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澳門’s aromatic locations: Macanese curry paste

It was Daniel Natoli the well-connected chef at Cafe Padre who told me about the old lady. Over a late night beer in the Cathedral Cafe off Senado Square he shared what he knew. She had been making it for decades, though how many was a mystery. Most mornings she would be at the back of her store over a large soup pot, stirring the aromatic olio, dispensing it into labelled jars.

Her shop is located on Rua Central past the grand slope to Don Pedro V Theatre. I later learn that the street plays host to another key figure in Macau’s historical culinary landscape, Omar Moosa, who only makes his prized alua at Christmas, to order. To avoid disappointment Macanese families in-the-know order weeks in advance. But more about Mr Moosa and his alua in another post. 

Chang Kee Bakery (昌記餅家) and grocery store is further along just before Rua Central turns into Rua de São Lourenco. The storefront is unassuming, yet the smell, even on this typical Macanese hazy-muggy summer evening, is unmistakable. The matriarch’s daughter poses politely with her son, but wants the curry paste to speak for itself. The paste contains onion, garlic, ginger, curry powder and piri piri powder slow-cooked and blended with oil. I buy a jar.

Her and other bingjias have clearly played an important role in provisioning Macanese households with key ingredients, including curry paste for gali noodles, chamuça and carril de galinha and sorpotel. It seems a shame that key food bloggers who post on Macanese food rarely mention these important street-side producers - such family-organised artisan producers do much to carve out a unique position for Macau in South China’s food landscape. Annabel Jackson’s recipe for Portuguese Chicken in Taste of Macau* is one of a few recipes acknowledging the need for pre-made curry pastes (Jackson calls for ‘red curry paste’). For this reason alone, I eschew Ken Holm and the rather attractive The Hong Kong Cookery blog for Jackson’s recipe with slight modifications (I take the extra step of blackening the chicken in a hot wok after it marinades, but I dodge the instructions to add desiccated coconut to the garnish). The way the curry gravy turns silky-creamy as soon as the evaporated milk joins the coconut milk in the pan reminds me of the mawa- / khoya-prepared Goan curries - the secret weapon of many home and restaurant cooks. The creaminess also reminds of conversations with Macanese chef and food writer, Florita Alvez on how luxurious the ingredients of home cooking recipes really are, or rather how luxurious they have become in the decades after the Second World War. 

The end result is a mild, sweet-creamy curry, lifted by the salt punch of the olives and chorizo garnish. 

References: *Jackson, A., 2003. Taste of Macau: Portuguese Cuisine on the China Coast (Vol. 1). Hong Kong University Press.

[muktadas]

Talk: Indian-ness in the Pearl River Delta: Tamil food in Hong Kong

Image: Puttu, Pittu (Tamil: புட்டு, பிட்டு, Malayalam: പുട്ട്,) Source: Ramesh NG, Flickr Creative Commons

Wednesday 11 May 2016, 7:00pm Hong Kong Museum of History, Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong

Free entry

Next week I will be holding a discussion at the Hong Kong Museum of History on part of my (ongoing) PhD research. This slice of research concerns Tamil food in Hong Kong and whether it has cultural power and, if so, what that is. 

Tamil food, as envisioned by Indian food writers, social commentators and eaters, is rich with flavour and technique, and is tasty and different. It is a food based as much on its location in India’s spice belt as it is based on a historic culinary migration of Tamil people as they travelled to South East and East Asia.

For the purposes of my discussion I look at cultural power in the context of Hong Kong’s seven year project to build an inventory of its intangible cultural heritage. Tamil food does not appear on this list - neither does the food of any ethnic minority, but 77 other local food practices do make the cut. 

Just who is able to get their cultural practices recognised as ‘heritage’? In what contexts are minorities able to do this – particularly diasporic groups, who may be associated with a colonial past, as opposed to recognised ‘national minorities’? What challenges exist for Tamil food to gain ground in the mainstream heritage discourse and what kinds of recognition can exist outside it?

Please join me and my key informant, Mr. Thirupathi Nachiappan, past President of the Tamil Cultural Association of Hong Kong, as we explore these issues on a night which analyses and celebrates steam-cooking cultures and maritime food migrations. 

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Goan tastes and Macanese cuisine: thick, hidden connections

Photo: Joe Chan in his element in one of the kitchens he manages for Starworld Hotel. 

I recently spent some time with Executive Chef, Joe Chan in Macau. Joe works at the Starworld Hotel and manages all five (some of them award-wining) kitchens of its restaurants. If that wasn’t enough, he is also a TV personality and magazine contributor, talking and writing about cuisine in Macau. According to the Macau Daily Times he is also one of the key guardians of Macanese gastronomy

I talked with him about my research on Indian food in the Pearl River Delta. We discussed the archive of kitchen notebooks I was working through, which were written before and during the second world war in the 1930s and 1940s by Albertina Martins de Carvalho Borges and Cândida dos Remédios Carvalho. We talked over their liberal use of tamarind, turmeric, coconut and certain forms of sugar such as jaggery.

The combinations of these South Asian ingredients with Portuguese ingredients such as wine, or Chinese ingredients such as black vinegar were very natural to Joe. He shared his own recipe for Porco Vin D’alho. 

Instead of marinating pork loin in a combination of wine, garlic, vinegar and turmeric for 24 hours, a slick of vinegar is added right at the end of cooking to give the dish a unique lift. Joe was also quick to point out that turmeric was added as a flavouring to wine and to vinegar in China’s history, which could easily make this a local, rather than a ‘colonial’ innovation.

‘Goanese, Goan-ness’ in Macau

We also talked about the social life of spices in food in Macau. Joe was born and raised in Macau to a Portuguese mother and a father from Shanghai. he has complicated feelings about Portuguese Macau and Macau’s post-colonial realities - too complicated to sum up here - but after years of giving media interviews his nostalgia is tempered and his main drive is to get his background story clear and unambiguous. It was being in the kitchen of his Portuguese mother and those of his extended local family (and not the culinary background of his father) which set him on the road to professional cooking. Having proved himself in high pressure elite kitchens including in Taipei, Joe returned home in time to manage a raft of handover banquets as the Portuguese colony officially became an Special Administrative Region of China.

Goans, other Indians, Angolans and those from Mozambique were often thrown together into a single ethnic category in Macau - Moor. Hence the moniker Moorish Barracks applied to the dormitory built in 1871 to house Indian policeman from Goa. Moreover many local families would have had great difficulty differentiating between the visible (darker skinned) minorities in Macau. And even the term ‘local’ to describe Macanese families of purely Portuguese and Chinese descent is erroneous. It is clear from talking to Macau historian and scholar Roy Eric Xavier and Carla Figueiredo of the Macau Cultural Institute that the pride and power in the Macanese’ mixed heritage comes from their complicated genealogies (time), but defies being bound by them and the nation states these genealogies touch (space). So, unlike in Singapore where the CMIO (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others) categorisation of Singapore’s multiracial policies creates a Singapore-Indian identity for second and third generation migrant Indian families, ‘Portuguese’ suffices in Macau as a signifier of both time and space. Given this complexity, it is no surprise that Joe cannot recall having any Goan or Indian school friends or having contact with these communities when he was growing up. In his youth and his adult life he crosses these cultural and ethnic boundaries through food. 

Photo: reconstruction of part of a traditional Macanese kitchen in the Macau Museum. Most likely, such rooms would have also had an oven.

‘African’ chicken

Names are very slippery things. We discussed the now famous Macanese dish, ‘African Chicken’. The blackened marinated chicken is served with a sauce of peanuts, spices including paprika and coconut gesturing at Lusophone fusion cuisine with African, European and Asian influences. The origin story of this dish as told by Raimund Pichlmaier, President of the Macau Culinary Association and one time chef, attributes the recipe to local chef Americo Angelo who invented the dish in the 1940s (demonstrating the war years and aftermath were a time ripe for invention and inscription). Angelo and his assistants, including Pichlmaier, were to go on and work in several hotels, passing the recipe on so that several hotels claim legitimacy for their African Chicken recipe.

Joe is convinced that the recipe is deeply rooted in the breadth of Portuguese colonialism and takes as much from South and South East Asian cooking as it does from south east and south west Africa. Joe is a food anthropologist at heart - very suspicious of single origin stories of food. He questions attributing the dish’s peanut sauce to Angolan or Mozambican cuisine when so many south east Asian cuisines use ground peanuts and cashews in their sauces. Moreover there is something decidedly South Indian in the range and amount of spices in the marinade and sauce (think tablespoons rather than teaspoons).

Joe’s unique insight and chef instincts have already set me down new paths or question old paths that I had assumed - erroneously it seems - were set in concrete and tarmac. 

Further reading / references

Boileau, J. P. (2010) A culinary history of the Portuguese Eurasians: The origins of Luso-asian cuisine in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. PhD thesis, University of Adelaide https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/77948/8/02whole.pdf

Sam, Irene (2015) ‘A Guardian of Macanese Culture’, Macau Daily Times. 3 April 2015 http://macaudailytimes.com.mo/a-guardian-of-macanese-culture.html [accessed 9 February 2016]

Xavier, R. E (2012) ‘Alvarez and Baretto, a tale of two families (part 1 and 2)’ Far East Currents, 13 November 2012. http://www.macstudies.net/2012/11/13/alvares-and-barretto-a-tale-of-two-families-part-i/ [accessed 9 February 2016]

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Spices in Hong Kong’s heritage

Photo: ‘Medicinal’. Source: Aocrane, Flickr Creative Commons

In October 2015 in the Special Collections of the Hong Kong University (HKU) I came across the life history of a man who (along with his father before him) had been trading in spices in Hong Kong since the 1950s. The life history was recorded in 2002, when the spice trader was 82.  

HKU is located in Sai Ying Pun on the west side of Hong Kong Island. The spice trader’s shop was located in Sai Ying Pun also, and in his interview he described the place as being the centre of Hong Kong’s spice trade. Conversations with CACHe, a hands-on Hong Kong heritage organisation working in Central and Western District, confirmed that the area had been part of the great Nam Pak Hong (南北行) trading house. This large influential Hong, dating from the 1850s, was involved in imports and exports that saw goods traded deep into Northern China, and extended across South East Asia via the Nanyang trade route (or the maritime silk road). Much of CACHe’s work in Sai Ying Pun is to pull together a biography of Hong Kong’s salted fish trade which would have formed a significant part of the Hong’s trade in foods. Furthermore, the oral history at HKU confirms that spices were very much part of this trade leading me to wonder what spices were these, where were they grown and where were they eaten?

These questions resonated deeply because I had just spent a very enjoyable evening in the company of a spice trader Nilesh Dattani, also located in Sai Ying Pun. Unlike the trader in the HKU archives, Mr Dattani is Indian. But very much like the trader in the archives, Mr Dattani has continued his father’s global spice business which has a similar reach to the Hong of old. 

Several decades after collectivisation ended, China’s Guangdong region has now become a net exporter of spices such as cinnamon, cloves and star anise - all key ingredients in a range of masalas which flavour Indian chai, Gujarati dhansak and biryani as well as being important ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine and in slow braised dishes. Regency Spices imports spices from Guangdong province to Hong Kong, India and other spice consuming countries - to their pharmacies and to their kitchens. Their processing capacities, from careful harvesting and drying to grinding to order, are superior to equivalent processes in India’s south central spice belt. Among high end, high concept Indian restaurants in India and in Hong Kong, Regency Spices is increasingly the favoured spice supplier. 

And as a spice supplier Mr Dattani has a unique perspective on the taste profile of Indian cuisine in Hong Kong. According to the spice merchant, Indian chefs in Hong Kong are more heavy-handed with star anise, cinnamon and cloves, turning out deep liquorice-sweet curries in order to cater to Chinese palates. 

It seems that globalising Indian curries necessitates upping the sweetness levels, though techniques differ and reflect regional tastes. Bak’s (2015) study of Indian restaurant cuisine in Seoul identifies the use of sugar and honey as a sweetener in Indian curries, perhaps reflecting the curry rice cultures of Japan and South Korea. 

Reference

Bak, S. 2015. Exoticizing the familiar, domesticating the foreign: Ethnic food restaurants in Korea in ed K Kim Re-orientating cuisine: East Asian foodways in the 21st Century. New York. Berghahn. 170-184

[muktadas]

China-India relations - some early thoughts from my ethnographic research

Photo: frozen ready-made paratha in a supermarket in Guangzhou. Indian breads are popular items among the Chinese, being both an exotic and ‘neighbourhood’ food item.

In the aftermath of Xi Jinping’s visit to the UK last week I was approached by the BBC for an interview. The journalist (who works across the BBC’s Asian programming) was interested in getting my perspective on India-China relations as China looks west for foreign investment and increasing its influence.

Although in the end, the interview (Sunday 25 October, 6-8pm) was conducted with another expert, SOAS Chinese international relations expert Dr. Yuka Kobayashi, the journalist’s interest and questions about in my research area - looking out at India-China relations from the everyday practices of the Indian food sector in China - prompted me to note a few preliminary thoughts down about my research so far.

How could we describe India-China relations?

The most popular way in books, journals and online blogs is to assume that India and China swing between cooperation and competition; cooperation over BRICS and its emerging institutions, and over economic growth and development, and competition over influence in South East Asia, over shared and disputed borders and over geopolitical alliances which bring stable food and fuel to their respective hungry economies. But relationships are always far more complicated than they appear to outside parties and books, journals and online blogs are rarely written by those making India-China relations work on an everyday basis (there are one or two exceptions). In reality, competition and cooperation are far too abstract to manifest as lived experience in daily life Day-to-day, Indians and Chinese living side-by-side in Chinese cities feel confusion, anger, rejection, disgust and stared at, alongside, curiosity, familiarity and love.

Such are the emotions infused in the stories that I have collected when talking to Indian and Chinese people in Guangzhou in the first few months of my ethnographic research.

How many Indians currently live in China and who are they?

There are no official data-sets that can accurately state the exact number of Indians in China, from neither China’s National Bureau of Statistics, nor from India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but estimates from the latter suggest the number is around 25,000, many of whom are living in cities in the South, such as Guangzhou. (This excludes the more than 28,000 Indians in Hong Kong SAR - according to the 2011 census). These Indians are traders, shipping agents, professionals in finance and insurance, and increasingly, medical students. Medical degrees are far cheaper in China than in India, sometimes up to one-third the price, and the equipment and facilities far better.

What kind of Indian community exists in China?

As is frequently the case, it’s more accurate to describe Indian communities in the plural. There are so many different ways that Indians here decide to come together and form bonds - or to claim an identity different from others. Sindhis form different communities to Tamils, Indian women come together in different ways than Indian men, and there are certainly generational differences also.

But couldn’t one say the same thing about Indian communities in London?

Yes, which is partly the marvellous thing. Indian, or more accurately South Asian, communities in London were built on successive waves of migration: Indians in the 1950s and 60s, and Bangladeshis and East Africans in the 1970s and 80s. Not to mention the complicated gendered differences in arrivals and departures to and from the UK. Indian settlers in China are relatively new - the earliest individuals and families came in the late 1990s, or the early 2000s. Yet many households are already multi-generational with children and grandparents living together with mum and dad. Is it true then that people of the world are moving around quicker thanks to advances in transportation, or is India-China particularly compressed in space-time compared to India-UK throughout the late 1900s?

What can one say about these Indian communities looking out from Indian restaurants in China?

Indian restaurants play an important role for indian communities in China. Of course they provide catering for and play host to Indian life celebrations such as children’s naming ceremonies, birthdays and a plethora of festivals like Durga Puja and Diwali. But they are also sites where Indian and Chinese, and indeed western, ideas of proper eating are played out. And none of this ‘proper eating’ is set in stone. In fact it’s fair to say that Indian restaurants and Indian food in China is very much an unfinished project.

I’ll explore this last theme in greater detail in later posts, when I contrast the concepts and the socio-economies of Indian restaurants in Guangzhou with those 170 kilometres away in Hong Kong.

One last thought about India-China relations before I end this post; It is clear that both India and China feel very strongly that this is their time. And, with Modi promising to develop India’s infrastructure so that India becomes a high tech manufacturing hub, there are many Indians in China who feel that returning to India would be the best course of action in the mid-term. These Indians rarely look to the UK for partnerships, but more likely for mergers and acquisitions. As one Indian manager who had recently arrived in China told me ‘Europe seems to be in permanent decline. We’re buying up their companies and making them profitable again’.

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Indian flavours of the 1940s Macau kitchen

I’ve always been a little wary of vindaloo - in my childhood it took on many roles. It was impossible to recreate in a Bengali home kitchen with our over-reliance on turmeric and mustard oil, so it was exotic and alien (and my brother’s favourite Indian takeaway dish). The word ‘vindaloo’ was also often used as a racial slur, shouted across the street to my and other Indian families.

I’m in the middle of examining over one thousand Macanese recipes from the 1930s and 1940s. I am trying to find the Indian influences in the cooking, and ascertain whether Indian flavours, cooking and eating practices were important to Macanese cuisine - and in what ways. So it’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve explored the idea that vindaloo had European ancestry in the Portuguese dish vin d’alho - meat marinated in wine and garlic and then slow-cooked. And further that the Macanese porco vin d’alho owed much to the dish’s sojourn in Goa as it did to its Portuguese beginnings and its Cantonese location. 

For food scholars, tracing the origins of dishes is like looking at a tapestry; look closely and edges dissolve. The world was connected enough over several millennia to make such research difficult and findings tentative, rather than definitive. 

At the same time, one can make too much of fusion cuisine, and the apparent freedom that Portuguese colonial home kitchens had in adapting the elite European recipes to local realities. As Rosales notes in her accounts of the other side of Luso-Asian Portuguese expansion - Goans in Mozambique:

“...many of the Portuguese cooking traditions learned by the families were profoundly modified. These creative processes of appropriation resulted from the addition of new spices and specific ingredients like fruits and vegetables from Goa, and had the objective of “adapting the Portuguese food to our taste” (2009: 160). 

“African food is negatively valued and the majority of the families do not reveal the slightest curiosity or knowledge about it. The only positive records obtained on this particular topic refer to the existence of a vast number of fruits like mango, papaya and passion-fruit that were described as very tasty and of very good quality.” (2009: 160)

Rosales makes it clear that the development of the fusion cuisines of Portuguese colonialism, were carefully thought through and considered, not rushed through, or haphazard. There were rules and systems of thinking that gave value to some foods and less to others. An abundance of fruit, vegetables and other materials in the colonies did not immediately result in those same materials being cited in recipes - something I had already noted.

With this in mind, I recreated two recipes from these recipe notebooks; porco vin d’alho, accompanied by cheese toast.

Picture credit: 林小饼

The recipes in these notebooks re-occur frequently and porco vin d’alho is no exception. Just in the notebooks which cover 1940-1942 there are five recipes for it, and all recommend a marinade of garlic, salt and pepper. Some recipes specify that Chinese rice wine can be substituted for white wine made from grape, others simply state the need for vinegar - offering no commentary on whether Chinese vinegar is suitable.

The unusual addition in most recipes is the use of turmeric (commonly misnamed saffron or açafrão, for which it was substituted as it was far cheaper and in plentiful supply) and cumin which appears in the recipes transliterated from Cantonese (siu wei fun) suggesting a deep penetration of this spice in Macau. With no clue as to amounts of each ingredient in the 1940s recipes, I turn to Felipe B Nery’s translation of Maria Celestina de Mello e Senna’s 1972 cookbook Bons Petiscos. Two whole teaspoons of turmeric go into the marinade for only 500 grams of pork - even Bengalis would hesitate at this amount. 

All recipes agree that the meat should rest in the marinade for a day and should be cooked off in lard, but cooking techniques differ. Some suggest adding some potatoes and water and cooking until the liquid has evaporated and then frying in lard. Other recipes eschew potatoes, still others - such as the 1972 cookbook - suggest slow cooking in earthenware. All recipes suggest that this is a semi-dry or dry dish and not a curry with gravy. To achieve this (without lard as I am unable to source this in Guangzhou) I go for a middle ground - somewhere between boiling and slow cooking. 

I host a dinner at 103 Gallery in Guangzhou where I cook the marinated pork. All of my Cantonese guests agree that the cooking smells are unusual. Initially the combination of fermented ingredients and spices are unpleasant to the nose, but eventually, as the wine and vinegar evaporate and the spices react to the heat the aroma becomes more palatable, and the resulting taste is deeply aromatic and slightly tangy. 

Picture credit: 怕肥

I serve the porco vin d’alho with cheese toast since none of the recipes suggest the pork is served with rice. Cheese toast is a sweet dimsum in contemporary Macau, but in the 1930s and 40s the addition of black pepper and mustard in recipes suggest that it was a substantial savoury snack (offering a balance of sweet-spicy and umami) or an accompaniment in main dishes. To cut through the heavy meal and to offer a more palatable balance between meat and plant-based foods for my Chinese guests, we serve this with a simple salad of watermelon, peach and tomato dressed in roasted peanuts, sesame seeds and dried red chillies, extra virgin olive oil, salt and mint leaves.

At the end of the meal, all the food had been devoured and the diners were happy. But I can’t help but think that the lard really is essential, to ensure the meat retains the juiciness demanded by such liberal amounts of spices. Moreover the ratios in the marinade could do with some adjusting. 

It’s no surprise then that several variations of porco vin d’alho exist and measurements were rarely shared. Even working within the tight confines of a partially fixed marinade schema, Macanese vin d’alho had many masters but no definitive recipe. 

Further reading

Boxer. C.R. 1975. Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas 1418-1815 - Some Facts, Fancies and Personalities. New York: Oxford University Press

Rosales, M. V. 2009. ‘Objects, Scents and Tastes from a Distant Home: Goan Life Experiences in Africa’ Two Homelands, 26, 153-166

Xavier, R, E, 2015. ‘Family Networks, Diasporas, and the Origins of the Macanese in Asia’ in Review of Culture, 48. 

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Macanese food in a era of turbulence and war

Picture credit: Carol Lin - 双皮奶: Flickr Creative Commons

Recently, I came across 13 handwritten notebooks containing recipes from the 1930s and 1940s in the Macau Historical Archives. These faded, age-browned exercise books were deposited by Ms. dª Cíntia Conceição Serro, a respected local public servant who was awarded the Medal of Dedication for services to Macau back in 1989.

The cookbooks were co-written by her grandmother, Candida dos Remedios Carvalho and her aunt, Albertina Martins de Cavalho Borges, the two women who helped her develop a love and flair for Macanese cooking when she was a child. Spanning 11 years of experience - the first of these notebooks was written in 1932 and the last in 1943 - Ms Serro deposited these writings after she published her own Macanese cookbook, which used these as source material. ‘Traditional Macanese Recipes From My Auntie Albertina” published by the Instituto Internacional de Macau is now available in English.

Macau’s food historians seem to agree that recipe notebooks from the 1900’s and earlier are very rare indeed. For the most part, Macanese recipes were passed on orally, among women presumably, yet were jealously guarded and reluctantly shared.

“On occasion, handwritten recipes were passed on to close family members but they were never really detailed in the first place and measurements were often incomplete” (Mamak, 2007: 161).

Within these 13 notebooks, however, there are some incredibly detailed instructions on how to make both sweet and savoury bebincas (the traditionally Indian 16-layered celebration cake), slow cooked dishes such as soportels, diabos and curries, wedding cakes, Christmas cakes, baked dim sum cheese toasts, fish and pork pastries, sambals, jams, marmalades and syrups; Macau’s home cooking in all its diversity.

Many of these recipes appear more than once. Sometimes there are more than ten variations of a recipe, occasionally attributed to a particular person, such as ‘cake de Felicia Marquez’ and ‘pudim de ovos e laranja (Sara Remedios)’. Without further work in the parish registers and census records, one has to assume that Felicia Marquez, Sara Remedios and the dozen other women whose recipes appear in these notebooks are family members, friends or neighbours, likely a mixture of all three.

Given the general landscape of culinary mistrust, was this family unusually happy to share their recipes? Why did cooks in other households trust these women with their own recipes? Did China’s civil war, Japanese aggression and eventually the Sino-Japanese war from 1937 create a sense of urgency to preserve this culinary knowledge? Was it fear that drove these women to record (some?) of what they knew?

Xavier’s account of the Macanese men, women and children who fought for survival during the years 1942-1945 in Macau and Hong Kong is based on oral histories, unpublished accounts and genealogical data collected by anthropologists and sociologists. These accounts make clear the many absurdities of cooking and eating in wartime, particularly for such well-networked, technologically advanced and affluent Asian trading hubs and the Eurasians who occupied them.  

“Realising now that war was imminent, Humberto sent his servant out to buy dry goods, who returned later with a case of potted Argentinian beef….” (Xavier, pending: 11)

“The Pires family and others prepared as best they could. The group pooled all the provisions they could gather [and] stored them in refrigerators on the upper floors of their buildings… As the power was cut off after the Japanese captured the electrical station at North Point, frozen food thawed so quickly that it had to be eaten in a few large meals” (ibid; 11)

The absurdities continued well into the period of the Japanese capture of Hong Kong and Macau’s confirmed neutrality. Macanese refugees returning to Macau from Hong Kong were given and, or, loaned anything from US$3 to US$560 a month for food and lodgings from the colonial governments and their employers. Many refugees pooled this money and their rations of flour, sugar and rice together and prepared food in communal kitchens such as the Bela Vista Hotel (ibid; 18).

At the same time some cafes and restaurants were doing a brisk cash trade servicing soldiers, government officials and those making their fortunes on the black market.

‘In those days, if you had money you could enjoy the best kind of cigarettes, American, British, right up to the end of the war… And you could have excellent food - if you had the money. I had big parties almost every night’. (ibid:22)

Instead of reflecting these myriad food realities of Macau’s war years, the notebooks seem to look past the war to preserve recipes for a future without blockades, black markets and rationing. There are only a few clues to the war’s impact: a few hasty, crossed out lists of food prices in the middle of the notebooks, or one or two recipes to feed 25 people that gesture towards collective cooking. But its hard to be certain about this -  household gatherings were typically large enough to accommodate the extended family and the family priest (Mamak, 2007: 161).

Perhaps the most interesting question these recipe notebooks raise is the explicit hybridity at the centre of Macanese cuisine.

From the earliest colonial misadventures of the 1500s, the Portuguese navy, soldiers and diplomats needed to be flexible in their culinary arrangements:

“With no agricultural base of their own, the only way for the Portuguese to feed their settlements was by tapping into local sources of supply.” (Boileau, 2010: 191)

However, the local sources of supply in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and other countries were centres of trade as well as agriculture. ‘Tapped into’ is right; after stumbling across an existing network of international commerce in foodstuffs, the Portuguese proceeded to actively create their own hubs within this network - such as Macau.

Much is made of Portuguese pragmatism and the mixed marriages which were to ‘eventually demystify and destigmatize local foods while native skill in preparing them increased their palatability’ (Boileau, 2010:  202).

But it would be unwise to put an end date on culinary adaptation. The recipe notebooks reveal that Macanese culinary hybridity was an ongoing project. Even while rice, turmeric, soy and steaming became ubiquitous staples, flavourings and cooking techniques, the steamships and cold storage that enabled food to be shifted between Portuguese hubs met the demand for dairy, wheat, sugar, beef, wine, fats and salts necessary in Portuguese slow cooking and baking.

“… until about the 1950s when social ties between the Macanese and the Chinese began to increase, there was a tendency on the part of the original Macanese to deny the existence of a separate type of cuisine that would be later called Macanese. This may be because the early Macanese were influenced by the values and behavior of the dominant group. They considered themselves to be ethnically Portuguese and their cuisine to be basically Portuguese.’ (Mamak, 2007: 160)

Looking at the notebooks alone, most modern cooks would not recognize the costeletas panadas. The recipes for this crumbed, marinated pork chop bun - a popular snack item in contemporary Macau and a standard-bearer for Macanese hybridity with its Asian seasonings and its wrapping of Portuguese bread - call only for white wine, minced garlic and salt and pepper. No five-spice powder, rice wine, soy sauce, ginger nor sesame oil - all of which feature in modern recipes.

These are very early impressions of these notebooks. I’ll be writing more as I delve deeper into this material and talk to experts. I’ll also write a little more about the dynamics of Indian foods and flavours in Macanese cooking in the coming weeks.

References / further reading

1. Augustin-Jean, L, 2002, Food consumption, food perception and the search for a Macanese identity in eds. D. Wu and S Cheung ‘The Globalisation of Chinese food’, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 113-127

2. Boileau, J. P, 2010 A Culinary History of the Portuguese Eurasians: The Origins of Luso-Asian Cuisine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. University of Adelaide. Unpublished PhD thesis.

3. Mamak, A, 2007, In search of a Macanese cookbook in eds. S. Cheung & T. Cheebeng ‘Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking’. London and New York: Routledge. 159-170

4. Xavier, R. E (pending), The Macanese at War: Survival and Identity among Portuguese Eurasians during World War II in ed. G. Gunn ‘Wartime Macau’, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 

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Guangzhou food people: Tanya

“My friend told me about this place. It's a small patch of sand, clay and soil nestled in between apartment buildings and office blocks in the middle of Guangzhou. A lot of people grow own their food here on balconies, sometimes 30 floors up. I want to create a community garden where locals can get used to planting for others and sharing their crops with strangers but so far the neighbours avoid me.

I want to find other guerrilla gardeners so we can share what works. My basil almost died but new shoots are coming through, which is a good sign of hope. Now I'm planting coriander.”

Tanya

[muktadas]

"new territories”

Buy land. They’re not making it any more. 

Sunset at Long Valley, New Territories. Source: Johnlsl on Flickr Creative Commons

A friend has just recently bought up farm land in Hong Kong’s new territories  - approximately the size of two football fields. In it, he and his partners have decided to grow organic salads and leaf vegetables and they already supply a number of hotels and restaurants in Hong Kong. 

Demand outstrips supply, always - even for the summer crop which doesn’t quite get the full benefit of variable weather in Hong Kong’s subtropical climate. Soon he will open a grocers on Hong Kong Island, selling directly to consumers. 

Territories and borders

China’s new territories have come under the ethnographers’ gaze over the past few decades. James Watson’s anthropological study of village life in the 1970′s to more recent work by food scholars such as Tan Chee Beng on the changing Hong Kong ‘food shed’ (as agricultural land is eaten away by housing developments) are just two of dozens of examples. 

More recently social geographers looking into the nature and the cultural politics of food scares in China, like Peter Jackson, have noted how Hong Kong’s farming and food have been incorporated into a mainland food safety strategy. As the discourse of East Asia’s poisoned food system (from Fukushima’s decimated farming and fisheries to China’s chemically dependent agriculture) takes greater hold, it seems that people with means across the Pearl River Delta are turning to the New Territories to supply their private and public kitchens. 

Organics and the politics of border crossings

While there is a rise in demand for Hong Kong grown organics among (largely) middle and upper class Hong Kong residents, there is a steady flow of food and personal care tourists from the Pearl River Delta (and other parts of China), who come through Lo Wu in the New Territories to purchase and consume. 

The food in Guangdong is mainly farmed in small plots by small-scale farmers - which means it is ripe for specialising in organics or other types of certified food provenance. Whether farmers (some of them from Hong Kong) who want to farm low-to-no chemical produce in Guangdong will be able to enter the premium grocery markets in Hong Kong is a whole other matter, but more on that later. 

[muktadas]

Simple immigrant-style tomato fish

It was my father who taught my mother how to cook in the spring of 1966. Indulged at home in deepest Assam during her childhood and convinced she had no culinary skills, mum arrived in London with no cooking experience, even of boiling chai.

Slowly, over the course of her first year living on Caledonian Road, North London, my father taught my mother how to buy ingredients in self-service supermarkets and grocery stores, cook chicken, vegetable and lamb curries, fry fish and add eggs to rice.

Dad came to London in 1958, four years after the official end to post-war rationing. Jamaican grocery stores were ubiquitous by the late 1950s which made spices easy to come by. At the same time meals out - taken while standing in the kitchens and back rooms of Indian restaurants - were simpler versions of those served to official customers, and were cheap or free. Life was fine in 1958 when my father started his Higher National Diploma in electrical engineering.

Bengali cuisine is a strange and perhaps inadequate container for the complexities of rules, preparations and presentations of food among people who share a language and a deep history of in-migration and emigration.

So mum and dad never established hard boundaries between the food they cooked at home, and the versions of Indian cuisine- largely Bangladeshi-Muslim cuisine - that shaped both the London street scape and their social circle of Dhaka-Bengalis who had studied and became tradespeople in the UK, like dad (after finishing his HND he managed the production line at Costco Electronics).

But on the whole they followed their Hindu - Bengali - Assamese palate. Their curries were only very lightly spiced with pinches of turmeric and cumin rather than heaped teaspoons. Their gravies were fine and clear, rather than thickened with expertly minced and slow cooked onions. They were liberal with water in their dishes, rather than oil, and added sugar to deepen the tastes of the spices and chillies, rather than garlic. All of this encasing English cuts of meat fish and vegetables. It was a practical framework and through it mum introduced other recipes transmitted in letters from her sisters. Simple tomato fish became a favourite in my house, so different from anything else on offer in our corner of London.  

So my brother and I noticed that our food was different to this other Indian food and we were treated to once-weekly Indian takeaways much like our English friends. Under pressure, mum eventually added a version of chicken tikka to her repertory of home dishes and eventually taught the dish to her older sisters in India - much to their, and her, bemusement.

Simple Immigrant-style Tomato Fish

Two steaks of fish (mum prefers salmon - with skin - because the light pink of the cooked fish is quite pretty sitting in rich red of the sauce)

Large pinch of turmeric

Large pinch of salt

1 onion - sliced

500 grams of tomatoes cut into eighths or thinner

1 teaspoon of English mustard paste

Freshly boiled water

Sugar (to taste)

Rub the fish steaks with the turmeric and salt and set aside for five minutes.

Heat the oil in a wok on a medium heat / flame. Fry the fish for 2-3 minutes (depending on the size of steak) on each side. Take out of the wok and set aside. Retain the oil. 

Fry the onions in the oil from the fish until softened. Add the tomatoes and the mustard paste and as they cook, gently break them up with a spoon. Add about 250ml of water and cook for five minutes. Keep topping up as the water evaporates.

Finally add back the fish steaks and bring the tomato gravy to a rapid boil.

Serve with rice, or with store-bought garlic bread if you need to clear your freezer.

[muktadas]

Open Sauce: celebrity chefs, bottling, and Chinese migration

‘Celebrity chefs are bigger than movie stars - the top agencies make more money from chefs than actors’. I was interviewing an ex-movie agent and film producer as part of a food-related project a few months ago and his words, said in a kind of surprised awe, struck me as entirely fitting with our current perceptions.

His words came back to me again today when I was sampling a Chinese marinade that was perhaps too specialist for the UK market. ‘Some of these sauces were based on famous restaurant preparations in China over the last century - with very subtle but important taste differences,’ I was told by the product manager, ‘chefs were encouraged to reproduce their sauces so that people could try to recreate their dishes at home, even in imperial times’.

Many Qing (and Republican era) chefs were well known in their time and those commentators who suggest that cooking is not considered high art in China - to explain the quite late bloom of ‘culinary cities’ like Shanghai - need only look back across the 1900's. If they were working in Imperial kitchens, chefs could pass down their jobs and accompanying status through the generations - guaranteeing the kind of job security that seems either eye watering to many of us, or reassuringly familiar to those who working in a kitchen like their parent (most likely father) before them. Dimsumdolly’s list of top imperial chefs is notable for the strong showing of women, and for stretching back to the Eastern Zhou period.

There are of course major differences between then and now which are historically and geographically contingent, but there are also interesting similarities.

Then, like now, access to a ‘production’ kitchen and a recognisable and popular taste profile, were key to building a successful public persona and repeat customers (be sure to keep an eye out for new sauce and condiment launches by popular street food cart vendors which utilise this same below-the-line model - coming to your new old-style-grocery-store or farmers’ market soon). And then, as now, this type of buying had to be accompanied by an engaged meaning making on the part of the customer - a willingness to understand and respond to the brand narratives; namely a sauce’s uniqueness to person and place. The other crucial thing was the technology, in this case bottling and canning. Rich unctuous oyster sauce, which rapidly moved from invention to manufacture and then bottled and labelled by the Lee Kum Kee company in 1888, could not have ‘been’ without the attendant container.

Bottling, in clear glass, earthenware and other material, was a major feature of the food trade between parts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe throughout the long centuries of the 1700 and 1800s. Jack Goody’s 1982 seminal work, ‘Cooking, Cuisine and Class’ states that bottling becomes progressively cheaper, and by the late 19th century, along with the growth of railways, the arrival of container ships and the emergence of shops alongside open air markets, bottled foods could arrive at destination with a fairly reasonable price tag. 

A note of caution though - sociologists working as late as the 1980’s in London would remind us that migrant families committed a larger amount of their income to buying food, compared to the national average, and these sociologists would go on to recommended culturally responsive state arrangements for elders - with mixed success.

Bottled foods’, such as oyster sauce, arrival in places of major Chinese diaspora signals not only the movement of people and their food but also their degree of powerlessness.

In 'Food and Diaspora'  in 2008, Sidney Mintz talks expansively about the forces that enabled food to move without people - such as the Columbian exchange which uprooted and transplanted native American plants to Asia and Africa and created the plantation economy which, among other systems, fed (and somewhat continues to feed) London and other industrialising cities.

Mintz also talks about the forces that enabled people to move without food. Of the hundred million people, about 50% were Indians and Chinese (and others) that went to work under a systems of indenture to Asia, Africa and the Americas throughout the 1800s. Despite their volume, these people did not have the political and economic might to also change the global farming landscape. Their food ways made use of the technology of the time - including poly-cropping, bottling, labelling, transportation, restaurants and shops - and in the process, developed and supported Chinatowns and Banglatowns (both real and imagined) to feed more than just migrant appetites.

One could argue that current day Chinatowns and Banglatowns provide the same cultural service. Thanks to photo sharing sites, we can use visual clues to compare past and present and think through connections between brands, sauces, bottles and journeying, over time. 

It’s no surprise then that there is thought, caution and a considered process among historic Chinese sauce brands to change their labelling and move from bottles to plastics. Under such circumstances, brands move cautiously, engaging a newer age profile, the next generation in migrant families and ‘host societies’, who are interpreting, renewing and rejecting their home cuisines in culturally powerful ways. 

So continues the attachment to person and place - to an older style of celebrating chefs - it is a constant and on going dialogue and not just a product of this audio-visual age. 

Photo: Chinese grocery store in Jamaica circa 1970. Penn Museum and Jeanette Kong. With thanks to Trudi Oliveiro (@trudiyoga) for critical feedback. 

[muktadas]

Steaks into Hamburgers

A wise man once summed up for me the reason why I’m forever seeing burger joints popping up all over London. ‘Simple economics and just a tiny gamble and then voilà!'. The old steak house model - without the expensive meat - is profitable once more! Steak into hamburgers, you see. Its a strategy. 

I had cause to think about this when I returned from Guangzhou and Hong Kong this summer. Like the aftermath of my trip to Barcelona last year I came back to London wondering about restaurant lunches. 

Now let’s be clear, Guangzhou and Hong Kong can be expensive places for lunch. Put to one side the launches of elite premium restaurants in these cities, and consider the historical importance of over-ordering, the customary regular invitations to large groups of friends and family, and the importance of paying for lunches to a person's career and general life progression and then consider the likely size of the bill at the end of such extravagances. 

But this is not the end of cheap China. If dining alone, and landing somewhere averagely-priced (which is more likely than not), you would in fact struggle to spend £5 for the calorific equivalent of a main dish, side, fruit juice and brownie (for afters, you understand).

We don't tend to think of this as strategy, at least not in the same way we think of the London restaurants, mentioned above, ensuring that we still spend £15 on a beefy meal and deliver this in a value for money format. We tend to think of cheap dining in places such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong as an outcome, drawing on notions of animal as food, environmental stewardship, quality assurance practice and overall food safety, labour rights, and systemic opacity and under-regulation that are powerfully negative in their representations here in the UK*. These are all major concerns for the food system in every country of course. But its doesn't always feel like it. Consider the cheap weekday menú del dia of Barcelona which is framed (very accurately) as worker-oriented. This articulates well with our ideas of political and culinary continental Europe - socially and gastronomically conscious. 

I'm being a tad unfair in labelling whole cities on approaches to quality, pricing and profit - and London is as diverse in this as in everything else. There are restaurants in Brixton Village - Okan, French & Grace, Mama Lan are examples, that still offer a hefty lunch for £6:50 - £8:00 and have barely raised their prices over the last few years despite ongoing pressures, both local and international. Understanding what prices your customers can bear for what you put in front of them will always be a strategic act, but when I look around me during my weekday lunches, I see regular faces - Brixton workers or Brixton residents, being paid Briton wages or paying Brixton rents. I see the owner-operators of these Brixton Village restaurants behind the counter or in the front, chatting comfortably with their 'regulars'. And I see the human scale of a social contract - one that takes into account the local circumstances of the restaurant space and perhaps even an eye to history and the founding principles of its location in judging the pricing of goods and services. 

Its a strategy that takes into account the broader social quality of the food served. I've seen that strategy, that social contract, utilised in many an old dimsum hall in Guangzhou, serving large meals throughout the day to vulnerable pensioners, and in Cantonese cafes in Hong Kong serving fast, and filling classics to low-paid retail staff. Turning steak into hamburger is a strategy indeed and an international one at that. 

*Apologies if clicking on any of these links has taken you up to the firewall for today the on NYT and SCMP websites.  

[muktadas]

Things that shouldn't work: papaya + milk

Fruit+milk drink roulette unless you know some Chinese. Photo courtesy of Voomei

Firstly, the basics. What exactly is a papaya? Alternatively named pawpaw by us Brits, papaya is a longish spherical melon-like fruit, which cut open has orange flesh and dark edible seeds inside. The unripened fruit is used in all sorts of savoury dishes in south east Asia (including in Thai salads), while the fruit, both ripe and unripe is also said to have several traditional medicinal uses. 

So far so tasty. But combining papaya with milk to create a cooling drink seems a bit of a stretch. Papaya milk comes freshly blended from street stalls and in cartons. Its pronounced Mùguā niúnǎi and in Chinese characters written like so:  木瓜牛奶. It shouldn't taste delicious, but it does. Having spent some of my youth in Taipei studying Mandarin, largely through the medium of KTV, MTV (its movie cousin - a genius extension of the concept) and other extracurricular activity, I've encountered and consumed many gallons of the stuff. At the time, my consumption quickly reached intervention levels - I would gulp the drink down guiltily secretly before I met friends, to then consume another 'legitimate' cup with them. I disgusted myself, but not enough. 

Like me, perhaps you're in awe of those early food pioneers who, after applying the dangerous survival / edibility test to experimental blends, have ensured that aeons later, we can, as a species, enjoy a rich and varied diet today - consider cheese or bread. And like me, perhaps you're less in awe of the more recent industrial processes that have given us combinations such as cereals that have both high levels of sugar and salt. Either way you need to know how food is invented - I can tell. Type the words 'papaya' and 'milk' into google - or rather don't, lest you find yourself chest deep in the argument 'does papaya cause lactation?' - the kind of argument that makes the internet worthwhile.

Meanwhile over on Facebook, Kaohsiung Milk King, the southern Taiwan-based milk drink producer has a sensible, plausible origin story. Kaohsiung Milk King and other drink producers purvey a range of fruit milk blends, including watermelon, passion fruit, and mango. Though, judging from the net response, it is the papaya milk drink which is much consumed, much missed and much welcomed by large groups of desperate, possibly diabetic ex-international language students in their home countries. Yes, the papaya milk blend has travelled. Kaohsiung Milk King has recently expanded out of Taiwan and into Malaysia and I ran into this old friend last week in Hong Kong as a diet version produced by Kowloon Dairy. 

If you really look, you'll realise that while we in Britain have been languishing in the doldrums with our lonely banana milk combination (or milk 'shake' and yes, without the benefit of ice cream, our US cousins), countries in the Americas and throughout Asia have been happily experimenting with all sorts of fruit and milk combinations. We are getting such combinations through the back door so to speak - London's recent bubble tea phenomenon, inexplicably the most visible outcome of several years of Taiwanese gastro-diplomacy in the UK - offers combinations of tapioca balls (or boba), tea, condensed milk, papaya and other fruit for your amusement and pleasure. Asking for a papaya milk without the boba gets you weird looks though - no one in the service industry likes a purist* | its easy to spot an addict* [*delete as appropriate]. 

[muktadas]

Its been widely reported that JJ Abrams' forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII will only be drawing on the official canon, namely Lucas' six films and the animated Clone War TV series.  But Disney has excluded more from this canon than it may know.

Found by Maggie Greene Assistant History Professor at Montana State University, this hand-sized picture book ( 连环画 | Liánhuánhuà) published in Guangzhou in 1980 is a Chinese rendition of Star Wars produced at a time when the film was not available in the country. Artists copied, interpreted and remixed from a range of material including film posters and other marketing ephemera. The result is part cold war propaganda, and part (mostly in fact) engaging insight into the way ideas travel. Greene writes eloquently about Liánhuánhuà artists and their agency in cultural circulations on her blog at http://www.mcgreene.org/. 

The picture book is being painstakingly translated into English by MA Modern Chinese Literature student Nick Stember. 

[muktadas]

The Dosa Effect: émigré street food as empowerment?

London's best dosa? Photo courtesy of Food.Edited

Dosa, a commonly found street food item in several cities in India, is a light, crispy savoury pancake. Ground rice and pulses are combined into a lightly fermented batter, which is cooked into large golden discs on a sizeable tawa or griddle pan.

There are regional variations to how and with what it is served but the performance at the tawa is the same – a single generous scoop of creamy batter is dolloped on to a hot tawa and the batter deftly spread into a round within seconds. Half a minute later, the dosa is cooked, scored, folded, and removed from the tawa. The folding exposes a delicate pattern of concentric rings on the underside, giving the dosa its distinctive look. 

Dosa arrived in London many years ago - fans will have travelled to Drummond Street and to parts of Wembley and Tooting to have sampled such delights. Its arrival in London as a street food is relatively new. I started to wonder about the infinite variety of South Asian food now available in London and whether this culinary diversity speaks to wider issues.

This week Freedland in the Guardian identified - 'that [London] is the most mixed, diverse place in Britain – but it is also the place apparently least troubled by that variety, a sentiment eloquently expressed in its collective rejection of Ukip'. Is the diversity of food in London's collective belly making for a comfortably diverse city?

It seems a simplistic question, but to be fair (to me) I'm seeking a complicated answer. You'll recall London's reaction to events that unfolded around the BBC's Panorama investigation into Tower Hamlet's mayor Lutfur Rahman in March 2014. Brick Lane restaurateurs (and other local businesses) support Rahman and thus South Asian food demonstrates its political orientation. Rahman was re-elected this week. 

London's dosa street food traders inhabit a different part of the political spectrum than their Brick Lane counterparts. Their champion - Kerb - is not as part of the political class as the lawyer turned mayor, Rahman. Kerb is, among other things, an advocacy platform, a civil society group on the margins of London's political establishment. Kerb is primarily an umbrella organisation representing the interests of 50-60 street food traders. It engages with a variety of London councils and London land owners to host hot food traders in sites around the city and has an overtly political aim: to protect what little hot street food trading is allowed in London and expand the sector.

While there are seemingly endless variations among Kerb traders of lunch street food specials based around a meat filling, dosa (essentially a vegetarian dish) is made by only two traders - Dosa Deli and Horn Ok Please. For Kerb, greater diversity in cuisine brings greater commercial viability and greater political influence. Offering a successful and popular dosa builds political power.

Horn OK Please is owned by Gaurav Gautum and Sandhya Aiyar, a pair of friends who wanted to start a food business within a few years of settling in the UK. At London Southbank’s Real Food Festival on a dull wintry afternoon in mid-December 2013, I've arranged to spend the day getting a hands-on look at the day of a Kerb food trader and Horn OK Please agreed to be my host.

As I ready the stall for a day's trade with Gaurav, I ask him to theorise the arrival of dosa as street food in London. He picks up the role of Horn OK Please in introducing more saleable dosas that work for London’s street food scene. Dosas made with moong dahl (or mung beans) instead of urad dahl can still be flash fried on a hot griddle but remain thick enough to hold a stuffing of spicy potatoes (rather than serve those potatoes on the side) and thus create a street food meal that can be picked up and eaten like a sandwich. For Gaurav, this innovation, hard won by and the result of several weeks of experimentation, signifies the success of dosa’s entry into London’s mobile lunch trade. 

Preparing the stall involves folding and draping saris, arranging and hanging branded chalkboards, menu panels, lights, bowls and takeaway containers moving the equipment around to form a welcoming ‘v’ shape, and getting the cooking area just right. As soon as the planchette-style grill is ready, Gaurav works quickly, unpacking the most impressive looking box-cooler and heating a range of fragrant mixtures. So much of the Indian food served on the stall has to be mobile. Gaurav’s use of a production kitchen - which ensures that food is prepared in the sterile, temperature-controlled environment demanded by health and safety and food preparation legislation - means that much of the ingredients for our lunch service, including his celebrated tamarind chutney, yoghurt sauces and sevs (think deep-fried noodles), are prepared beforehand and transported in his trusted white van inside his large box-cooler. To be considered edible by policy and city planners street food has to be made somewhere other than the streets it is served in. 

My lunch break offers me a chance to sample Gaurav's dosa once more (I confess I have had dosas from Horn Ok Please on several different occasions for, er, research... obviously). It is a play of delicious contrasts, the crisp mouthfeel of the dosa a gateway to the sour-sweet softness of the potato filling, the peppery undertones of Gaurav's special chiili giving way to the tangy sweet richness of his exclusive yoghurts and chutneys that top the dish. It is heaven.

After lunch Gaurav reveals that a job as a street food seller in India would have been impossible. Cooking has status implications for Indian males, but he reveals that his talent from cooking comes directly from his father who would cook family meals from scratch – possibly a rare thing for an upper-middle class family household in Gujarat.

Distance by migration offers him a chance to experiment with possibilities such as being a street food entrepreneur. I don't delve any deeper and we work in companionable silence through much of the afternoon. 

There are few visitors to the festival with so few shopping days before Christmas, but Horn Ok Please still does a brisk trade. As an enterprise on the verge of expansion - despite slim margins and the revenue ceiling from London’s lunch time trade - the atypical success of Horn Ok Please has all the makings of being personally empowering to its co-owners Gaurav and Sandhya.

But its success has a bigger political impact - under the auspices of offering more choice to the urban food consumer, and greater social cohesion between trader, food and city dweller, the Kerb collective is successfully navigating city planning and zonal policy to protect the livelihoods of hot food street traders; each additional, regular, trading site provides additional income. Delicious dosa, dosa that works for a London lunch, packs a powerful political punch after all. 

Image source http://foodedited.com/

[muktadas]

Food [type] journals: on a london book shop shelf

3191, Apicious, Another Escape, Asia Easter, The Art of Eating, The Carton, Cereal, Cherry Bombe, Chickpea, Delicious, Diner Journal, Dolce, Eating Well, Food and Wine, The Food Network, The Foodie Bugle, Fork, Fructose, Gather, Good Things, Kinfolk,  Lucky Peach, Modern Farmer, Olive, The Plant, Pure Green Magazine, Mood, Put A Egg On It, Runciible Spoon, So Good, Swallow Magazine, 

Lesson #1: Foyles truly supports print. 

Lesson #2: Could Fructose please invest in some good SEO?

[muktadas]

Neal's Yard Dairy as a doorway to history - and British Pathé as pathos

One of many Covent Garden barrow makers. Photo courtesy of British Pathe

I had the privilege of recording an oral history interview with Sandford [Sandy] Lieberson as part of the Neal's Yard Dairy oral history pilot I am managing. 

As many already know, Sandy has led an exceptionally rich and varied life and his stories of LA and Rome of the 1950's and 1960's were enthralling.

His accounts of London's Covent Garden in the mid to late 1960's the 1970's and 1980's were so evocative, I, like many others this week, turned to the newly uploaded archive of footage of British Pathe to satisfy an unbearable history itch. 

Only a handful of films feature Covent Garden in the collection, but those that do give a powerful account of the traders, customers and the costermongers of the old fruit and vegetable market and the deeply political nature of the act of bringing food into the centre of London.

Taking the prize as the most charming however is a film showing one of the last remaining barrow makers. This foregrounded the scale of the light industry that would have occupied the area years prior to the arrival of Neal's Yard whole food shop, the bakery and mill, the Dairy and Monmouth Coffee Company.

That these historic buildings around Seven Dials still stand and that the adaptions of their use over centuries can still be guessed at by visiting and looking at their internal structures and facades was and is a political act also.

Read more about on Covent Garden Memories, a website for a project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and involving Kings College London, Covent Garden Community Association, Westminster City Archives and others.

Image source: http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/