The ship sails around the straits
Bringing spices around the country
Don’t be choosy with spices’ traits
Mixed in the pot it becomes curry...
It’s somewhat ironic that a dish of sub-continental Indian origin has become so super-continental today until it is a Malay…
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“Do you know yee sang, the dish with raw fish?” I asked breathlessly as I went around China in my last visit. When the person I asked didn’t speak English, I switch to Chinese, which makes it worse. Although I’m part Chinese, my Mandarin is almost non-existent, as my street dialect is…
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It is the 15th century. The place is the royal palace of Melaka, a strategic port and center of a great trading empire that bears the same name as the city.
By all accounts it is a rich place, with goods from all over the known world available in its markets. And the wealth is reflected…
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Like it has been since the first cup ever brewed a thousand years ago, it starts with a sip. It has to be a sip, because unlike wine it would be hot. Even if it’s not, it still starts with a sip, because unlike tea for example it has an expectant bitterish taste and one does not want to overwhelm the…
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“I’ll have the Mo-cha…”, I began as I scanned the beverage menu.
“Mo-ka”, corrected the bright young lady serving me, as naturally as she must have corrected a hundred or a thousand other customers.
“Oh, Mo-ka…” I sheepishly repeated. As a Spanish-speaker,…
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Soto here has nothing to do with
satay, that other popular dish in the Malay-Indonesian world, despite sharing the same consonants and differing only in the vowels. Indeed the two foods are as different as night and day.
Neither has it any connection with Japan, despite ‘soto’s…
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Mention ‘Satay’ and those who know this dish will most likely begin to salivate. A quintessential contribution of the Malay Archipelago to the planet’s culinary repertoire, it has been claimed by just about everybody else as ‘their’ influence.
Let’s explore the origins and hidden…
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