The Elegant Sufficiency

Soba So Good

A long-awaited Japan trip booked for June. Kyoto and Tokyo for eight days. (Bloody hell, still to give you the goods on Yunnan Province visit last year...hopelessly behind...) My desk is now groaning under the weight of clippings and books about restaurants, ryokans, shopping... Any thoughts you might have, please throw them my way. Would love to do some cooking classes during the trip, but suspect any decent ones will only be in Japanese. In my Googling for such, I came upon FXCuisine, a blog I wasn't familiar with (you might find owner François-Xavier's "About" page a little amusing) that has some fantastic pics and information about Tokyo's Tsukiji Soba Academy. I don't think I need to learn how to make homemade soba (as if...), but I would love some guidance in simple Japanese home-style cooking. Fiddled tonight with a recipe from Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking — her Soba Chirashi. Loved it, especially the "Mentsuyu sauce" (soy, mirin, dried bonito flakes), but such a long way from finessed in flavour.

A Maiden Voyage

More deadlines, head down, trying to map out umpteen projects for the remainder of the year. So I’m going to let my father take the floor again for this post, in which he reminisces about his voyage from Australia to England in the days when air travel was out of the reach of most travellers. And a wonderful excuse to show you these glorious, glorious illustrations and old menus.

A Maiden Voyage
by Peter Wood

I was very posh. There I was in Dad’s 1930s’ dinner suit, joining other dinner-suited gentlemen and elegant women in evening finery in the first-class dining room on the P&O liner S.S. Canberra en route from Sydney to Southampton via the Suez Canal in the early ’60s.
Friends more experienced in overseas travel than I had persuaded me to sail on what was called a P&O “boomerang” fare that allowed a reduced first-class fare in the off-season. Tourist class, where I’m sure I would have felt more comfortable, was for the hoi polloi. First class was very, very posh. Thank goodness Mum had taught me respectable table manners.
But my wardrobe was not equipped for such a passage — it was very meagre and unfashionable and P&O stipulated formal dress for first-class passengers in the dining room. I remembered Dad’s dinner suit with its fashionably broad, pointed shiny lapels. Mum had kept it after he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1958 while the Queensland Leader of the Opposition. I had memories of Dad heading out in it — to his Masonic Lodge meetings or to formal balls.
Looking around the Canberra’s elegant dining room on my first night aboard, I came to see that my posh single-breasted dinner suit, older than I, was very much out of date. I was an unsophisticated 26-year-old from a country town and fashion wasn’t to be my only discovery on that long voyage.
The first-class dining room’s menu was another learning experience for me. I had not actually looked at very many menus in my life. Beyond home-cooked meals, my gastronomic education began with pies from the horse-drawn cart at primary school, progressed to army food during National Service, and thence to Nick’s steak and the works in Brisbane, where quantity was the priority (the works were as much spaghetti, chips and other bits and pieces as would fit on a large plate.)

An Incomprehensible Menu

I would have struggled to understand the Canberra’s daily-changing menus even if they had been in English. Even after a lifetime since of restaurant meals, I’m still struggling to understand it. (Can anyone tell me what “crane” is, as in “Smoked Trout with Crane”?)  You can just imagine what I made of “Crème Chevreuse”, “Duckling à la Suédoise” and “Bouchée Dubarry”.
From memory, I think I stuck to a suggested set menu. That needed enough explanation for my uncultured mind. And the wine? For one shilling and ninepence I could have a glass of 1955 “Rhone—Hermitage” red, or for two shillings and one penny (one penny??), a “Hock—Rüdesheimer Superior”. I wonder what my sommelier son might make of those. But in those days I was too much of a prude and didn’t drink. Alcohol aside, throughout the voyage I tried everything I could and my knowledge expanded, as did my waistline.
Our table steward was a pleasant young Englishman from Liverpool, although for a reason I never discovered, most stewards were Indian, from Goa. Each steward had only one table of eight to attend to; each would take an order of up to three courses, not including dessert, from each of eight diners and return to serve each plate to the correct person, all without taking notes.
I later discovered that the steward had a dual identity. As I waited to disembark at Naples to go to Pompeii, I was standing with the Canberra’s entertainment officer. She pointed out an attractive young woman descending the gangway and asked what I thought of her. I replied that the young woman was indeed a remarkably good-looking young lady. The entertainment officer laughed. “That’s your table steward,” she said.

On a Camel in a Suit

My dated dinner suit, combined with my painful shyness, made mealtimes socially awkward. I noted that most tables were noisy, but conversation at our table of eight was muted. We had two members of the crew at our table — the prim and proper ship’s second-in-command, resplendent in uniform and war medals, and that entertainment officer. Thank heavens for that: she was what one would expect an entertainment officer to be, noisy, colourful and an excellent talker and carried the conversation for the whole table. Although her enthusiasm must have flagged when she tried to provoke conversation from me.
And so, our gastronomic voyage continued, via Colombo, Bombay, Aden and the Suez Canal, where passengers left the ship to visit Cairo. I still have a photograph of myself on the back of a camel in front of the great pyramid, dressed in a SUIT — another part of being a first class passenger.  The ladies wore gloves and hats, but they didn’t get on the back of camels.
On board, the entertainment included organized programs in the evenings — bingo and balls, concerts and cinema. During the day there were games on deck, including the popular shuffleboard, in which we pushed a flat disc along the deck with a long paddle-like stick. And there was never a shortage of food: I made a pig of myself at morning and afternoon teas, astonishing arrays of biscuits, cakes, pastries and other goodies.
On one occasion, tiring of the stuffiness of first class, I crept off to tourist class. (First- and second-class passengers were not supposed to mix — amazing in these egalitarian days.) I found a dance room, selected a pretty face, and asked for a dance. Off we went but, to my consternation, I found the owner of the pretty face was also very pregnant. I don’t usually inspect dance partners for pregnancy. I completed the dance and retreated in confusion to first class where very few women were likely to be pregnant. It was back to bingo. My very moral upbringing showed.
Six weeks that voyage took. Nearing Southampton, I was having great difficulty squeezing into Dad’s dinner suit.

P.S. I bought an up-to-date dinner suit for my wedding to a Sydney girl I later met in London. It hasn’t been worn for a while: I wonder if my son might one day pull it out of the cupboard and give it a run.

Things I Love

How I love wild, wet and windy Melbourne days, a pot of soup on the stove, part-time work, my new Mac, Carla Bruni's album Quelqu'un m'a dit, and the internet. Look what I just found: a blog called Gridskipper, "the Urban Travel Guide". It looks at an endless list of cities (you can subscribe to feeds on individual cities), including Mumbai/Bombay. With one keyboard stroke, I've learnt about Mumbai's women's-only cab company - Forsche - plus some great fabric shop tips. (Problem is, I keep buying fabric when I travel ... you should see my Shanghai silk... but never have it made up... about time I started to learn something from the craft bloggers among you.)

My Brain is in India

Think I have a blogging block … struggling to turn my mind to ES … spent too many hours over the past few days at a computer … planning my India trip (there are frequent-flier points that must be used … after tossing balls in the air … Malaysia, Japan, Borneo, China … this time, India has landed in the palm of my hand), emailing contacts for ideas, endless web-surfing, agonising – should I take a group tour, easy, lazy, secure, herded around from one thing to another, unknown, possibly awful, travelling companions, or should I launch out on my own? Think I’m getting my head around the idea of the solo trip. (God I wish I was one of those bright happy people who say “hello” to anyone, chat about anything, fit in anywhere…)
So … maybe, a Singapore stopover to see friends, Mumbai to research article on Bollywood (I want to be an extra in a Bollywood film), then a flight to Kerala. Looking for cooking schools, food gurus, ayurvedic excellence, spice plantations, tea plantations, antiques, jungle (is there any in Kerala?). Any ideas?
As a result, the cooking spirit has been willing but the flesh has been weak and my kitchen has been rather neglected – unsalted butter and leatherwood honey on Dench grain bread the staple. (New hyped inner-city Melbourne Malaysian for dinner tonight with an old not-seen-for-ages friend that was EXTREMELY disappointing.)
So what else can I do but leave you with a fine new cake recipe discovery, baked for a fund-raising morning tea at work last week. It was good. Really good. Even if I had to pay $5 to taste it!
Now, back to the Lonely Planet, Taj Hotels, Times of India, etc websites…….

Raspberry and Lime Syrup Cake
(adapted from BBC Good Food)

225g softened butter
225 caster sugar
4 medium eggs
2 limes, grated zest and juice
250g self-raising flour, sifted with a pinch of salt
25g ground almonds
200g raspberries
Syrup:
8 tbsp lime juice (about four limes)
1 lime, grated zest
140g caster sugar

Line the base and sides of a round cake tin (NOT loose-based) with greaseproof paper. Butter the paper. Preheat oven to 180C.
Cream the butter and sugar until light. Gradually beat in the eggs. Beat in the lime zest, then fold in the flour and almonds. Fold in enough lime juice – about 3 tablespoons – to create a mix that will drop easily from a spoon.
Fold in three quarters of the raspberries and turn the mixture into the tin. Even out the surface then scatter the rest of the raspberries on top – they’ll sink deliciously as the cake cooks.
Bake for about an hour – if the cake starts to brown too much, cover with foil – until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.
Make the syrup while the cake is baking: put lime juice, zest and sugar in a small saucepan and stir over gentle heat until the sugar dissolves. While the cake is still hot, prick it with a skewer all over and then pour over the syrup, which will seep through the cake creating a luscious sticky thing.

Believe it or Not, Spam Sushi

The trip plans I mentioned a few weeks back are, sadly, unlikely to eventuate for reasons I won’t go into, so it’s back to the drawing board. I’m desperate for a break – and desperate for a break that involves getting on a plane and flying across an ocean. Have some frequent-flier points that need using, so hope to be heading somewhere in the next couple of months.
But I have a bigger, and more expensive, trip in my head for later in the year or early next year: a trip to Japan with a focus, of course, on food, and ryokans, and onsens. Home with a cold today, and all my muddled brain is capable of doing is some web-surfing to start planning the Japan itinerary.
How hilarious is this: in a feature summing up Tokyo’s best eating for 2006, Japan Times’ writer Robbie Swinnerton raves about a new bar called Teppei in the back streets of Kagurazaka, wherever that might be. “The best thing we ate all evening,” Robbie writes, “was the house specialty, spam sushi. Yes, you read that correctly. The meat – standard-issue, canned, Okinawa-grade spam – had been browned in butter, lightly seasoned and artistically arranged on patties of vinegared sushi rice. Sheer shoestring brilliance.”
That may be so, but I’m not sure I’ll be putting Teppei on my itinerary.
(Any Japan suggestions – Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, the countryside – I'd love to hear them.)

On Top of the World

I’ve had to go to my atlas to work out where it is and I think I’ve got it sorted: The 7556-metre-high Minyak Kongka (or Gongga Mountain) is a few hundred kilometres due west of Chengdu in China’s far-west Sichuan Province. In the south-eastern Tibet plateau, Kongka is known as the “king of the mountains”.
I’m riding a horse there in April.
OK, this is the story: one of my dearest friends from my Hong Kong days is a dazzlingly clever Australian bloke called Bruce Foreman – fluent Mandarin speaker, photographer, environmental scientist, writer and former Intrepid tour guide. Bruce is still a HK-resident, now with his own travel company – Funky Golden Dragon – and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seethed with envy at his travels. Yanghsuo in Guangxi Province is his second home, and I’ll regularly get dispatches from the far reaches of the Silk Road, Beijing or Shanghai (a yawn for him), or Tibet’s mythical Mount Kailash. Drives me nuts. In Hong Kong, we would often saunter through the steamy, air-conditioning-dripped streets in search of good photographs, but frustratingly, I never travelled further than Kowloon with him.
I’ve decided to change that: in April (15 to 27) and May (12 to 24), Bruce and a bunch of Tibetan nomad guides will lead a horse trek to Gongga Mountain, one of the least touristy parts of Tibet and apparently the home of every deity of Tibetan Buddhism. And I’m determined to be on one of those horses. The trip starts in Chengdu, a modern Chinese city that I’ve long wanted to get to. It’s famous for its outrageously spicy food, traditional tea houses and Chinese opera, and its wandering ear-cleaners. Other highlights (please let me sound like a tourist brochure for a moment) include limestone lakes, village home stays, the Lagang monastery, cups of smoky pu er tea with the monks at the Kongka monastery, rhododendrons and a visit to Chengdu’s Panda Sanctuary. Did I mention the horseback riding? That may be optional – if you don’t ride, you have to walk – but Bruce tells me that the horses are a sleepy sort of breed, which I find a little comforting, given the rugged, cliff-speckled nature of this countryside. I think Bruce’s photographs above should give you an idea of just how extraordinary the area is – and just how sleepy the horses are.
There are still some places available on the trip, which is US$1499 ex Chengdu. For more information, take a look at the Funky Golden Dragon website.
With Sichuan and fleecy longjohns on my mind, tonight I pulled out what is arguably one of the finest books on Asian food to have emerged in the past few decades. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty (or Sichuan Cookery if you’re in the UK or Australia) is a masterful collection of stories, information, techniques and recipes from Sichuan Province. I had yum cha with Fuchsia when she came through Hong Kong in 2002 – she had written a couple of pieces on Chengdu for the newspaper section I edited – and I was just so impressed; she’s a brilliant Englishwoman who took herself and her polished Mandarin off to Chengdu and its Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, becoming the first Westerner ever to graduate from the institute. I recall her sketching our dim sum in her journal as we ate and quizzing the waiters at every chance – one of those inspirational, multi-talented, nauseating people!
Last year, Fuchsia’s second book – on the cooking of Hunan Province (The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Ebury Press) – came out and it has muscled its way to the top of my I-Want List.
But tonight, I had Dan Dan Mian on my mind. In Hong Kong, my colleagues and I would take off at lunch for a fix of this madly spicy noodle dish at a Wanchai hole-in-the-wall run by Sichuan migrants. The menu was in Chinese, the spice quota of the dishes designated by chilli icons. After my first visit with a Chinese-speaking colleague, a much-scribbled-on takeaway menu translating key dishes found a home in my wallet and was pulled out frequently over the next few years as I took one visitor to the city after another for a dose of this exhilarating pain.
The key ingredient of Dan Dan Mian – and other Sichuan dishes – is hua jiao, commonly known as Sichuan peppercorn. As Fuchsia describes hua jiao in Land of Plenty: “It has an extraordinary, heady aroma that carries hints of wood, citrus peel, and the languid scents of summer, and it produces a weird numbing effect on the lips and tongue. … One folk explanation for the widespread use of this pepper in Sichuanese cooking is, curiously, that its numbing effects allow people to consume more chillies than would otherwise be humanly be possible!” (Hua jiao are widely available at Asian food stores.)
According to Fuchsia, Dan Dan Mian are the most famous of Sichuan’s street snacks. She writes: “They were originally sold by men who wandered the alleys of the city, carrying their stoves, noodles, and secret-recipe sauces in baskets hanging from a bamboo shoulder pole (known as dan) in Chinese. … The noodles were served in small portions in tiny bowls, just enough to ease the hunger of scholars working late or mahjong players gambling into the night.”

Traditional Dan Dan Noodles
(Dan Dan Mian, from Land of Plenty, by Fuchsia Dunlop)

Serves 4 as a starter

340g (12oz) fresh egg noodles
Sauce:
1tbsp peanut oil
4tbsp Sichuanese ya cai or Tianjin preserved vegetable
3 scallions, green parts only
1 ½ tbsp light soy sauce
½ tbsp dark soy sauce
2-3 tbsp chilli oil, to taste
1 ½ tsp Chinkiang or black Chinese vinegar
½ - 1 tsp ground roasted Sichuan pepper*
Pork topping:
A little peanut oil
110g (4oz) minced pork
1 tsp Shaoxing rice wine or medium-dry sherry
2tsp light soy sauce
salt to taste

Heat 1 tablespoon of peanut oil in a wok over a high flame. Add the ya cai or Tianjin preserved vegetable and stir-fry for about 30 seconds, until it is fragrant. Set aside. Add another tablespoon of oil to the wok and reheat, then add the ground pork and stir-fry. As the meat separates, splash in the wine. Add the soy sauce and salt to taste, and continue to stir-fry until the meat is well cooked, but not too dry. Remove from the wok and set aside. Finely slice the scallions.
Put the fried vegetable and all the other sauce ingredients into a serving bowl and mix together.
Cook the nooldes according to the instructions on the package. Then drain them and add them to the sauce in the serving bowl. Sprinkle with the meat mixture and serve immediately.
When the bowl is on the table, give the noodles a good stir until the sauce and meat are evenly distributed.
* To prepare about 2 ½ tablespoons ground roasted Sichuan pepper, heat a dry wok over a low flame. Add 6 tablespoons Sichuan pepper and stir-fry for about five minutes until the pepper husks are richly fragrant. (Fuchsia warns that they’ll smoke slightly as you cook them.) Remove from the wok, cool, then grind the peppercorns to a powder in a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle. Sift the powder to remove stalks or unground pepper husks.

How I Caught My Fish

'Pheasant Picker-Up, Blair Castle, Perthshire' (left) and 'The Salmon Scales, Lochmore Lodge' from The Highland Game: Life on Scottish Sporting Estates, by Glyn Slattery. (Swan Hill Press, 1992)

Going through some old files last week, I came upon an old memory, a marker, even, of a turning-point in my life. It was an article I wrote a decade or more ago, reflecting on my brief experience as a cook in the early ‘90s for a wealthy English family at their sporting estate at Invercassley in the Scottish highlands. A marker? The article was the first I had published in the food section of Melbourne’s Age newspaper, on its cover no less, and set me off on my dream career course – at least for a few years. Other interests and passions and directions kicked in later, but then? Well I was in heaven. And the Scottish experience? It was hell.

Taking the Low Road in the Highlands

In daydreams, I had seen myself as a smiling mother figure, distributing canapés to people ravenous after days spent waist-deep in rivers, striding across grouse moors and crawling on their stomachs in pursuit of stags.
Instead, my nightmares were tormented: visions of smouldering ashes that had started life as quiches, tables stretching into the distance lined with leering faces howling for supper, and me desperately dishing up fish fingers as a last resort.

A Culinary Genius

I can’t shake the memory: a tour bus and a drive south from Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta; drive-by views of women in woven conical hats, knee-deep in water bending to pick lotus flowers, water buffalo, rice paddies, coconut palms and thatched huts; and Tony Tan lurching up and down the aisle of the bus insistently pouring out cups of Mekong rice wine for each of those in his tour group to try. (He wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t add that his lurch had very little to do with Mekong rice wine and everything to do with Third World road infrastructure.) Later, after a boat trip through the Delta and through the sort of rain that only the tropics knows how to turn on, he switched hats – from comedic tour leader to food scholar and sage. Over lunch in an open, barn-like, waterside restaurant, Tony revealed great Indo-Chinese culinary secrets (at least, I think that’s what he was doing – thudding rain on a tin roof stole away most of his words), all the while rushing around the table to check that his charges were sucking the insides out of charred prawns, using the the correct dipping sauce with the crisp-fried elephant ear fish, and working out what the steamboat was all about.

Tony is one of Melbourne’s finest chefs; I would rather eat his food than anyone else’s. But the great tragedy is that, despite my nagging over some years now, he refuses to open a restaurant. The extraordinarily knowledgeable Malaysian-born chef has been there, done that, and now focuses his attentions firmly on his small cooking school and on his regular overseas guided food tours (mostly to China and Spain). His food is simply exquisite – he has the touch of an angel; the attention-to-detail of a Virgo; a generosity of spirit that drains him. Oh how I wish I had recorded and photographed every dish I had ever eaten at his table ... almost always Asian, or with the touch of an Asian. I remember: immaculate Hainan chicken rice, beef rendang, precious dumplings, a Portuguese-influenced Singaporean curry, airy crab ravioli, mee goreng and any number of other miracles, sophisticated and rustic.

I was in his kitchen again this week, gratefully (what can I chop? I’ll do the dishes… let me mop the floor … can I make you a cup of tea?), as he prepared for one of his classes. Two young couples celebrating a birthday were his students for the night and sipped wine as he cooked and talked. Afterwards, when the final garnishes were set, they sat at his 200-year-old dining table and ate in wonder. 

1. ‘I love to play,’ Tony says, and he’s doing ever more of that since he discovered the food of España. Here, jamón is wrapped around avocado and served with flaked smoked trout, salmon roe and flying fish roe (tobbiko). It’s drizzled with an oil that has been cooked on low heat for 30 minutes with diced jamón and smoked Spanish paprika. To finish, a lemon zest syrup. (Served at a previous TT occasion.)

2. Bak Kut Teh: Food as therapy and incredibly simple to make: a ‘teabag’ of Chinese medicinal herbs and spices (available at Asian foodstores) is simmered with halved bulbs of garlic, peppercorns and pork ribs.

3. TT in full flight.

4. Fish sauce: I love this label almost as much as that on Japanese ‘baby doll’ mayonnaise.

5. A TT curry.

6. TT’s mee grob.

The Corporation Fruit Market

Photographer Mark Chew remembers it was late afternoon when he took this photograph in the Corporation Fruit Market in Madras more than 10 years ago. “Usually the problem is getting people out of the shot in India, but I suppose that by this time a lot of people might have gone home,” Mark recalls. “Over time I find that my favourite photographs are the ones I can keep coming back to and not get bored with looking at them.  This is one of them. There is so much going on ... the three characters, the immaculate stacks of fruit, the hanging baskets, even the typography...”
He adds: “You can’t beat India for a photographic location. “If I could only ever travel again to two countries in the world it would be France and India ... and maybe not in that order.”

Mark is one of my favourite photographers – one of Australia’s best – and I stumbled on this shot when I was browsing through his website. I love the clutter of the shot, yet it’s not a cluttered shot; there’s a strong point of focus and the stallholders have a wonderful intensity of concentration. I love the symmetry of the piles of fruit, and the almost painterly colours. The technical stuff? Mark used a Nikon FE2 35mm camera and Kodachrome 25, a film killed off by the digital revolution. “It’s sad, because it provided almost grainless images with soft, almost muted tones ... a bit like the old super 8 home movies,” says Mark. “You used to send it off in a little yellow prepaid envelope and about 10 days later you would get your slides back in the post. I think half the excitement was in having to wait.”