runcible spoon

Like eating custard in a public toilet

We were late back last night, and scored a lift home from the station as a result. When the car rounded a sudden bend, I had the strangest sensation. It was as though I could smell durian. There was something coolly pungent about the scent.  Fruity, but with a whiff of the obscene.

We were in the depths of Sydney's anglified suburbia. Moreover, we were inside a car.  I put it down as just another one of the vivid travel longings I'd been experiencing of late. I'll see a battered metal sign, and think of Delhi, or watch the way shadows fall across wet footpath and think of Bangkok. Doughnuts are Tokyo, rye bread is Helsinki, and palm heart salad is London.

We got home and walked into the kitchen. There was the strongest smell of gas in there. I panicked, and checked the stovetop. The burners were off, but the smell remained. It was elusive, but carried with it a certain sweet hint of death.

Odd, I thought. Maybe that scent I could smell in the car was actually gas? The two were awfully alike: cool and lingering and pervasive.

We began to eat. Esther, Andrew's mother, walked in and casually announced that she and Robert had been eating durian before we got home. The durian had cost $2 a kilo at Woolworths - it was overripe, but cheap. Esther's own mother, perhaps homesick for Malaysia, had bought two and a half kilos.

In unison, Andrew and I exploded: 'I could smell it in the car!'

'Then I thought there was a gas leak in the kitchen,' Andrew continued. I was just elated to think I wasn't crazy.

Some have described this gustatory experience akin to 'eating custard in a public lavatory,' while 'smells like hell, tastes like heaven,' is another popular saying. I don't know that the scent is 'hellish' or foul per se - it's just indefinable, and seems to carry more than a hint of all the things that scream to humans, 'eating this is not a good idea.'

After dinner, the remainder of the durian was produced. It was nestled in a clear platic take-away box. The pale, fleshy segments looked like hunks of cheese, but the smell was something else. It was so heavy, so loaded: sweet in the way shit and rot and things that have decayed or turned are sweet. Sweet-bad. Sweet in a way where the smell worms inside your brain and sinks into your pores and membranes.

Yet there was a pungent, tangy savoury note as well. A sharp cheddar. Or onions. Or garlic. But bitter. Something biting into that sweetly rotting flesh. Hard like the sting from a slap.

Esther muttered darkly that the fruit did not taste as good to her as when eaten by the roadside in Malaysia or in Singapore. Something was lacking.

I ate a little, but my stomach didn't want to know. It was 11 at night, I'd just eaten a fish dish and I was desperately tired; my body seemed completely uninterested in inclining itself toward this fruit. My brain and tastebuds were in revolt. They could not agree on what this thing might be. Was it pleasantly sweet, or was it just a bad idea?

The kitchen smelt exactly like Tops Supermarket in BKK. It was like being back there. Esther put on a fan to try to disperse the scent. It was hanging thickly over the table, saturating our clothes and skin.

When I went back down this morning, the smell was still there.

They do things different in tha South

Tantilising photo from post entitled Brunetti: Hot Chocolate I Have Known at Diversionary Daily, a Perth-based blog.

Ever so slightly hyperventilating right now. Must. Go. To. Melbourne. Immediately.

Need to lie down.

Kopitiam

Last night's Asia Book Club was stomach-pleasingly good.  We had read (or, in many cases, almost finished reading) Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin. The author's real name is not actually Larkin - she has used a pseudonym in order that she not incriminate the many writers, intellectuals and everyday dissents with whom she spoke in Burma.

I thought Secret Histories was fascinating, as well as very nicely written. It was a notch above many similar books by other Westerners in that Larkin is fluent in Burmese and was herself born and raised in Asia. She currently lives in Bangkok.

Of course, my passion may also have been ignited by Larkin's many (and, some might say, reverential) descriptions of Burmese tea houses:

There is a pleasing rythm to the life of the Mandalay tea shops, and whole days can be lost inside them.  In the morning, bicycles and motorbikes crowd around them in congested rows as customers down their first cup of the day before going to work.  At lunchtime, the peak of the day's heat, the tea shops are lazy and quiet; the young waiting boys doze on the tables, while flies hover above them in sultry slow motion. In the late afternoon and early evenings the pace picks up as the boys become busy with orders for tea and snacks, and the shops are again noisy with chatter.

Mmm. Said tea is 'served honey-thick with condensed milk, and washed down with Oolong tea' as a chaser.

In light of all this, it is unsurprising to note that I fell in love with Kopitiam, the Malaysian hawker-style coffee shop where we found ourselves meeting to discuss the book. The atmosphere was just the way I like my small-time Asian eateries: poky, basic, bare-bones and cosy. A couple of golden lucky cats waved their open paws at us from high shelves and an industrial-strength airconditioner was blowing a refreshing gale. The little restaurant quickly became packed out with local Asian students schlepping in in shorts and rubber sandals to grab a fast, easy evening meal.

The char kway teow (hawker-style noodles) were fantastic, and the nasi lemak a real stand-out - the rice and potato/chicken curry being served on a plate studded with golden peanuts, fresh cucumber slices, hardboiled egg, sambal and tangy, pungent ikan bilis (like anchovies, but served dry and crispy). Please, Sir, may I have some more?

For afters, most of us sipped at steaming mugs of teh tarik - a Malaysian-style 'pulled tea' that is served frothy and sweet and suitably strong. It was without a doubt the best I have had outside of Penang. Just amazing.

Andrew, on the other hand, couldn't go past the Grass Jelly drink once he'd noticed it on the menu. The boy has an addiction. The drink had been misrendered as 'glass' jelly, but we decided that only added to the charm of the place.

Crimes in the name of noodle soup

"I taught him everything he knows about making a good soup and running a business, but he never greeted or thanked me. So I thought I'd make him taste a bit of pain."

Something that recently caught my eye is this: the vivid, quasi-murderous rage of noodle artisans.

I especially like the idea that the noodle crime has tapped into such an abiding foodie passion in Japan that the whole nation has been avidly following the case!

The scent of quince

The kitchen is presently overflowing with pumpkins. They sit rudely bumptious in their monkey grey skins, worn over deep-orange flesh like an old man wears a cardigan.

R can't stop buying them. He's a sucker for roadside stalls and produce markets and flavours that taste of otherwhereness. On the bench, pumpkins pile up next to Middle Eastern dried figs and a bowl of abundantly yellow quinces. When I come home from work in the evenings, the quinces send my nose mad; the whole kitchen is heavy with the intense perfume of that fruit. These quinces are like muskrats on heat, sending out a coquettish olofactory message to the world: 'we're ripe, we're ready, take us now.'  It's sweetly acid, this smell, with tones of icing sugar and overripe citrus and pear.

Two weeks ago, we dined on purple Congo potatoes, because R had finally located the buggers after hunting them down for a year. They are the potato equivalent of the purple Milka Cow that used to appear in ads for that chocolate, or the colour of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate wrappers. It goes all the way through the vegetable, you'll note. It's not just their skins.

It's nice that a colour that used to be reserved for royalty alone is now the property of potatoes too.

Even if they are a little disturbing to eat.