Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve just spent a week in Barcelona, partly attending the IABC EuroComm Conference 2008 where I chaired a panel discussion on social media and partly for a holiday. I’ll be blogging about the conference and the issues that came out of the panel discussion separately. But being a foodie, my first post about the trip has to be about the food we had there!

They call it tapas, the tid-bits of food that the Spanish serve in the early evening before the main meal. It’s very civilised compared to the UK where you generally gobble a packet of crisps and some peanuts with your pint at the pub. The Spanish lay out fried potatoes, spicy morsels of chorizo, sliced octopus, fried calamari and cuttlefish, fried aubergines - the list goes on. Over a long drink and great conversation, it’s just the best way to unwind after a hard day’s sightseeing or shopping. But I have to say, it makes me think of dim sum, the Chinese tid-bits that you generally have for Sunday lunch - in Australia, they call it “yum chah”, I think. My contention is that the Spanish got the idea from the Asia-Pacific region via the likes of Marco Polo, Vasco de Gama etc.

And it’s not just tapas. In Barcelona, there’s a speciality dish which is stir-fried seafood vermicelli - which looks and tastes exactly like the Chinese “chow mai fan” that you get in Malaysia. We would eat it with chilli sauce but they serve it with a daub of garlic butter - equally yummy!

We also came across a fried springroll thing but instead of veg and pork, it is stuffed with chorizo and onions.

And we were struck by the word for butter “mantega”, which is the same word for butter used in Malay. Staying with linguistics, the Spanish word “nona” means woman - I wonder if it is related to the Malaysian word “nonya” which refers to a Straits Chinese woman?

I’m pretty sure these are not merely fanciful connections on my part. Malacca and the Straits of Malacca were critical in the spice trade between West and East during the 1400s so I’m sure words, food and ideas travelled with the sailing ships between the Spanish ports and Malaya. In particular, I was struck by the Arabic influence in Spanish due to the many centuries of Moorish occupation and of course, Arabic continues to be a strong influence in Malay language and culture.

What do you think? If you have any other examples of linguistic or culinary connections between East and West, please do share your thoughts!

Photo: thanks to Gbworx from flickr.com (CCL)

One of my favourite radio podcasts is Thinking Allowed on the BBC, hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor. A recent programme discussed the sociological implications of the British Sandwich - whether cutting it in triangles shows middle class pretensions whereas cutting it into oblongs demonstrates working class earthiness. I had no idea there was so much that could be read into a couple of slices of bread.

I’ve never been keen on sandwiches. I tend to prefer the Asian way of eating - Asian meals do not involve much wheat or gluten or cold food so the sandwich is a strange concoction from that perspective. But in the UK for many years, the sandwich has been the staple of quick lunches so I tolerate it and have had my fair share of lunchtime sarnies. I’m glad to see, though, that more and more Asian style fast food lunching is becoming available - you can buy a nice hot meal with spicy chicken and rice for around £5 and take it away to eat back at the office, just like in Kuala Lumpur (though the price is probably 3 times more than Asian prices!).

The one kind of sandwich that I did love as a kid in Malaysia was a chicken sandwich with lots of butter and white pepper on soft white bread. Chicken sandwiches were a treat that we had when we went “out station” - meant to sustain us on the long drive to my grandparents’ in Taiping, but often devoured within the first hour or so of getting into the car! Their novelty lay in their being, well, Western but they also tasted great because the chicken was prepared with Chinese style ingredients and included the dark meat and the crunchy skin. (In the UK, shop bought chicken sandwiches are made from the bland skinless white meat so can be dry and tasteless, unfortunately.)

For pure evil indulgence, we tried a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich once - said to be Elvis Presley’s favourite. You butter the white bread on the outside and pile the inside high with the squishy ingredients, then deep fry the oozing slab. Yummy and gruesome all at the same time. I’m not sure what the sociological implications of this type of sandwich would be….

Photo: thanks to sheilaz413 from flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve never appreciated roast turkey with all the trimmings. I find it bland and lacking in celebratory festiveness. I am especially not fond of brussel sprouts! So the traditional Christmas meal is a bit of an ordeal for me. Which is not to say I don’t like turkey as such. We often eat turkey steak or turkey escalope or diced turkey throughout the year - but cooked with wine Italian-style or soy sauce or curry Asian-style.

The problem with the traditional roast turkey meal for me is that when I was a child in Malaysia, Christmas food was just so much more - more tasty, more spicy, more varied, more exciting. We would spend Christmas with my grandparents in Taiping and the preparations would start weeks in advance. As a child, I never was aware of all the effort and hard work that Grandma put into it - with the help of all the aunties, great-aunties, cousins and second cousins all over Taiping. But everyone in the large extended family would have got involved in the vast cooking marathon that would have been needed to lay on the feast that fed over a hundred people.

In the heat of the tropics, we would have a full-blown Christian Christmas, complete with tree, Santa and carols.

The kids’ job was to decorate the house. The older second cousins would be in charge - tall, good-looking Paul who seemed so grown up to us and broad-shouldered, grinning Jason. They would be the ones up the ladders stringing the paper chains, placing the balls on the higher reaches of the Christmas tree. We younger kids would drape tinsel on the lower branches of the tree, balance cards on shelves.

On the day of the big party itself, the living room would be cleared and chairs set out for the carol service. There would be a churchful of people in there, singing our hearts out. One of the fat great-uncles would always dress up as Santa in the red suit and jolly mask, arriving at the end of the service when the lights went out. He would have a sack full of presents and ho-ho-ho his way round the room, scaring the babies with the strange staring mask.

But when it came to the food, we celebrated Malaysian-style - with curries and spicy fried dishes, rice and satay: and enough to feed an army. Memories of delicious Asia will always be associated with festivities and celebration for me so a pallid turkey for Christmas, no matter how moist you might claim it is or how Christmas-y just does not do it for me at all.

What are your memories of childhood Christmases? Please add a comment and let me know!

Photo: thanks to Mr_Woo from flickr.com (CCL)

I blogged about comfort food last week. This week, I got to thinking about comfort drinks. You know, those hot, comforting drinks that just make you feel cosy and safe.

Here’s my list of top comfort drinks:

# hot milk with honey - especially when coming home cold and late on a winter’s evening and you need something soothing to wind you down, ready for bed

# creamy hot chocolate - I tend to prefer this earlier in the evening as it’s usually too rich and makes me feel a bit too full to be going to bed right after drinking it

# hot Milo - mmm, this reminds me of my childhood in Malaysia

# hot Ribena - another childhood reminder. We used to have this in Malaysia if we were sick and in bed.

# hot toddy ie hot water, whisky, lemon and honey - great for colds and flu in winter. I enjoyed a big mug of this every evening for a week recently when I was down with flu - until we ran out of the cheap whisky and found a 40 year old Johnnie Walker at the back of the cupboard, which was too good to mix. That was when we turned to neat vintage whisky instead…. which worked pretty well, too!

What’s on your list of top comfort drinks?

Photo: thanks to wingyipstore.co.uk

Now that it’s cold and wet, and the night seems to encroach steadily on the day, my body is yearning for comfort food. It doesn’t help that the central heating at home seems to be on the blink and the air-conditioning at work thinks it’s still summer and I seem to have spent most of the last ten days scrunched up in a physical huddle, feeling cold and miserable. All I want to eat is everything that is stodgy and unhealthy:

# Deep fried fish in thick batter with greasy chips, reeking of salt and vinegar - preferably in newsprint paper held in both cold hands as the grease oozes through the paper. And with that distinct greasy paper smell.

# Hot bangers and mash, in a pool of steaming gravy

# Steamed sponge pudding in a pool of treacle, drenched in hot yellow custard

# Juicy minced beef baked into lasagne, moussaka, cottage pie or shepherd’s pie

# Apple stewed with dates and cinnamon and then baked in the oven with a thick, sugary, crunchy crumble on top and enveloped in double cream or more hot yellow custard

# The ultimate English/ American breakfast and/ or mixed grill - bacon, egg, sausages, chips, toast dripping with butter, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, hash browns, steak, grilled lamb chops, grilled pork chops, all washed down with a strong cup of milky, sweet tea

Funny, isn’t it, how the list is made up of primarily English food? Imagine being faced with any of that in the tropical heat, while you’re drenched in sweat and panting. In contrast, this icy, rainy November weather is perfect - especially if you’ve been out in the cold and wet doing something spiffingly British like going for a brisk walk in the rain up a hill or gardening!

What’s your favourite comfort food? Do you try and justify it first like doing some random exercise in the rain? Or do you just eat it anyway, to hell with guilt?

Photo: thanks to ukmari from flickr.com (CCL)

I never liked Continental breakfasts. To me, a Continental breakfast is a dry bread roll, a dollop of butter and some tasteless jam. Given the choice in most hotels between an English breakfast and a Continental one, I’d go for the bacon, sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, fried bread, grilled tomato and baked beans every time. It’s a no-brainer.

But then, when we were on holiday in Delft a couple of weeks ago, we stayed at the Hotel Emauspoort and they served a Continental breakfast that has changed my life. Well, my eating habits anyway.

Buffet-style, they laid out home-made warm and fluffy croissants and an array of rye bread, fruit bread and other baked goodies. We could help ourselves to cheese, ham, salami, gherkin and boiled eggs. There was a bottomless bowl of fresh fruit salad with strawberries and jugs of fresh orange juice. There was yoghurt and milk and cereal, too.

After the first morning, I found myself day-dreaming about the next day’s breakfast, already feeling the croissant break crisply and yet softly in my hands, tasting it’s fresh, yeasty, buttery flavour in my mouth. I just loved that European mix of cheese and cold meats and gherkin in the morning - excellent for protein and yet light and refreshing. And afterwards, a bowl of fresh fruit salad to cleanse the palate.

The next weekend, I was back in London and we went out for breakfast with a friend. I had an English breakfast and found myself not really enjoying the over-salty, chewy bacon and the over-salty sausage and that oily full feeling you get with fried foods. I longed for the fresh tastes of Delft.

I’d always enjoyed the British morning fry-up - it’s what this country specialises in. Now, it looked like its place in my Breakfast Hall of Fame was about to be eclipsed by the rising star of a Dutch breakfast. Was the breakfast at the Hotel Emauspoort really the best breakfast I’d had to date? It got me thinking about the other great breakfasts I’d ever had.

Alongside the English breakfast, I’ve also loved the so-called American or cowboy breakfast - steak, egg and hash browns. When I was on a road trip across California and Arizona years ago, we’d often walk over to a diner like Denny’s from our motel room and I’d indulge in a fortifying steak and black coffee before setting off in the car.

In Malaysia, breakfast could be anything from deep fried or steamed dumplings to prawn noodle soup, nasi lemak, laksa, curry and fried noodles. The Chinese Dim Sum is a selection of tidbits that in some places is eaten as breakfast. There’s something special about sitting at a table in a Malaysian market next to a steaming vat of curry parked on a three-wheeled motorbike, with the chaos and noise of the stalls and traders around you, eating laksa in the early morning.

If I had to choose my favourite breakfast in the world, which would it be?

Oh dear, I can’t make a choice. I love them all.

English fry-up? Laksa? Steak?

If you forced me to choose, I’ll have to go for the steak, egg and fries - the American breakfast. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me of the open vistas of Arizona. Perhaps its that satisfying feeling of being set for the day, packed with protein and good coffee - and without being as oily or salty as an English breakfast.

At any rate, it looks like the delicate taste of fluffy croissants in a charming European setting is great but just not great enough to be my No. 1 Favourite Breakfast of All Time!

What’s your Favourite Breakfast?

I’m going to tag some bloggers to see what their Favourite Breakfasts are:

1. My cousin Pey Colborne, who is a poet and also a foodie. Her blog has photos of meals she’s about to have and that her husband (what a star!) has made for her. She’s bound to have something (poetic?) to say about great breakfasts.

2. Massage therapist and friend Melanie Crowe, who is South African but based in the UK. She blogs about massage, de-stressing and health. I’m curious to know if she’s fond of fry-up breakfasts or if she eats tasty yet healthy breakfasts.

3. Silvia Cambie, who is my associate and co-author of New Trends in International Public Relations, is Italian and now also lives in the UK. She has lived all over Europe so I’m hoping she can share some breakfast delights from the Continent.

When you’ve been tagged, the rules of this tagging game are:

A. Blog on the theme of My Favourite Breakfast on your blog.

B. Link back to (i) the person who tagged you AND (ii) to this originating post My Favourite Breakfast on Fusion View.

C. Tag three more bloggers to share the fun.

D. Refer back to these rules on your blog.

Even if you haven’t been tagged, you can still share your thoughts (or tastes!) - add a comment or email me. Or write about it on your blog, link back to this post and follow the rules A-D.

Photo: thanks to fremontdock.com

This is the last in my series on the influence of food in my life. Having cried over English school food and introduced my Uni friends to nasi lemak and laksa, it’s time to bring the English over to tropical Malaysia for some real treats…

When I’ve brought my English friends back to Malaysia for a holiday, they are always taken by the hospitality and friendliness of my extended family and my Malaysian friends. Uncles and aunts and cousins always make a point of inviting us all out for a huge slap-up meal, making sure that the UK visitors try the tastiest and most exotic dishes. My local friends take us out to the pasar malam for hawker food that my guests have never experienced before. The challenge seems to be to offer the wildest and most unusual foods to the mat salleh. My great-aunt had the dubious honour of being the Malaysian that gave my first boyfriend fried pig’s fallopian tubes. Some cousins brought a huge pile of the stinkiest durians for a group of my friends from law college. Other family members came up with a plate of chicken’s feet fried in soy sauce. My UK friends have all gamely tried everything, winning the hearts of the Malaysians - and their respect. One French girl I brought to KL was sniffy and picky about what she ate and point blank refused to even taste some dishes. No-one liked her. And eventually, I found, neither did I and she was dropped from my address book.

The food highlight experience for my visiting Western friends used to be a trip to the wet market in Pudu. My mum used to do all her grocery shopping there until traffic and parking made it impossible. When she first got married to my father, my father’s mother took her to the market and introduced her to all the stallholders there, saying, “This is my daughter-in-law, treat her well. If you cheat her, you have me to answer to.” Once every few weeks, my mum would put on her oldest clothes, take off all her jewellry and put on her marketing shoes and head to Pudu market early in the morning. So we would wake our visitors before dawn and all pile in to the back of her car, groggy and half asleep still. At the market, we would follow her to the chicken man and watch as she chose the chickens for him to garotte and throw into a drum of boiling water to loosen the feathers. My friends began to pale. Next, we passed the cute puppy dogs in cages - and no, they are not pets, I would say to our visitors - making our way to the beef butcher, careful not to slip on the blood from the decapitated cow on the slab. Now, my friends were turning green. My mother would then buy vegetables and fruit and spices and head back to pick up the chickens and some chunky roasted pigs trotters for breakfast, the smell of spices and fruit and raw meat mingling in aircon. An hour later, back at home, we would be showered and sitting down to a breakfast of pigs trotter congee while my English friends looked ill, asking weakly for some dry toast. “If you eat meat, you should know where it comes from,” my mother would say. “At the market, you know it’s fresh and just killed for you.” And even as they nodded, I would see my friends pining for the shrink-wrapped sanctuary of a Tescos.

Of course, Malaysia is more than its food and Malaysians abroad and at home have achieved impressive and astonishing things in the 50 years since independence. But for me, food and meals have brought people together for millenia. To sit together around a spread of food, whether at a table or on the floor or on a mat on the bare ground, people and cultures have met each other at the deepest level since civilisation began. At a meal, in past centuries, they left their weapons and differences outside. These days, we don’t carry weapons but most of us try to leave our differences outside at meals with friends and family. We share and eat each other’s foods and also our personal stories and cultures. Even a lunch of baked beans on toast told me in more than words about the UK I had come to back in 1975 in the same way that an abundance of durians told my UK friends something about Malaysians and their sense of humour and pride. In the simple, natural act of sharing our food with others in the countries we travel to, I feel that Malaysians abroad have shared - and continue to share - what is truly valuable about who we are: warmth, generosity of spirit, joy in the good life, graciousness and common humanity.

Photos: scenes from Pudu Market - my photo album c. 1995

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Continuing a three part series on my experiences of food in England. In Part 1, my horror and tears at English school food. This week, curry and spice and everything nice at Uni…

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison. I lived in a shared house down Cowley Road in Oxford during my second and third years, thriving in the joy of being free from the institutionalised halls of residence. My housemates and I threw parties and gave dinners, dressing up to fit the themes we devised. It was the early 80s and we were playing at being the cool, sleek grown-ups of the ’40s and ’50s - Bogie and Bacall were our models, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “High Society”. At candle-lit dinners in our shared living room, our men wore black tie and cummerbunds and we girls shimmered in cocktail dresses and high heels. We ate parma ham with melon, smoked salmon mousse, roast duck in blackcurrant sauce, drank champagne. With coffee, we puffed on cigarillos and nibbled at blue-streaked gorgonzolla, sipping port.

But nothing compared with my Malaysian dinner parties. I had brought a wok back in my suitcase after one holiday back home. In the cupboards were an endless stock of sambal belacan, stinky dried fish, dry-fried shrimp, thick gooey soy sauce, crispy ikan bilis, fragrant pandan leaves, curry powder, chilli powder, turmeric, five spice cloves, blocks of coconut concentrate - you name it, I had it. They came with me back to Oxford either stowed away in my suitcase triple-wrapped in plastic bags and towels or hunted down from London’s Chinatown. Back then, before mass cheap travel and globalisation, my English friends had never seen - or smelt - anything like it. Most of them had never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe and some had never left their little island at all. I fried up prawn chilli and flavoured rice with coconut and pandan for nasi lemak; sizzled up bright yellow turmeric pork with caramelised onions; cooked sesame chicken with nasi goreng. My friends watched me as if hypnotised, amazed that I did everything in the wok - even bacon and eggs on some Sunday mornings. “Why not?” I would say, “It’s just a cooking implement.”

To come to my Malaysian dinner parties, my friends had to dress up. In the winter, I would turn up the heating in the living room, pull back the dining table and chairs against the wall and lay out a large woven mat I had brought back from KL. Sometimes, I even managed crepe paper palm trees sellotaped to the walls with green fronds hanging from the ceiling. In the summer we would sit out in the overgrown garden, the tall weeds and unkempt grass adding to the fiction of the tropics in suburbia. The theme was tropical Malaysia so everyone had to come in tropical clothing - Hawaiian shirts and shorts, flip-flops, sarongs. We would all sit cross-legged on the mat and eat nasi lemak or curry with our hands. Once, Siva, a Malaysian PhD student brought a coconut and a parang and chopped it open Malaysian style, spinning the fruit in one had as the other expertly hacked the husk away while my English friends watched in awe.

It was in the summer vacations of those years at university that my English friends would take long trips to India and South East Asia. They would be the generation that would seek out exotic restaurants with tasty, spicy food once they were back in the UK and settled down to their jobs. They would be the ones finding new and cheaper ways to travel around the globe and to look outside of their home island for work and business opportunities. It seems to me that from the ’80s onwards, the British began to evolve from seeing the world as an empire they owned and imposed their will on to a place of interest and wonder to explore and exchange with. Looking back, I wonder how many other Malaysian students in the last few decades played their part in introducing their British friends to the wonders of another culture, through our delicious, unique food and our warmth and hospitality.

Whenever my British friends come across another Malaysian, they would always tell me. And I would always hear how friendly and generous this Malaysian is, how interesting and funny and talented. And how this Malaysian is really into their food. How they cooked for my friend and what an amazingly tasty meal they had together. And how much there was to eat. “Yup, that’s definitely a Malaysian,” I would laugh. Even if their passport might say some other nationality because they have migrated for career reasons, a Malaysian’s heart - and stomach - will always be Malaysian.

In two weeks time (Friday 20 July 2007): what happens when my English friends visit my family in Malaysia

Photos: from my photo album c. 1983/ 1984

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The following series of three posts is taken from an essay I wrote for a collection of essays by various Malaysian-connected writers coming out in Malaysia sometime soon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysian Independence from British rule.

Part 1 - The meal that made me cry

I stared down at my plate. There was one soggy piece of toast on it, drowned in a pool of orangey-brown baked beans. I looked around me at the crowded dining hall. The girls were all taller and bigger and heavier and stronger than me, all tucking in to their lunch of baked beans on toast, all laughing and chatting. There were a few black faces but otherwise, they were all Caucasian, pale skinned and robust. I was the only South East Asian, skinny and small and caramel-toned. It was my first day at boarding school in the UK. It was 1975 and I was twelve.

The morning had been a tumble of classes and new friends as I trailed behind my new classmates to change rooms for each new lesson. In Malaysia, we had the same teacher for most subjects and any specialist teacher who taught us came to our classroom while we stayed put. This new pattern of packing up my pencils and books after each class and fighting my way through the chaotic corridors to find the next lesson confused me. Several times, I got lost, like a new recruit left behind by her platoon, and stood bewildered as girls hurried past me.

By lunchtime, I was exhausted and disorientated. My legs felt cold in the navy school kilt and my arms felt tightly constrained in a long-sleeved sweater. My knee-high socks prickled my shins. Lunch would help me feel better, I thought. I always liked break-time at school in Kuala Lumpur. My friends and I bought curry laksa at the canteen, the spicy soup ladled out of huge steaming vats into a bowl of noodles, beansprouts, soya and chicken. Sometimes, I brought in fried rice and would eat it lukewarm from the tupperware. Friends would bring in soy sauce noodles and vegetables. But here in this rowdy English place, lunch had not turned out how I had expected. I stared down at the baked beans and toast on my plate.

I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was just after 1pm. I looked at the strange, noisy, pale girls around me. It struck me that I had five years here. Five long years of baked beans on toast. Five years without curry laksa. Or stir-fried vegetables. Or soy sauce chicken or grilled satay or beef rendang or nasi lemak. Or anything that I knew as food. Real food. I burst into tears. The girls sitting at my table fell silent, staring at me uncomfortably. A sixth-former said, “She’s just homesick. She’ll be all right.” And they left me alone to sob despairingly over my baked beans.

Later, when I was older, I realised that this was probably not an uncommon experience for Malaysians going to study abroad - especially back in the ’70s and ’80s. These days, in the 21st century, even the remotest part of the UK will probably have a Malaysian restaurant or at least an eatery that can do a decent curry. Back then, England was still emerging uncomfortably from its post-war troubles and coming to grips with the loss of its empire. It had been used to exporting its culture and habits and food across the world and it would be some decades yet before a new generation would return from the hippy trail with bottles of fish sauce and chilli belacan and recipes for Thai green curry and satay. Back then, curry was a strange concoction involving a plain curry sauce, pineapple and raisins. To my horror, they also mixed curry powder with sweet salad cream to make a weird cold dish called Coronation Chicken.

For five years, I learnt to eat potatoes with everything. Roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, buttered potatoes, jacket potatoes, sauteed potatoes, chips, mash, potato salad. The were lots of interesting things you could do with potatoes. But none of them turned the spud into rice. Every now and then, though, we would have rice. Aaah, rice. Those were my favourite meals. Except that the rice would come with that pineapply-raisiny curry and I’d have to spend ages picking out the bits of fruit. Or with chicken fricassee, a mix of shredded chicken in what tasted like Campbell’s cream of chicken condensed soup - which was marginally better than pineapply curry in that I could pretend it was chicken a la king.

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison….

To be continued next Friday (06 July 2007)…

Photo: thanks to Johnnie Shannon on flickr.com

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