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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 and added it to her own store of cooking 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 at the desired flavor anyway by adding other ingredients—for example a thick soy sauce. Friends often wondered why Amah’s curry had such powerful flavors. This ability to recreate flavors from memory is one of the most desirable gifts that all good chefs the world over possess.

This leads me to the concept of yin and yang. Another attribute of Asian cooks is the ability to achieve a balance in their cuisine between the opposing energies of yin (earth, darkness, cold and receptivity) and yang (sunlight, heat and activity). In food this is important because some foods are known to be cooling (yin) and others heating (yang). This relationship is encouraged and fostered in both aroma and flavor, and has little to do with actual temperature, but more with creating heating and cooling sensations in the body with dishes and their ingredients.

Pickled garlic can be truly surprising when used in salads and meat dishes and can be easily made at home.

Yin aromas have a calming effect on the chi (life force or human energy). Examples of this are the delicate, almost feminine perfumes of the grassy pandanus and green teas, the citrusy lemongrass, the floral bouquets of the ginger flower or the delicate keng hua (cactus flower). Yang aromas are warm and stimulating. Examples are pepper, ginger, chili and the musky and nutty aromas of spices and some meats. Do not turn down a cup of “heaty” ginger tea offered to you when you have a cold coming on—the aromas will clear the sinuses and the ginger will warm your chest.

I have often felt homesick for the tastes and smells and that little chili patch back home, and for the Asian kitchens which always beckon with their spicy, intriguing aromas that change each day as the daily menu changes. Living in Australia, I slowly came to realize that in the West herbs are subtle and gentle, whereas the herbs used by Asians are intense and fiery, and clash together as they cook in the wok. Moreover, the spices that are strong in their own right, such as cumin, coriander and fennel, are often dry-roasted to give them added punch. This represents a major difference in our cultures. Our cuisine in the East is so aromatic because that is what is most important to us. Good Asian cooks are trained to bring out the aromas of each individual spice or herb. Garlic aromas are teased out in woks, and curry pastes are slowly cooked until they became aromatic. The abundance of perfumed ingredients makes it easy to create such food once you understand this simple point. To this day I live by one of my Amah’s major tenets: “ Ahh, ho heong, ho sek mah!” which means “Good smell, good to eat!”

Friends who travel with me to Asia are enraptured. One friend, a television producer, used to looking at things through the confining lens of a camera, turned to me in the midst of filming a market and remarked that he wished he had a “smell-a-vision” camera. Canadian and Australian friends repeatedly walk into my kitchen and are seduced by the aromas, immediately heading for the stove and lifting up the lids to breathe deeply of their contents, trying to analyze each of the dozen herbs and spices I had painstakingly layered into a tender rich Rendang. An Australian diplomat who had lived in Asia for many years once walked into my home and immediately asked whether I had forgotten he was coming to dinner. Prior to his arrival, I had cleaned the kitchen thoroughly and sprayed it with air freshener to extinguish the curry smells and he assumed there was nothing cooking! I never did that again. Today I bask in the aromas of my food and its glorious flavors, and my kitchen remains a proud outpost of my native land.

This book was born from a discovery that Asian flavors and aromas are simple to recreate in your kitchen. Follow my Amah’s rule “If it doesn’t smell good, it will not taste good!” Just go ahead and have fun with these aromas.

Perfect for a summer lunch that speaks of rarefied paradise (see Black Pepper Lobster Tails with Garlic Butter—page 183) with a glass of your favorite bubbly.