercise is that I always take the route less traveled and ask really silly questions “Would this come out tasting better if you cook with your left hand instead?”, just so I can get the strangest and deepest answers. Perhaps. Kerak Telor
We pulled up along the busy Kemayoran area (in Jakarta) streetside in the evening and saw a row of what seemed like the old shoulder cart satay peddlers at Beach Road or Pasir Panjang in the 70’s. I nearly had to strangle our driver to pull up (he sees such old street food with disdain and wasn’t too proud to recommend it). They all sold Kerak Telor, and sat by the busy roadside with their backs to the traffic straddling a charcoal grill with two huge baskets filled with eggs, rice and condiments. What they made and sold on the spot was a crispy rice and egg pancake, wok-grilled slowly over woodchip fire. He would flip the pan over so the top side was nicely seared over the gentle open fire. The resultant thin pancake- all eggy and nicely soft yet crispy with half-cooked rice, was topped generously with serondeng (spicy fried grated coconut), dried shrimps and crispy shallots – rare and fast disappearing in Jakarta. Watching the old Betawi master prepare and indulge us with his traditional food in our hungry stupor was like an epiphany. It was better than any roti prata with any fillings I ever had by ten miles. Not a drop of oil was used.
Pak Talib sold what looked like a halved Japanese pancake (or the mini round mee chang kueh) filled with cheese, kaya peanuts etc..for almost twenty years. But this getting to be rare Indonesian kueh is actually made with sago flour and has that distinctly different and less mushy bite-feel and is gently fragranced with pandan. It cost a ridiculous 500 rupiah (about 8 cents) each and he could not even afford to fill it up with the usual sweet grated coconut as “ the price went up- it now cost 5000 rupiah for this much”, as he holds up a fist to indicate amount. So he sprinkles a carefully measured amount of choco-chips on the batter. He had so much pride in this work and asked that we wait till his pan was of a certain temperature before he could begin making it. He gingerly pours the batter it over the coin-slot like mould and carefully scraped the pancake off when it was just perfectly seared at the sides. I washed that down with a cuppa thick milk kopi in a nearby coffeeshop and digested the soul of the busy heartland Muara Karang area. Ooh, once again, the explicit joys of such makan
culture foreplay. |
