As the week went on, lifting pot lids became the major activity in the afternoon, when preparing the evening meal got under way at around five. Donna didn’t hesitate to ask for my help. Once I had crossed that threshold into her culinary domain, I became her new sous chef, or maybe just a heaven-sent helper to do the slicing and dicing. ‘You cut these, please,’ Donna would say, handing over a few red capsicums for a Chinese concoction she was planning that evening. Fair enough, I thought; it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to lift pot lids at will. Pearl and Pat looked vaguely shocked as Donna and I became increasingly more familiar. But maybe they also knew that Donna took no prisoners, for I was beginning to feel more and more like an appliance.
I had my own way of paying back. Teasing Donna was easy for me, especially since I had a reliable two-woman audience to count on for applause. A simple question, thrown out in jest but laced with mock gravitas – ‘Are you sure you want so many onions in the stir-fry? It might overwhelm the dish’ – was guaranteed to get a rise. Donna’s you’re-a-dead-man expression as she whipped her head around from the stove was as predictable as a Swiss clock.
But I craved more than just an afternoon play date. I wanted to find out where all the fabulous food came from.
‘Will you take me to the market with you? And to the fish store before you make sushi?’ I asked on that first day. ‘We’ll see,’ Donna said.
After breakfast on the second morning, without a word of warning, Donna appeared on the deck and announced, ‘We go now.’
‘Go where?’ I asked
‘To the fish market,’ she said. So off we went to the little green ‘shack’ at the water’s edge on the other side of the island. Donna had promised lobster that night, and already the boats, in all shades of Crayola colours, were pulling up on the beach. I marvelled as men held up great clawed creatures, just pulled from the Caribbean. Donna talked with them in a dialect so fast, furious and foreign that I couldn’t find an English word to save me, although I knew they were hidden in the conversation. Would I have walked up to these guys and struck up a conversation had she not been with me? Not on your life; I would have felt like a number one fool. Donna was my key into their world, giving me a kind of VIP status that money alone couldn’t buy.
The guy who owned the fish market, really more of a store that acted as a clearing house, had ‘proud’ written all over his handsome, youthful face. His small green hut was a bit deceptive, for inside it was all spit and polish, with trays of whole fish on ice fronting a long sink used for cutting each one up to a customer’s specifications. The storage refrigerator was top of the line. On the wall to one side was an Obama sticker. It was mid-January, and our president was about to be inaugurated. I felt a swell of pride that he was being honoured on this small volcanic chunk of land closer to South America than to the United States.
A few European tourists had ventured in to inspect the catch of the day. I felt infinitely superior to them as they poked and sniffed around before settling on a few fillets that were quickly wrapped before they scooted out the door. I was still chatting with the store’s owner, still oohing and aahing as more fish came in. After Donna and I picked out our lobster, she took a picture of me next to the man who had caught it, holding it high as we both beamed while trying to say ‘cheese’, as Donna had commanded.
We were ‘downtown’ now, which meant that we had to pay a visit to the two other great establishments across from the fish store: the fruit man and the grocery store. The fruit man sat next to his stand on a chair that was slightly tilted for maximum comfort. His hat was halfway down his head. Except for the fact that his table was crammed with exotic specimens in a riot of colours, he struck me as the Universal Fruit Man, for his counterpart was everywhere in New York – indeed, throughout the world. It made me think that all sidewalk vendors must attend a school somewhere to learn how to sit at just the right angle, with their hats perfectly cocked, while mastering the art of the blank expression.
Across the street, something even more familiar loomed: the grocery store. While it had its Caribbean touches, I felt as if I’d been to this place many times in the course of my life. How different can a store be when its shelves are stacked with mostly familiar items? And here I was for the first time surrounded by fellow whites, who were speaking English, yes, but also German, French and Italian. My cultural focus had shifted, but all it did was make me feel cooler than I had before. ‘I’m with Donna, folks,’ I was thinking, ‘so best not to get in our way.’
On a return trip to Mustique – 21 January, to be exact – I bought a local St Vincent newspaper with ‘OBAMA’ splashed across the front page. I also took a photo of an adorable little blond boy who was sitting on the checkout counter in a sea of his mother’s groceries. Suddenly, I was being reprimanded. His mother suggested, in a staccato accent, that perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. ‘People are on Mustique for privacy,’ she said. ‘There are many celebrities.’
I immediately realised my error and apologised profusely, even holding up the camera to let her see me deleting the photo. But I couldn’t help thinking back to dinners at the villa, where I would take photos with total abandon, mostly of Pearl or Pat carrying out new plates from Donna’s stove, to document what would become a treasured book of recipes. Pat pleaded that she was too shy for all of this, but Pearl at least knew how to fight back: ‘You do not know how to relax. Why don’t you sit down for five minutes and do nothing?’ Never, I thought, when I’m having this much fun.
Joyriding all over the island, back and forth to the store and fish market, with the occasional detour for a little sightseeing, became the pre-chopping highlight of the day. The going could be slow on the narrow roads, and Donna never hesitated to tell me to stop if we were passing one of her chums with whom she wanted to catch up – a cart-to-cart conversation, in blazing sun or afternoon downpour – before moving on.
For an entire week, the day began each morning after breakfast with, ‘Come on, we go now.’ Donna’s all-aboard call always felt like a whim, as nothing had ever been discussed prior to departure. On the last day, though, I was prepared but also confused, for Donna wouldn’t say where we were headed. She just kept giggling as we drove to the mystery destination and I continued begging for information.
When we reached the beachfront villa I knew something was up, for this place had ‘special’ written all over it, from the location, smack on the sand, to the long gated entryway that spoke of wealth and seclusion. ‘My sister is Mick Jagger’s cook,’ Donna said. ‘This is his place.’
For a child of the 1960s, entering Mick Jagger’s home might equal the thrill a modern teen would feel if invited to visit all the vampires on the set of the Twilight movies. Denise greeted us at the door for a guided tour. There was Mick’s pink pool table. Denise and Donna cheerfully posed behind it for a snap. On a bureau was a picture of his mother, smiling and waving furiously. I laughed. Donna and Denise laughed, because I was laughing.
We all ended up in the kitchen, where I inspected the drop-dead appliances. They made the ones at Sapphire, which looked liked they might have belonged to June Cleaver from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ at one time, seem horribly out of date. I even wondered if Donna might be a tad envious. I would have been. We finished the tour with coffee and cake, as I learned that the two sister-cooks had six other siblings – five girls, whose names all started with ‘D’, and a brother, Oral. Suddenly, that was funny too.
On my last night at Sapphire, I drank the juice from my ceviche straight from the bowl, just after Pearl left the room so she wouldn’t see my exhibition of bad manners. After dinner, I helped clear plates, as I’d done most nights, and stopped worrying if pitching in might actually be insulting. After all, Donna, Pearl and Pat were professionals, with jobs to do, but weren’t they now also my friends? They were both, I decided, and friends don’t let friends clear plates by themselves. I rang the dinner bell, and we had a final laugh.
I email Donna now and then to let
her know of my progress with her soufflés (the one with marmalade is as killer as her cheese creation). I tell her what worked and what went wrong. She always writes back, with advice for fixing my mistakes. At New Year’s, she surprised me with a note of cheer and well wishes.
I wonder sometimes if Donna, Pat and Pearl were sorry to see me go. Or relieved. Maybe they were happy to get back to the dinner bell, with guests who followed the rules, guests who never got in the way of their duties by lifting pot lids and clearing tables. I think about them often and ask myself what I got out of my week on Mustique. The answer is always the same: I met a terrific cook, who shared her recipes with me and took me to the edge of the sea to find lobster. Donna is one of many friends I know who are good cooks, but she is the only one who lives in the Caribbean. We are twenty-first century pen pals. And that’s something pretty wonderful to bring home.
Salad Days in Burma
KAREN J. COATES
Karen Coates has spent a dozen years covering food, environment and social issues across Asia for publications around the world. A correspondent for Archaeology magazine, she writes a regular Food Culture column for the Faster Times. She was Gourmet’s Asia correspondent until the magazine closed in 2009. Karen is the author of Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War and co-author of Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World’s Largest Ocean. She is a 2010–11 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can get another taste of her writing on her food blog, Rambling Spoon.
It’s November in northern Thailand, right on the brink of seasonal change from sultry to sublime. The rains have ended and the evening brings a wintry nip. We crowd around wooden tables with chipped red paint, sipping strong Shan tea from little blue-and-white cups. I grab my notebook and the feast begins.
For the past three weeks I’ve been teaching basic journalism to Southeast Asians, and tonight I’ve invited my Burmese students to dinner. I’d like to repay them for a slew of small kindnesses – for carrying my bag, buying my rice, bringing my tea during classroom breaks. But I’m also hoping for a favour. I’d like them to teach me everything they can about Burmese cooking. I lead them behind a boisterous local market to a small, quiet alley with a little Burmese restaurant tucked inside a garden of leafy trees.
Shredded ginger salad, gin thote, arrives with peanut, tomato and onion in a waft of pungent, nasal-clearing goodness. The salad – the thote – is the welcome mat of any Burmese meal. This I learned on my first trip to Burma several years before. My students tell me that almost every thote begins with shallots fried in peanut oil, garlic mixed with onion, fish paste, salt and something sour, such as tamarind or lime. Chickpea powder, I’m told, is key; it adds a hefty graininess to the salad that I have always loved.
The students order a plate of pork in soybean paste, wat pone yae gyi. Sauce is paramount to this dish, I learn. ‘The main thing is the juice. It’s better than the meat,’ says one of the students, who counts eating his wife’s cooking among his favourite hobbies.
We try the pork curry, wat hmyit chin, with a sweet pickled bamboo that takes months to prepare. ‘We have two kinds of bamboo – sour and sweet,’ another student explains. This, he says, is like ‘infant bamboo, infant of the big bamboo tree.’
A heady dish of fish paste, nga pi, comes in a ring of raw vegetables. ‘This is essential food,’ says the only female in the crowd. ‘In Burmese villages some people cannot eat a meal, so they eat this with rice and vegetables, and that’s all. Because they are poor.’ As a single woman from a family with little money, she rises each morning before the sun to cook for parents and siblings, then goes to work to earn money for the family coffers.
Most of these students are men, and they don’t cook at home. But they learn everything by watching the women in their lives. They know as much, in fact, about cooking as their female colleague. Towards evening’s end, the eldest in the group leans to my ear, and he says: ‘Karen, I want to tell you something because I think it is useful for your story. We all know how to cook our curry because it is in our culture.’ Every woman cooks, and she talks to her friends about food. Every man eavesdrops, and he learns the secrets of the Burmese plate.
I ask his opinion of this restaurant. ‘Is it the real Burmese food?’
‘Nearly, nearly!’ he answers with a big, toothy grin. Translation: it’s as good as it gets away from his wife’s kitchen.
We’re all stuffed and happy, chatting over little cups of tea, nibbling on sweet cubes of jaggery, customarily served gratis. I duck downstairs and open my wallet, but the waitress shakes her head. The bill has been paid, and I never even see it. My students don’t have cash to spare. Yet their kindness never runs out, and it’s always a few steps ahead of my own.
It’s early January. My husband, Jerry, and I are on a plane to Burma, our first return to the country in six years. It’s a short flight from Bangkok to Yangon, barely an hour, but it feels like a journey between worlds. Time lags half an hour on touchdown: 10am in Bangkok is 9.30am in Burma, which sets a pace thirty minutes askew to the rest of the region. Author Chris Offutt once wrote that time doesn’t move forward; it stays put, and people move through it instead. Humanity has its comings and goings, but time stands still around the commotion.
It’s that way in Burma. Little has visibly changed in six years. A few new buildings and billboards, a few cell phones and internet shops. But little else seems different for the people. It looks eerily similar to what I remember. But the Burmese people move – constantly, swiftly, with necessity. And the moving is never easy: rusty old Toyota taxis with broken windows and missing knobs; buses crammed with bodies, bumping over potholed streets; rickshaws with wobbly wheels pedalled by drivers with cracked and callused feet.
Jerry and I spend eighteen hours on an overnight ferry through the Irrawaddy Delta, to the city of Pathein. We sleep in the open, on the hard metal floor above rumbling engines one deck down. Each passenger is given a rectangle of space, approximately two and a half feet wide and five feet long, on which to keep body and luggage. I count 130 people squeezed together, head to head, toe to toe, all of them crammed into a space the size of a three-car garage. Everyone is kind and polite, taking careful steps so as not to tread upon another passenger’s mat while moving between the deck and the fetid bathrooms.
Vendors pass through, shouting offers of fish and rice, fried fritters and fruit, and a spectacularly spicy and bitter tea-leaf salad known as laphet thote. It’s a national snack made from pickled leaves, crispy dried yellow peas and beans, sharp raw garlic, potent red capsicum, a drizzle of oil, a hint of sour. It’s a pleasantly bitter sensation, sour but savoury, with a unique crunchy, oily, moist consistency that ends in dragon-fire breath born of so much garlic and chilli. Jerry brings me a flimsy plastic plate with a dollop of salad, and I lap up one luscious green bite after another.
We sleep that night to the constant chug of the engine beneath us and wake to a saffron sun, lifting over the mangroves of a vast delta.
It’s three months later, and we’re back in Burma. Yangon is a sauna in April, its pavement like hot coals, its air like blistering steam. It’s the season of waiting – for rain, for relief, for release.
I’m teaching creative nonfiction writing to a small group of journalists. For days, we hash out the differences between fiction and nonfiction – blatant distinctions to me, but not to my students. Is a how-to manual fiction or nonfiction? A movie review? If a reporter writes a truthful article but makes up the main character, do I call it fiction? (I call it verboten.)
The students hurl questions at me for hours. So seldom is the truth allowed in print that Burma’s best writers tell it through imagined stories – this I learned on my previous trip. Forty years of that, and readers’ minds are blurred. People know the difference between truth and lies, but they no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. So we discuss Dexter Filkins, John McPhee, Peter Hessler, Susan Orlean. We read Chris
Jones’ prize-winning story ‘The Things that Carried Him’, and I email him a list of students’ questions about method and story structure (to which he replies at great length).
At lunch break, we take our conversations to the corner canteen. We sit at tiny tables with little stools beneath leafy trees eating homemade curries, soups and thotes.
Right around this time, I pitch pickled tea as an article for a new travel magazine, and the editor jumps. When I tell the class interpreter that I’ve been assigned to do a story on laphet thote, his eyes begin to dance. He teaches me a term, shoo-shee, which is onomatopoeia for the sound one makes when fanning the lips after eating a piquant plate of the salad. The Burmese don’t just like this dish. They feel it in their teeth. They gobble it up, then swipe a finger through the juices and lick that finger clean. That last taste, a young reporter tells me, is better than the salad. It is the concentrated essence of every ingredient combined.
I set off with one of my students on an afternoon mission to find the best of the city’s laphet thote. We trudge through scalding heat and black puffs of smog belched from old buses as we angle towards Sule Pagoda. There we find a long-time shop that serves excellent salads made to order – each customer can select the number of chillies, the amount of oil and the desired amount of pickled tea.
But this is not the way most Burmese eat laphet thote, my student tells me. A small plate of laphet typically costs 500 kyat (50 cents) at the corner shop. ‘This is expensive,’ he says. So people of few means – as in, mostly everyone – buy the ingredients in their local market and take them home to prepare. Every market has a laphet thote aisle with sacks and bins of pickled tea, dried beans, seeds and peas. ‘Many Myanmar people eat laphet salad and rice for their dinner,’ my friend says. ‘They are very busy and they have not much money.’
A Moveable Feast Page 6
