AN ACCIDENT OF CUISINE

Last year one of my friends described a restaurant dish he had eaten on the recommendation of the waiter as too gingery. The kitchen (white people, and Mexicans doing precisely and exactly what the white people had told them to do, better than an equivalent number of white people would have done) had gone overboard on the ginger, big time. He did not like it; coming from a culture that uses a lot of ginger, he felt that there were natural limits to its use. Like typical Anglos, they did not understand that.

Many white people go to excess when they bust out of their shells.
We've all met the weirdo who puts buckets of garlic in everything he cooks, as well as the people who insist the hotter the better, and repetitiously make themselves suffer in consequence.

This is often the result of bad white cooking.


I will admit that I too grew up with bad white cooking. Except for when my father took over the kitchen, or I snacked at the house of an "auntie". For "auntie", please read 'exile from Indonesia, living in the Netherlands after the revolution forced her and thousands of others to leave'. Valkenswaard had a fair number of such people (they're referred to as "Indos").
Some of them were 'uncles', of course.
Their food was fun.

Bad white cuisine can be alleviated by adding sambal (chilipaste), peanuts, fishpaste (trassi, blatjan, or petis), and a touch of garlic to almost everything.

Even tuna fish sandwiches.

Or salad.


ALTYD SAMBAL BY DE VIS

Nowadays one of my favourite dishes is pork or fish slices cooked with bitter melon and fermented black beans (dousi), served over rice with a generous shploop of Sriracha sauce. There's just something incredible crisp and fresh and greeny-green and herbal comforting bitter about bitter melon.
It's so good!

I'm also incredibly fond of seriously fatty pork chunks steamed with lots of ginger. Hot sauce -- either a homemade sambal or the bottle product from Huy Fong Foods -- plays a serious role in enjoyment of the dish.

Lovely pork siumai in Chinatown? Sriracha!

Oystersauce over vegetables?

Just add sambal.


It's not that I use huge amounts of hot sauce, but if chilies, ginger, and fish sauce suddenly became unavailable, I would feel obliged to commit serious insurrection. What kind of horrible ghastly barbaric primitive pissant place lacks those essentials?

Buncha damned Midwestern pablum snarfers!
Lutefisk!


Like anyone who grew up in the Netherlands, I still dip my French Fries in Mayonnaise. But Sriracha is also in play, and always takes the place of the ketchup which bad white people add to everything.

I have NO good words for American mustard.
That stuff is extremely vile.




==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================