veryone I know rolls their eyes squeamishly at the very mention of fish heads.
- How can you eat it what is looking at you? - my Black French friend Lionel's voice goes an octave higher than usual. Well, dude, just don't look back, c'est ça!
My landlord raises his face from his plateful of deep-fried fish fingers only to crack something very sarcastically English about my bagful of nice and fresh salmon heads. I have brought them at Brixton Market, three for a quid, now try to beat that!
But the best thing about them is not how cheap they are but all the lovely textures you get from a big meaty head of a piscine predator - from the meaty cheeks to the crunchy cartilage to the flavoursome brain, and I love the eyes too!
This time, instead of Ghanaian abenkwan, I made it Malay style, gulai kepala ikan. It is so good that some consider it the national dish of Malaysia and Singapore.
Here's the recipe:
Ingredients (if you don't know what it is, google it or just show the name to your local Asian grocer):
3 medium-sized salmon heads
two red onions
half a head of garlic
a three-inch piece of ginger
teaspoonful of turmeric
one crushed and finely chopped stalk of lemon grass
half an inch of finely sliced galangal
half a handful of fresh or frozen curry leaves
a couple of de-seeded chopped chillies
a few tablespoonfuls of Malay fish curry powder (can be made by grinding ad mixing equal quantities jeera, coriander seeds, fenugreek and red pepper)
half a litre of tamarind juice (dissolving 50g tamarind paste in warm water)
half a litre of coconut milk (or dissolve 100 g creamed coconut and warm water)
a dozen okras, two large tomatoes cut into eight pieces each, a handful of string beans, and half a dozen halved garden eggs.
Cooking instructions:
De-gill the heads, wash them well and chop them into 8 pieces each.
Peel and make paste out of the onions, garlic and ginger.
Lightly fry the paste in a deep cast-iron pot with some ghee or vegetable oil.
Add turmeric and fry until it start giving off flavour.
Add the rest of the spices. Fry ever so gently, making sure the flavours fold into the oil, not go up with the smoke.
Add the tamarind juice and the coconut milk.
Bring to a gentle simmer and add the vegetables and fish heads.
discovered this restaurant on a rainy day on my first month in London. Hungry and frustrated, I was skipping the puddles: my left shoe started leaking and it was too late to go back. Lead-grey clouds were pissing a cold sprinkle on the stressed out urbanite crowds. As I moved along the grey gravitas of Pall Mall towards the National Gallery, I saw an unusually bright sign: Jom Makan, C'mon Let's Eat in Malay, sounded exactly the right kind of invitation.
Inside the minimalist post-modern cafe interior nothing told of what kind of sunny fest I was in for. With the first bite of rendang daging, beef slowly stewed in coconut milk with herbs, I was magically transported from soggy November London to sun-drenched Kuala Lumpur. Everything is made right: you could count grains in fluffy and fragrant coconut rice and teh tarek, Malaysia's national drink is "pulled" at the bar to form a frothy cap at the top of the glass.
Malay food is not very well known outside its country of origin and undeservedly so. It uses all the herbs of the neighbouring Thailand and the spices of its cultural cousin Indonesia, but with a unique twist of its own. Sitting exactly half-way on the main trading route between India and China, Malay cuisine seems to have very creatively absorbed influences from those culinary giants too. It all makes for a great mix, healthy, flavourful and exciting. However, even in London, the seat of Malaysia's former colonial master, Malay eateries are still far from being a familiar sight.
I have come to Jom Makan umpteen times since my first visit. I think I have tried every dish on the menu. They all have been consistently good, just the right bit easier on spices than in Malaysia, since hot food does go down as easy in a colder climate.
Begedil, when cooked right, IS a big deal. It's a deep-fried curried potato dumpling. Do not let the word deep-fried put you off, it is done the Asian style so you end up with a crunchy crust and tender spice purée inside.
Nasi ayam hainan, chicken with rice Hainanese style: if spice is not your thing, you will like this. It is served with great sauce, mix of ginger and sweet chilli. A wee bowl of chicken broth that comes with it is to die for, mixing the flavours of toasted garlic, ginger and scallions.
Kari ikan, fish curry, is a great way to cook sea fish. Zesty from ginger and mildly sour from tomatoes, its spices only accentuate the flavours of okra and salmon. I remember in Malaysia they use red snapper or other white fish for this.
Kerabu daging is slivers of grilled beef on a bed of lettuce and asparagus sprinkled with Assam vinegar. Sometimes the asparagus is missing, sometimes the vinegar. When you get all the ducks lined up, you're in luck: it is a really great combination.
Chicken satay with peanut sauce on a bed of lettuce, a classic Malay street snack. Satay is said to derive from the Hokkienese word for "three pieces".
Rose-flavoured milky cold drink, air bandong, literally means "rose water".
Malay bread, roti canai, although fried in oil is not greasy. I could eat it plain, really, so tasty it is.
My favourite, nasi lemak, consists of a dollop of sambal cumi-cumi, belacan-based squid curry, and a dollop of rendang daging, beef stewed with coconut milk and spices. It comes served with fried peanuts and dried anchovies and a boiled egg and chicken or coconut rice.
This popular South East Asian dessert, tapioca pearls topped with coconut milk and palm sugar, is a bit of acquired taste. I love it with crushed ice because this is how they serve it in tropical climates.
This is a true chef-d'oeuvre: creamy mango and coconut sorbet in the shape of a boiled egg. Just the right amount of sweetness and full of original fruit flavour.
hatever people can make out of what Nature gives us! Kapi shrimp paste represents a totally different approach to using seafood than crevettes mayonnaise. Here, weeny shrimp that otherwise would be too small to consume is fermented into a condiment. It has a solid homogeneous consistency and intense flavour.
It took me a while to get used to it. For someone brought up halfway between Moscow and Alaska, the heady smell of sun-rotten shrimp ground into paste was just too overpowering. Time heals everything, even aversion to exotic condiments. These days I add a wee dram even to some dishes that are not supposed to contain it, like Korean jaeyook bokkeum. It works amazingly good.
I call this shrimp paste by its Thai name kapi because I first encountered it in Thailand. It is called the same way in Laotian and Khmer but its native range actually spans from Southern China to Indonesia. In Malaysia it is called belacan, in Indonesia - terasi. They make an intensely fragrant sauce out of it, sambal belacan or sambal terasi that tastes amazing with squid (sambal cumi-cumi). The same thing is called nam phrik kapi (น้ำพริกกะปิ) in Thailand and used as a dip.
ruly, truly, one man's food, another man's poison. I remember how I scared my Moscow friends when I brought a bag of bean sprouts to fix some Chinese food for them. They decided they were in for a feast of creepy Asian worms.
Bean sprouts are widely used in Pacific Asian cuisines. They are known as moyashi (もやし) in Japan, dou ya (豆芽) in China, kongnamul (콩나물) in Korea, tauge in Indonesia (and Holland), thua ngok (ถั่วงอก) in Thailand. In Iran, they are traditionally prepared for the New Year's festival Navrooz. There they symbolize the power of new life.
In Thailand, folk wisdom has it that bean sprouts, when consumed raw, increase sexual drive. It come as no surprise if you consider all the life energy of enzymes and vitamines of freshly sprouting seeds!
I use them for a number of dishes: from Indonesian gado-gado to Chinese mapo-dofu. I can chew them raw much to the consternation of my friends. But I don't mind as it defo gives me a huge perk once in between the sheets! +wink wink+
This potato curry is Indian of origin but is very popular in Malaysia. As with all curries, the technique is about infusing oil with spices and then using it to make the gravy.
In this case this stew's intense fragrace is based on 2 components:
1) peeled and puréed six shallots, half a head of garlic, 3 chillies and 3 inches of ginger;
2) spices: garam masala, ground turmeric, cinnamon sticks and curry leaves. First I briefly fry the spices in odourless vegetable oil and then the pungent purée. Then I add pre-fried vegetables (potatoes , carrots and a tomato) and pour water to cover it all. Let it simmer 15-20 minutes and ideally let it rest for some time to allow all the juices intermingle and soak into the vegetables.
I serve it laced with yoghurt and sprinkled with fresh lemon juice and chopped coriander.
Malaysian oxtail in tamarind (asam) juice is a festive dish: when you slaughter an ox, you might as well cook it real good. Gently simmered in fresh tamarind juice the oxtail acquires its flavour from the galangal root, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, chilies and unripe black peppercorns.
I serve it with a sprinkle of chopped coriander, never a foreign flavour in South East Asian cuisines.
My first time in Kuala Lumpur I had a little shock. On every street there would be a very busy no-frills café with a huge Chinese sign saying "Meat and bone tea". It sounded so cannibalistic to a simple Northern lad like yours truly, it took my friend Ani some effort to drag me into one.
Bak kut tehwas invented in Malaysia in the 19th century to supplement the meagre diet of Chinese coolies. Nowadays, people eat itmore for the savoury taste than for the nutrient kick.
It is never cold in Malaysia but I discovered that bak kut teh can brighten up a gloomy Dutch winter day like nothing else. The recipe is simple, you will need:
700g pork ribs (I use calf ribs as a more health-conscious choice)
2 litres of cold water
one head of garlic unpeeled, broken down into cloves
"Increasing intercultural understanding through the appreciation of world cuisines." I hope that my blog will inspire people to open their minds and try other people's food where they live or travel.
v
eryone I know rolls their eyes squeamishly at the very mention of fish heads.
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