and Chinese herbal lore. She was Cantonese but her and our food heritage was from everywhere. Sri Lankan fish and shrimp curries with their soul-satisfying coconut soupy sauces followed the spicing rules of my father’s people. For Chinese cuisine, we adhered to the strong herbal and saucing traditions of Amah, intertwined with my mother’s early Hokkien and Nonya food experiences in Penang, where her first loves were the hot and spicy shrimp pastes and chili heat of the Nonya Laksa and Mee Siam. There were other influences of course, like the Malay dishes that friends and neighbors prepared and the formal European dinners that were given by my mother’s colonial associates and missionary friends. These recipes were all eagerly borrowed, recorded and tested again and again at our home until they gradually became our own, carefully recorded in old broken-spined school exercise books.
Every morning before school, under Amah’s expert tutelage, I learned to pick and portion the herbs. In one instance lemongrass, galangal, chili and turmeric would evolve into a mouth-watering curry paste for her unique Sambal Shrimp (see page 66). We would start first with a collection of chopped onion and garlic and pounded shrimp paste and tamarind puree. Working on the grinding stone, she would grind the chili, pulverize the onion and garlic, then add the rock-hard turmeric—so difficult to judge, coloring everything it touches with a saffron stain—until it splinters and releases its rose-musk fragrance. Lemongrass would go in next. As more herbs were added, they actually made the grinding easier. From her I learned the secret of layering ingredients when cooking, adding first the garlic and waiting for it to release its enticing aromas, then adding the next ingredient and then the others in their turn so that the oils and fragrance in each spice was released separately to build on the flavor of what came before. The Sambal Shrimp that finally emerged was a mixture of all these perfumed ingredients and remains an indelible memory of my ancestral home.
While we went to our gardens frequently for the aromatic herbs and spices for the grinding stone, it would be off to the jostling, noisy market for our fresh produce—always at dawn before the sun wilted away the best ones. Crisp green beans and jelly-like tofu—shaking as we picked it up from its aromatic banana leaf container—and the fresh scents of kailan (chinese broccoli), and mustardy choy sum (flowering cabbage) with its peppery yellow flowers, jewel-like eggplants and bright green, knobbly bitter gourds— all of these would be carefully selected, wrapped and dropped into our bulging shopping basket.
Asian markets are tumultuous, exciting places. Some are mere collections of tiny little thatched lean-tos. Others are rambling, colorful and well-stocked. How lavish the brightly-colored mix of the vegetable stalls always seems. Pyramids of fresh green wing beans—I salivate at the thought of using them for a quick, crispy stir-fry with dried shrimp and slowly caramelizing onions. Orange and saffron-colored bananas, bright red tomatoes, towers of food looking so neat yet so precarious. What hilarity to see them accidentally scattered amongst the regal purple brinjals (eggplants) and the jungle-green bittersweet drumstick beans! The sweet fragrance of coconut, reminiscent of ripe cucumber, cream and pandan is a Proustian link to palm trees and beaches, so familiar to us all, and a unifying element amongst all the wonderful countries and cuisines of the tropics.
Shopping for aromatic herbs and vegetables in Sydney’s Asian market at Cabramatta, where the largest concentration of Asian migrants live, grow their market produce and serve an amazingly eclectic range of Asian foods.
Markets smell different in Asia than elsewhere. Enter one and you are met with an onslaught of fragrances: musky, fishy, yeasty, nutty. The salty tang of fresh fish in large, musty-wet bamboo baskets—I picked up some whiting so fresh it almost leapt at me! The trevally is particularly tempting and the snapper always inviting because of its pink shiny scales. Further down, there are the caramel-like smells of roasting chicken satay. The pungency of chili powder being ground; the clean aromas of galangal and warm nutmeg; the sweet scent of cardamom and cassia perfumed tea, poured out in a tall, thin stream to create a magnificent, spicy froth. Asian markets are always a beehive of activity with people jostling and carrying baskets—busy, busy everywhere.
Aromas alone can announce the culture and the nationality of a market. Indian markets are suffused strongly with the pungency of curry leaves, cumin and coriander. The magical dry-roasting of these spices creates completely new aromas, such as those found in a vegetarian dal dish cooked with tomato and garnished with black mustard seeds and frying onions. And everywhere in India there is the faint lingering aroma of cardamom and chocolaty cinnamon.
Chinese markets announce their presence by the squawking of live ducks and chickens and row upon row of pork butchers. Herbal concoctions boil in vats and onion-mustardy smells emanate from rows of stalls selling choy sum, bok choy, een choi and various other cabbages piled in pyramids with other greens. In another area one finds assorted pickles and preserves in large earthenware jars, close to stalls with charcoal braziers where pork is slowly roasted, yielding the arresting sweetness of hoisin, and the ever-enticing caramel aromas of char siew pork and anise-glazed ducks which hang on hooks like soldiers in a row.
Fresh garlic chives not only look attractive, they pack a garlic punch when added to a tossed noodle dish or a chili crab dish (see Chili Crabs with Ginger and Garlic Chives—page 64).
Every country has its characteristic aromas: the Balinese ones are best represented by the delicately perfumed ginger flower chopped into the babi guling roast pork salad; Thailand by its coriander and lemongrass with peppery chili and the lemony tang of its Tom Yam Soup and Mee Krob; Vietnam by the herbal fragrance of perilla in its beefy Pho soups.
The importance of aroma
Over three quarters of what we taste in fact comes from smell. When we put food in our mouth, its aromas travel to the back of our throat and up to the nose. To demonstrate this to my students, I have them eat a few grains of strong, aromatic cumin, fennel and sugar while their nose is blocked with a clothes pin. They get nothing—no sensation of taste or smell. Then I have them remove the clothes pin. Whoa! Smell and taste return with surprising force.
Max Lake, the famous food and wine critic and my personal mentor and friend, has reinforced and influenced a great deal of my own understanding of aroma and taste. He writes that olfactory memories are strong because the nose is connected to the primitive brain, and thus connected to our sensual drives. Perfumers and sommeliers have long been aware of this relationship. His analysis of how the part of the brain devoted to smells affects our enjoyment of food and wine serves to confirm what I have learned through personal experience—that the emotional and physical functions of the brain are conjoined via the nose.
Because they are so closely tied to personal and cultural memories, aromas affect different people in very different ways. The smells of a ripe durian and of a ripe blue cheese are equally strong, yet they evoke either repulsion or greedy anticipation in a person depending upon whether their upbringing is Asian or Western. However, a look at the long queues at a bread shop or an Italian pizza shop redolent with roasting garlic, will also confirm that many aromas are universal.
Elegant star anise pods—an aromatic star-shaped spice with the fragrance of cassia and anise.
I feel that taste memory—the ability to perceive and differentiate between aromas—is always present in a person, but requires training through cultivation and practice. I recall Amah’s natural ability to use her taste and smell memory to recreate flavors in a dish quite foreign to her. Once she tasted something, her own senses would guide her through a personal library of ingredients and formulae, enabling her to cook from intuition rather than from a written recipe. Even if the ingredients were not quite right, as when she tried a new curry recipe (she was not Indian, but Cantonese), she managed to arrive
