YOU HAVE OFFENDED MY ANCESTORS!

A good friend was once repulsed by my posting a drawing of bittermelon on social media, and likened it to Kermit The Frog after a spin in the blender. Obviously, as a child she was made to eat it, and still harboured longlasting angst over the experience. I, on the other hand, discovered it in my teens when eating a late lunch over at an auntie's house, and was rather delighted by how different it tasted from vegetables at home. My mother was the daughter of an army officer, so naturally they had servants and a cook from The South. In those days proper Anglo-Americans did not believe in flavour. Not in vegetables. Those had to be cooked for hours to repress any savage Catholic tendencies.

Stringbeans? Four hours of boiling.

My grandmother once put stringbeans in the pressure cooker and set the timer at thirty minutes. I decided to have dinner out at a Chinese restaurant with friends that evening. In my teens I had started cooking stringbeans for only very short periods of time.
Excellent with dried shrimp, chilipaste, and a splash of stock.

After brief exposure to Southern and Midwestern "cuisine", I concluded that it was all far too English in concept, and have mostly avoided it ever since. Don't try to talk me out of that.

My repulsed friend, by the way, is Parsee. Parsee food is quite good.

Well, perhaps not how they do bittermelon.

Bittermelon at Cantonese restaurants is frequently cooked with fermented black bean sauce and fatty meats, or seafood. Personally I find it delightful -- it's so greeny green in taste -- but I can understand that many other white people will avoid it, because it does have a bitterness which Anglos do not associate with "nice". And at Chinese restaurants Anglos want things deep-fried then sauced with a brightly-hued gloop that incorporates plenty of sugar.
Plus salt and cornstarch. That's real Chinese food.

It's one of my favourite vegetables.

There are some things without which civilized eating would be downright unthinkable. Chilies. Fermented fish products (garum inter alia). Garlic. Ginger. Soy sauce. Cooking wine of whatever type. Citrus. Spices and herbs used liberally. Highly refined sugar.

If that last is the only one present in a noticeable quantity, you may be stuck in England or the heathen parts of the United States. And augmenting what's on your plate with glops of ketchup or mayonnaise.


One cannot read about the fall of Rome without realizing that for the next millenium food in large parts of Europe was nasty and Brutish. No wonder they martyred saints and burned people at the stake.



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