OPINION:
THE MALAYSIAN KITCHEN: 150 RECIPES FOR SIMPLE HOME COOKING
By Christina Arokiasamy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35.00, 340 pages
A truly good meal isn’t just what ends up on your plate. It begins long before it arrives at your table and lingers on long after. It is as much anticipation and recollection as it is consumption and digestion. Those fortunate enough to have been born into a family that appreciated food don’t have to be told this. Those who were not so lucky can be taught. For novices and aficionados alike, Christina Arokiasamy’s “The Malaysian Kitchen” will prove a welcome companion.
The author’s mother was a spice merchant in her native Malaysia, a country with a richly layered history that is reflected in cuisine influenced over the ages by various local cooking traditions in the Malay Peninsula, neighboring Javan and Sumatran cuisine from what is now Indonesia, the early incursions of Portuguese explorers and colonizers, a strong 19th and 20th century British presence, and the complex and varied cooking heritage brought to what was then British Malaya by large numbers of Chinese and Indian laborers whose offspring would preserve and adapt their ancestral food ways even as they became successfully assimilated Malaysians, including many members of the country’s business and professional elites today.
Thus, in a very real way, to understand Malaysian cuisine is to understand Malaysian history, just as an awareness of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Cajun and American Southern cooking helps one to understand the unique, “creole” nature of a city like New Orleans. There are, indeed, times when a cookbook is much, much more than a cookbook.
But everything has to start somewhere and, for Christina Arokiasamy, that somewhere was her mother’s spice garden: “Our yard was a place where you experienced food with your eyes and your nose before your stomach,” she writes. “Among the cinnamon, mango, and curry leaf trees were plenty of ginger root plants, with their blindingly green leaves and scarlet flowers. We blended fresh ginger with garlic as building blocks to begin most of our Malaysian dishes. Fresh ginger was also dried under the tropical sun and ground into a citrus-scented powder used in marinades, salad dressings, desserts, and tea. The subtle green tea scent of the pandanus palm pervaded our garden, tinted our rice cakes pale green, and infused our custard with sublime flavors.”
Figuratively and literally, it was but a short step from garden to kitchen. “My father would often bring friends home unannounced, and my mother was able to magically prepare a variety of dishes to please the guests. I saw her repurpose everything and create dishes with whatever ingredients she had on hand. My mother taught me the details of spice grinding, how to work with the ingredients, and how to smell, feel, and taste the food.”
But — and this is a very big but — “she never concerned herself with quantities and cooking times. A touch of this and a dash of that was the way she cooked without ever using measuring cups or spoons.” What her daughter has done is to systematically explain and quantify dishes like those her mother improvised from instinct and experience; to make some of the kitchen magic of her childhood reproducible at the hands of American food lovers working in their home kitchens today.
Once-exotic ingredients that are now available in Asian grocery stores and large supermarkets are demystified and prep tips are shared while the reader is offered a medley of tempting recipes divided into nine sensible sections: sauces, aromatic pastes and dressings, soups, salads, vegetables, rice and noodles, seafood, street food, meats and desserts.
Whether your fancy is captured by Malaysian Chili Prawns, Chinese-influenced Kopi Tiam Pork Tenderloin in Black Pepper Sauce, a simple side of Fragrant Coconut Rice, a sweet/tart/tangy Pineapple, Mango and Cucumber Salad with Tamarind Sauce, or an English-Asian “colonial fusion” dessert like Coconut-Banana Sponge Cake, Christina Arokiasamy will show you how to make it and tell you all about it, seasoning it with history and family recollections along the way.
And the recipes are so good that reading them is almost as pleasant as tasting the finished products. “Even after all my years in America,” she tells us, “every cinnamon stick holds a fragrant story,” and “the recipes in this book have been an important part of my life.” Reading and enjoying “The Malaysian Kitchen” may make them a welcome part of yours as well.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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