Original link: https://sehseh.substack.com/p/80d
Cold tea, the Burmese pronunciation is laphet thoke, which is an important role in Burmese cuisine. (Wagaung@Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Editor’s Note: This is the second article in the “Field at the Dinner Table” series. Ma Yingqing, the columnist of the world’s food, comes from an overseas Chinese family in Myanmar. She will crawl and comb and record different types of food culture and family stories on the family table. She will lead readers around to taste the taste of her hometown in her memory, and also describe the family contained in cooking. and population migration trajectories.
Review of the first article: “Taiwan Muslim Children’s Ramadan Memories – Shalawa and Xinsheng South Road at Night”
Text / Ma Yingqing
Those impressions of home are a constant reminder of who we are, or who we might be.
Compared to most of my peers who grew up in Taiwan, my background is a little different: my family migrated from Yunnan to Myanmar, and then relocated to Taiwan 30 years ago due to multiple motivations. My father’s family took root in Myanmar during the Qing Dynasty. It is said that my grandfather’s grandfather once served as an official in a local place called ” Bang Nong “. Mom’s grandmother, my Azu, rode a horse during World War II and ran to Myanmar alone to find her husband.
The family of my father and mother has been in Myanmar for decades. Running through different time and space backgrounds, the meals are full of food and simple meals, supporting a series of migration stories.
In my ignorant childhood, these foods were like secrets that I kept hidden from time to time. I didn’t want to be different from other classmates, and often thought to myself, how good would it be to cook more Taiwanese food at home that my classmates would also eat? Therefore, although my home has been filled with various kinds of diverse dishes since I can remember, in the past, I was not very good at distinguishing which food came from Myanmar and which food came from Yunnan. Embedded in intricate migration trajectories, memories and stories are buried consciously and unconsciously.
It wasn’t until I left home to study in Kaohsiung that for four years, jars of fermented bean curd, pickled vegetables, laphet thoke, and balachaung ice were in the small refrigerator. I was shocked to realize that as a child who grew up eating three meals at home, my tongue was Memories—it reminds me that I’m on a long trip, and that I’m finally home.
Every time I open the jar and put it in my mouth, the food and memories that feed me keep calling me and lead me to wonder about the stories behind these flavors.
When I quietly peeped into the small cracks of life, I found that these moist, crunchy and fragrant molecules are loaded with private, secret and unique stories. The aggregated memory is also impersonal, shared by a group of people with the same life experience. These foods mixed with Myanmar, Yunnan and Taiwan are their hometown flavors.
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Yunnan: fermented bean curd with rice, pickled vegetables, buckwheat, dried radish with noodles
After growing up, things have changed and many things have changed, but the Yunnan tofu in the refrigerator at home is never absent. It’s always about to bottom out, followed by a new can reassuringly.
Although we call it tofu in daily life, in fact, its taste and state are closer to fermented bean curd, the only difference is the more distinct spicy taste and the aroma of ginger. This is a special product of Yunnan. It is packed in a palm-sized, round fresh-keeping box and used as a pickle with rice when eating.
Smell and taste buds sometimes lead us to remember someone. Whenever I take out tofu from the refrigerator, I always feel that Azu is still by my side, and my impression of her is firmly stuck in the memory of food. I often remember that in the past, Azu had to serve tofu with meals, perhaps because of her influence. When I was a child, if there was no tofu at home, I would eat one less bowl of rice.
Especially whenever Grandpa made salt rolls (a kind of pasta similar to steamed buns but softer), or when grilled buns and papaya chicken soup appeared on the dining table, if I happened to be in the predicament that I just finished eating tofu, I would even stop. eat. I ate with her and developed an obsession with tofu. She always smiled and said proudly that she was indeed his great-granddaughter (great-granddaughter).
Yunnan tofu can be said to be one of the indispensable pickles in our home. However, it was not easy to obtain in the past, and we had to make it by ourselves.
Because my mother often makes fermented bean curd, she has a good relationship with the owner of the tofu stall in the market. She will pre-order a large wooden box of flat tofu. After buying it, she will expose it to the sun, cover it with a cloth, and let it ferment naturally until the tofu grows white hair, and then add chili, salt, and pepper. , star anise, and our family’s unique recipe, the aged ancestral secret sauce, has finally become the taste of home in my memory.
The taste of aged secret sauce is a bit like bean paste. It is made by mixing salt and spices after the flour and soybean powder are fermented. It is said that this sauce was made by Azu in a certain winter in the past, because according to legend, the water on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month is the cleanest, and the ancestors would save the water on this day to make the sauce. Because of this special sauce, even though ready-made tofu has become easier to buy in recent years, you can still taste the difference.
Growing up in a Muslim family, because Taiwan’s halal diet is not easy to obtain, most family members have to bring their own lunch boxes whether they go to work or go to school.
In the past days when we had one day off on weekends, our family established the habit of eating noodles on Saturdays. If Yunnan fermented bean curd is a pickle with meals, when cooking noodles on Saturdays, we often take out the pickles in the refrigerator to match. . The protagonists of the pickled vegetables are the mustard greens cut into small pieces and the flaky carrots. The sour and spicy taste is the best partner for pasta such as whistle noodles.
Generally, what we eat at home is mixed pickled vegetables. We take some of the pickled vegetables, pickled carrots, dried white radishes, and pickled buckwheat from three different jars, add a little soy sauce, salt and shredded ginger to taste, Mix together and serve on a plate. The taste of pickled vegetables is soft and sour. The buckwheat head bursts with juicy sweetness when you bite into it. The salty dried radish is intertwined, bringing a richer taste to each bowl of noodles, never boring.
When I was a child, I always thought that the mixed pickles of this combination were pickled at the same time and in the same jar, but when I grew up, I realized that they were mostly made separately. My aunt will pickle the buckwheat, and my mother and he often communicate with him, so the two families usually have a full range of pickles on the table and in the refrigerator waiting to be eaten at any time.
Although it is delicious, when I was a child, when the mustard greens were in season, I always worried that my mother would ask me to go to the vegetable market to buy a lot of vegetables. Because I have to share it with my relatives, and I have to keep it for several months for the extended family to eat slowly, every time I bring it home from the vegetable market after I buy it, I always complain with a big bag of mustard greens.
Myanmar: laphet thoke for sour meal, crisp balachaung for strangers
Although the family still retains the Yunnan eating habits after moving to Myanmar, many Myanmar specialties have also become part of our family dinner table due to cultural integration.
Cold tea, the Burmese pronunciation is laphet thoke, which is an important role in Burmese cuisine. Because it is very popular, not only is it often brought out for banquets, but it is also said to be a token of past wars and reconciliations.
The taste of laphet thoke is difficult to describe in words. Mixed with sour and astringent taste, soft fermented tea leaves, mixed with peppers, tomatoes, ginger and other ingredients, and finally add the soul ingredient-fried beans to add taste, and the sour, sweet, bitter and spicy blend is just right Every year on Hari Raya, when visiting relatives with family members, we will eat beautiful laphet thoke on a plate. Different ingredients are contained in shallow trays. Everyone takes the proportion of the weight they want, scoops them out with a spoon, and eats them together with shredded ginger. .
The way we eat it at home is to treat it as a dish and make it into a salad. Mom would make tea leaves, and a variety of beans together, add lemon juice, tomatoes, and the occasional shredded cabbage, and turn it into a big bowl of Burmese salad. When eating Indian curry and coconut rice, mix it with a bowl of laphet thoke, which can make the dining experience refreshing, not greasy, and full of layers.
But most of the time, laphet thoke can also be eaten easily. In the refrigerator at home, my mother would put two cans of tea leaves and fried beans separately. Sometimes when I was hungry, I would take a little from the two cans, mix them and eat them with bibimbap. I can eat a large bowl at a time. The caffeine in tea leaves refreshes the mind. Dad said that when he was in college, many of his classmates would stay up late at night and eat laphet thoke while studying hard.
When eating Indian curry and coconut rice, mix it with a bowl of laphet thoke, which can make the dining experience refreshing, not greasy, and full of layers. (provided by the author)
Growing up in an overseas Chinese Muslim family in Myanmar, when I cooked white porridge at home, the ingredient I ate was not floss but balachaung. Balachaung is a famous pickle in Myanmar, a food with a texture between meat floss and onion crisps, let’s call him shrimp floss.
This civilian food occupies an important place in the local food culture. Fried garlic and onions dominate the crispy taste, but compared to the monotonous onion crisp, there is more of a ray of shrimp fragrance. It is very suitable with rice, porridge, fried rice and other foods, and can add flavor and texture to simple dishes. . At the same time, because it is easy to store, it can be eaten for a whole year without ice and kept dry in a jar. This multi-functional and easy-to-match pickle has become a must-have cooking helper for almost all Burmese households.
Looking back at the many memories of family meals, they all seem to have been put on balachaung’s amber filter. For example, in childhood, my parents liked to take their children out on the outskirts and have picnics on weekends. They were worried that halal restaurants would be hard to find. My mother would always prepare a piece of fried rice for each person, accompanied by balachaung, so that we could solve a meal quickly and conveniently.
I studied in Kaohsiung during college, and every time I go back to Taipei, my mother will still make a big box of balachaung for me to take back to eat. In the kitchen, I watched her put the dried shrimp into the cooking machine. The flocculent shrimp flakes were mixed with chili, garlic and other ingredients and fried, and they became golden and crispy. Memories of “home”.
Family and Ethnic Migration History in Food
The food memory embedded in the migration story is a bridge that allows me to cross the gap of time and space to understand how our family’s food tradition is influenced by the living background of Yunnan, Myanmar, and Taiwan, leaving traces, which has become my memory. hometown flavor.
Looking at the food culture, according to the habitus discussed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, because in the past there were many births, the community was dominated by large families, the staple food was rice, and pickles with strong taste and easy preservation were eaten. , it has become a habit that leads us to know the overseas Chinese in Myanmar. If these heavy-tasting side dishes and eating habits are the coordinates, we’ll be squarely in the not-so-middle-class quadrant.
Knowing what a person, a group of people eat, can give a glimpse into their way of life. Entering the fields at our dining table from the perspective of history and sociology, we can see the scene of mixed culture, class, and traces of migration.
But in the end, in the process of finding out who I am, these dishes became clues and answered my question – I think, home may not be a place, but a process. Eating pickles that my family passed down from Yunnan several generations ago, and cooking that my family learned when they lived in Myanmar in the past, and the migration process that merged all these, is my hometown flavor. (Finish)
About the Author｜ Ma Yingqing (a Taiwanese Muslim girl born in an overseas Chinese family in Myanmar, now studying at the Institute of Sociology at National Taiwan University, her research interests are ethnic identity and social boundaries, and she occasionally writes reports and reviews.)
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This article is reprinted from: https://sehseh.substack.com/p/80d
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