Beef Steaks with Sweet Onion Jam tells of her experiences in Australia with her family. Settled and firmly planted now in Sydney, I can see her—and hear her—preparing a spicy Shrimp with Tropical Coconut Laksa Gravy and a Mint Vodka Collins with Watermelon Fingers with Lyndey Milan making a screamingly good tipple in the background.
Heavenly Fragrance evokes more than just memories—it excites the imagination and fills the senses with the possibilities of pungent fragrances and tastes that create new memories. It articulates the past and present of a talented cook in the very best way—with wonderfully delicious recipes!
FRAGRANT MEMORIES FROM MY YOUTH
by Carol Selva Rajah
Fragrance evokes memories. If you have ever entered a bread shop while cinnamon buns are baking or passed someone’s kitchen at Christmas and whiffed the spicy aromas of a Christmas cake or breathed deeply as you walked through a pine forest after a spring rain, then you will share some of my passion for fragrance in food and its ability to stir up memories of the past. This phenomenon has been most famously described by French author Marcel Proust, as he sipped a cup of tea and ate a soggy madeline biscuit. This simple and almost mundane act of eating and drinking set off a chain reaction of fragrance, awakening long-lost memories and indeed becoming the inspiration for one of the greatest of all literary works—his classic novel, Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Simple, humble tastes and smells have the power to project us back to our childhood and remind us of a forgotten event or moment faster and more effectively than almost anything else; and always remind me of Proust’s madeline.
My own childhood, spent in Malaysia and Singapore, abounds with fragrant memories which have inspired the recipes in this book and built up my appreciation for fragrant home-cooking. Walking through the tropical spice gardens of Bali, Penang or Sri Lanka, your senses are overwhelmed by a combination of distinctive aromas as you stop and mentally attempt to separate them into what is culinary and what is purely floral. For me it is like a dance through my childhood and a mental game of guessing the origins of each aroma. I have found that in Asia the ingredients from gardens, kitchens and floral markets overlap as they are all used in cooking, conjuring memories of a mouth-watering curry from a street stall in Chiang Mai or Singapore’s Newton Circus. With this book I hope to inspire you to create new “food memories” with simple, deliciously fragrant recipes drawing upon the vast rainbow of aromatic produce one finds in traditional Asian kitchens.
When I was growing up in Malaysia, beautiful scents were all around us, pervading our lives. I lived with my family on a large sprawling property planted with a jumble of fruits and herbs. Mango and rambutan trees framed my window, the aroma of mango flowers brushing past the mosquito netting, spreading their light caramel-like fragrance around my room. Now whenever I bite into a juicy Bowen mango from Queensland, I close my eyes and am immediately transported back to the warmth and comfort of my childhood bedroom. Stalwart jackfruit trees stood like soldiers along the back fence, producing meter-long fruits which resembled spiky green balloons hanging ponderously from the stems. As these fruits slowly matured, they gave forth a spicy, pineapple-honey scent that enticed everyone passing the open breezeway to the kitchen and the chili beds beyond. These beds were only chili in name— in fact they were littered with the distinct lemon-oil scents of lemongrass and galangal and the pungent, oily turmeric, yielding a tousled jumble of aromatic citrus and rose whenever disturbed, especially on a hot afternoon. These herbs and spices were gathered and tossed together on occasion into a beautifully tart jackfruit salad—colorful, fragrant and deeply satisfying, having come straight from our own garden.
Drawing of the family home and garden in Klang near Kuala Lumpur. To the left of the old colonial bungalow was the attached kitchen with herb garden beds and badminton court. On the right were orchids and various fruit trees. In front of the house stood the bougainvillea bower and the fish pond underneath it (as shown in the diagram).
Our garden was a place where you ate with your eyes and your nose before you even got to the dining table. There was perfume everywhere. In front of the house was a high metal planter that supported scarlet bougainvillea and delicate white flowers of orange blossom and red hibiscus which were thrown into juicy Sri Lankan sambols. Under this impressionist splash of color sat a circular fish pond with darting blue fighting fish, watched benignly by the resident tortoise. Nearby was a mass of blue pea flowers that colored our Nonya cakes and gave off a delicate perfume. Behind the house, an old roseapple or jambu ayer tree struggled for survival, laced with pale lichen and crawling with giant red ants, all headed for the special juicy sweetness in the fruit that we, as children, all craved. These beautiful juicy roseapples had the aroma of peaches and were used in our family Rojak salad—their sweetness contrasting with the spice of chili and pungent shrimp paste.
My father and mother when they were very young sitting in the garden by the side of the house. By the time I had grown up this garden was filled with rambutan, mango, jambu, roseapple, and jackfruit trees.
On one side of the house we had curry leaf bushes which gave off peppery aromas that ended up in my father’s hot Ceylonese curries and a famous sour, salty Mulligatawny soup known as rasam in India. The subtle, newly-mown grass scent of the pandanus palm pervaded our garden and glamorized our coconut rice cakes. Father’s bud-grafted trees, gnarled and bent with heavy green pomelo fruits, with pink pockets of lemony-sweet fruitiness on the inside, jostled with the lime trees whose fruit was indispensable in the kitchen. Everytime my father was annoyed, my Amah would produce her Pomelo and Shrimp Salad to placate him with its soothing colors and aroma, often involving the jambu ayer roseapple and several herbs from the garden. The kalamansi lime bushes with their cherry blossoms of dark green that spurted orange-sweet juice that was used for the ubiquitous lime cordials—so loved for their thirst-quenching properties, was a necessity in the tropical heat. Nothing was wasted—the spent fruit, rind and all, was massaged into scalps to create squeaky-clean, lime-perfumed and shampooed hair, again a strong Proustian channel to childhood innocence.
Central to all of this was the kitchen, tucked onto the back of the house yet the pivot of the home. The kitchen was divided into two areas: the “wet-kitchen” where pounding, grinding and slicing of spices and herbs was done each morning in preparation for a meat or fish curry, close to a running tap so that everything could be splashed clean. The other “dry-kitchen” was for cooking—where the old wood and coal stove sat squat across from the sink and wash area, and on it, a huge pot bubbled quietly with a joint of mutton for a curry or filled with chicken bones for stock inside. A vast wok sat on top of the stove almost permanently where a special dry chicken curry would be slowly sautéed, full of potatoes, tomatoes, chili and plump chicken pieces. I remember being drawn to the kitchen by the sharp, nose-tickling spike of the chili as it splattered into the hot oil, burning my eyes and nostrils until the onion and the soothing garlic were thrown in and left to mellow slowly in the wok. Amah, my “other mother,” would be there, stirring the mixture calmly, adding the soft citrus and gingery aromatics— the lemongrass and galangal and the earthy, fecund shrimp paste—finally converting it all miraculously into a composite of satisfying aromas, flavors and colors.
My Cantonese Amah dressed in her white Chinese samfu top and black pyjama pants holding me on my second birthday.
Amah was a natural cook, a master of flavor and aromatic patterns. As part of my multicultural extended family, she observed and learned the Jaffna Tamil and Malay influences of our country
