AROMATIC THINGS

Savage Kitten has been one of the most fortunate things to have happened to me; getting that woman crazy enough to actually live with me has been another.
Even though she believes me to be a a weird white man, an utter deviant, and an obsessed sicko, it turns out we are 'simpatico' in a number of ways.
Apparently my weird sick deviance does not disturb her too much.

Well, not any more than is necessary.


My food habits sometimes did surprise her, but were not disturbing at all. She already knew that white people were extremely odd about food. We had fetishes and dislikes. We didn't just eat anything, unlike the Cantonese.
White people were unimaginative eaters - we would order sweet and sour pork over rice every single time.


She and I share the kitchen, more or less, but have divergent ideas about doing so.

If I'm doing the cooking, I can be interrupted at any time for conversation. Multitasking is what whitey does best in a kitchen, though it is debatable that whitey should actually be in the kitchen at all when conversation is necessary - the jury still out.
Conversation is often necessary. I should know that by now.

If she's cooking, however, I must keep my distracting tuchus out of the kitchen as much as possible - whatever is on the stove is a surprise.
Go smoke somewhere, don't bother me; I'm cooking!


Culinarily, my chief function in this relationship is to keep the kitchen stocked with interesting stuff.

She was happy to discover that I kept shrimp paste (Haahm haa jeung 鹹蝦醬) in the refrigerator, along with oyster sauce (ho-yau 蠔油) and various other fragrant condiments.

The 'library' of hot sauces, mostly homemade, was far less thrilling - chilipepper was a fearsome plant, its aficionados possibly psychopaths. Certainly, I was a bad example.

[There was a period several years ago when she kept discovering bags of sugar and jugs of vinegar around the apartment - for a while I had been making and selling my own hot sauce - which convinced her that she was living with a loony. Ferreavensakes, who stores sugar in a bookcase?!? Then some relatives came to town and gibbered about liquor stores and "delicious pastries", ecstatic every time they passed a bakery or place that sold vodka. This convinced Savage Kitten that I was in fact quite 'normal'.]

Homemade peanut sauce, ketjap manis, and stinky Indonesian salad dressings were good, one could use them in many ways.
Coconut milk, olive oil? Sherry instead of rice wine? Cool!
Mayonnaise, mustard, banana ketchup, and chutneys likewise had their uses.

Olives and capers, however, were exceedingly nasty things. Even today she has a hard time thinking of them as edible.

What she really appreciated were the spices.
Cantonese-American girls grow up in an culinary environment that has five-spice powder (ng-heung fun 五香粉), black pepper (Wu-chiew 胡椒), dried orange peel (chanpei 陳皮), and salt (yim 鹽) - Toishanese cooking relies on fresh natural tastes in judicious combinations, plus garlic, and ginger; savoury additions like soy sauce (cheurng-yau 酱油 OR see-yau 豉油), oyster sauce (ho-yau 蠔油); and a number of strongly flavoured dried foods used as lesser ingredients. Hence a multiplicity of spices is virtually unknown.

[Five spice powder is compounded of cloves (ding-heung 丁香), star-anise (baat gok 八角), cinnamon (gwaipei 桂皮), fennel seed (woei-heung 茴香), and Szechuan pepper (faa-chiew 花椒;also called Prickly Ash). These are also found uncombined as whole spices. Star-anise is often used in slow-cooked meats. Additionally, black pepper (胡椒) is used - but the name alone says that it is foreign to the Chinese: 胡椒 ('Wu-chiew') literally means 'Barbarian Pepper'.]


Words that were new to her nearly twenty years ago: Anise, annato, basil (tulsi), bird's eye, black cardamom, black mustard seed (bidji sawi), bukbok kunit (yellow spice mixture), caraway (djinten itam), cayenne, chile de arbol, chiles rocoto, chiltepin, cinnamon (kayu manis), cloves (tjengkei), coriander (katumbar), cumin (djinten), curry leaf, Delhwi garam masala, dried Thai chilies, dry ginger, fenugreek, galangal (langkuwang - dwarf ginger, also called 高良薑), green cardamom, green curry paste, guajillo, Habanero, Jalapeno, kaffir lime (djeruk perut), kala masala, kluwak nuts, lemon grass (sere), mace, nutmeg (buwa pala), oregano, paprika, paura (bukbok ura - red spice mixture), red curry paste, saffron, sambal santaka, Scotch Bonnet, serrano, Sindhi garam masala, sweet Spanish pepper, tamo kuntji ('Chinese keys'), thyme, turmeric (kunit), white pepper, yellow curry paste.


She can recognize most of these things by sight now. Which means she no longer has to call me in and ask "what is this?". That alone has made cooking more fun for her - she can happily putter about and experiment without needing me to enter the kitchen at all, and her ever increasing familiarity with my spice shelf has made the results extraordinary.

The role of a Dutchman is to keep her supplied with exotic spices.


Now keep quiet and go smoke somewhere!


A secondary role is to remember exactly where each spice is, from the other side of the firmly closed kitchen door.
No, don't come in, just tell me where I put it!

Naturally, I remember spices - I am a Dutchman.