LAKSA AND OTHER HERESIES

About the only thing we can agree on is that laksa is spicy, and contains thick rice flour noodles. And seafood of some type. Laksa is comfort food by definition, and some people find comfort in bizarre ways, such as extremely sour broth, or overly oily curries. One has to wonder about their digestive systems, and depending on how depreciative one's personal make-up, sneer at their severly flawed background.

[Laksa: Peranakan and Indonesian seafood soup with rice noodles. There are two types, as well as intermediate kinds, namely coconut curry soup, and sour (tamarind broth) soup. Peranakans are descendants of locally born Chinese in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. They have a little non-Chinese in their ancestry, just like Indo-Dutch might have Chinese or Indonesian. Similarly, their cultures and cuisines will incorporate a broad spectrum of ingredients which were not traditional then, but might be customary now. Laksa is a perfect exemplar of cross-over cooking.]

Myself, I prepare it with a mild coconut milk broth, and have both sambal and fresh lime on hand to adjust the flavour, as well as fresh basil leaves.
In this I declare myself a heretic. Jerome and Abdullah would label me so.
Oh, and I tend to use yellow Thai curry paste.


Dried shrimp toasted and ground, kemiri nuts ditto, rice stick broken so that the whole thing can be eaten with a spoon. Fresh seafood if available, plus shredded cooked chicken and beansprouts. Thin coconut soup, made with chicken broth, touch of shrimp paste (蝦膏 'haa gou'; pâté de crevette), and a little fried garlic.
A roasted large tomato, skinned and chopped. Pinch of sugar. Spoonful yellow curry paste. Dash of fish dew, dash of a vinegar-based hot sauce.
Minced scallion or chives.


Think of it as a South East Asian Chinese Indo Dutch version of San Francisco Cioppino, but with everything entirely different.
Good with warm sourdough.


More rice noodle than chicken, more chicken than shrimp, crab, or chunked fish, fresh basil and a hefty squeeze of lime to finish, along with a squeeze of Sriracha sauce from Huy Fong, plus a spoonful oily sambal badjak.
More coconutty than sour, but with a fine balance of the two.
Seafood does not benefit from too much acid.
But it always needs heat.


Making laksa soup will take me several days, primarily because there are several ingredients that are low or absent from my larder at this point. Kemiri nuts and dried shrimp, as well as fresh seafood, beansprouts, and basil leaf, which I'll probably purchase sometime next week. And also the particular shrimp paste I like for some dishes, which is a Thai-style version of trassi or blatjang: 泰式蝦膏油醬 ('taai sik haa gou yau jeung').
Also good added to sambal goreng vegetables.
I cannot understand how I ran out.


NON-FOOD AFTER THOUGHTS

My mother, who during most of her youth and early adulthood ate very white food (which then included chop suey, chow mein, and sweet'n sour pork, as "international cuisine"), would have looked askance at all this.
Surely there is no useful nutrition there?

In her day, cookbooks advocated cooking shrimp and other crustaceans for an hour or more. So all Dutch, Chinese, and Indonesian seafood dishes were ab initio suspect. Crab was risky, lobster could kill you.

French and Italian food was something that had to be prepared by people who actually spoke French or Italian. Or German, but only if they had been properly trained by Frenchmen or Italians.

Food in Switzerland was fine.
The Swiss are all three.

Mercifully, she did not ask what my father and I put in the pot when we cooked dinner. She probably knew that we were vile barbarians, but she avoided the sambal, and was diplomatic.

Besides, we weren't in any evident agony, or visibly dying.

Several words here were not in her vocabulary.

Shrimp only need a few seconds.




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