A BIG OLD DAB WILL DO YOU

Not a single day has gone by that I haven't had hot sauce on something. After living in the Netherlands during my youth, I crave sambal. Sambal, of course, is as Dutch as I am, meaning that it's from somewhere else entirely. I was born in the United States, we moved there when I was two years old. Sambal comes from Indonesia, though there is evidence that the SriLankans invented it (the same word is 'sambol' in Sinhalese), and the basic building block without which it can not be sambal is the chili pepper, which is a native of Central America and Mexico.

My mother never touched the stuff. As far as she was concerned, the Dutch ate some weird shiznit, and it was probably poisonous. Many people I know are as convinced of that as she was, for entirely different reasons.

Much of what I eat is food that my mother would not countenance.
My father, on the other hand, first pointed me in that direction.
And would have gladly sampled most of it.


Both parents would likely have been okay with my frequent eating in Chinatown, which may surprise you. My mother missed Chinese food enormously when we lived in the Netherlands, and my father enjoyed good food, both as an eater and as a cook. But the Chinese food that they were familiar with then was a bit different than it is now.

Some of it would startle them.


Dried fish, fatty pork, nice greasy roast duck, lots of shrimp, steamed fresh fish, black bean sauce crabs, bitter melon, dried oysters either cooked with pork or put into rice porridge, fungus, hair vegetable, deep fried sushi.
Oyster sauce, scallion and ginger shellfish, sautéed clams.
Cooked lettuce, red bean pastries.
Curry puffs, cheung fun.


AND SAMBAL: COCK SAUCE

To the shock of many Cantonese, I crave chili sauce with a lot of things.
Almost everything listed above tastes better with Sriracha.
Even fresh seafood. Especially seafood.
It brings out the sweetness.
Sriracha rocks.

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