A Moveable Feast (7 page)

I immediately realised my error and apologised profusely, even holding up the camera to let her see me deleting the photo. But I couldn’t help thinking back to dinners at the villa, where I would take photos with total abandon, mostly of Pearl or Pat carrying out new plates from Donna’s stove, to document what would become a treasured book of recipes. Pat pleaded that she was too shy for all of this, but Pearl at least knew how to fight back: ‘You do not know how to relax. Why don’t you sit down for five minutes and do nothing?’ Never, I thought, when I’m having this much fun.

Joyriding all over the island, back and forth to the store and fish market, with the occasional detour for a little sightseeing, became the pre-chopping highlight of the day. The going could be slow on the narrow roads, and Donna never hesitated to tell me to stop if we were passing one of her chums with whom she wanted to catch up – a cart-to-cart conversation, in blazing sun or afternoon downpour – before moving on.

For an entire week, the day began each morning after breakfast with, ‘Come on, we go now.’ Donna’s all-aboard call always felt like a whim, as nothing had ever been discussed prior to departure. On the last day, though, I was prepared but also confused, for Donna wouldn’t say where we were headed. She just kept giggling as we drove to the mystery destination and I continued begging for information.

When we reached the beachfront villa I knew something was up, for this place had ‘special’ written all over it, from the location, smack on the sand, to the long gated entryway that spoke of wealth and seclusion. ‘My sister is Mick Jagger’s cook,’ Donna said. ‘This is his place.’

For a child of the 1960s, entering Mick Jagger’s home might equal the thrill a modern teen would feel if invited to visit all the
vampires on the set of the
Twilight
movies. Denise greeted us at the door for a guided tour. There was Mick’s pink pool table. Denise and Donna cheerfully posed behind it for a snap. On a bureau was a picture of his mother, smiling and waving furiously. I laughed. Donna and Denise laughed, because I was laughing.

We all ended up in the kitchen, where I inspected the drop-dead appliances. They made the ones at Sapphire, which looked liked they might have belonged to June Cleaver from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ at one time, seem horribly out of date. I even wondered if Donna might be a tad envious. I would have been. We finished the tour with coffee and cake, as I learned that the two sister-cooks had six other siblings – five girls, whose names all started with ‘D’, and a brother, Oral. Suddenly, that was funny too.

On my last night at Sapphire, I drank the juice from my ceviche straight from the bowl, just after Pearl left the room so she wouldn’t see my exhibition of bad manners. After dinner, I helped clear plates, as I’d done most nights, and stopped worrying if pitching in might actually be insulting. After all, Donna, Pearl and Pat were professionals, with jobs to do, but weren’t they now also my friends? They were both, I decided, and friends don’t let friends clear plates by themselves. I rang the dinner bell, and we had a final laugh.

I email Donna now and then to let her know of my progress with her soufflés (the one with marmalade is as killer as her cheese creation). I tell her what worked and what went wrong. She always writes back, with advice for fixing my mistakes. At New Year’s, she surprised me with a note of cheer and well wishes.

I wonder sometimes if Donna, Pat and Pearl were sorry to see me go. Or relieved. Maybe they were happy to get back to the
dinner bell, with guests who followed the rules, guests who never got in the way of their duties by lifting pot lids and clearing tables. I think about them often and ask myself what I got out of my week on Mustique. The answer is always the same: I met a terrific cook, who shared her recipes with me and took me to the edge of the sea to find lobster. Donna is one of many friends I know who are good cooks, but she is the only one who lives in the Caribbean. We are twenty-first century pen pals. And that’s something pretty wonderful to bring home.

Karen Coates has spent a dozen years covering food, environment and social issues across Asia for publications around the world. A correspondent for
Archaeology
magazine, she writes a regular Food Culture column for the
Faster Times
. She was
Gourmet’s
Asia correspondent until the magazine closed in 2009. Karen is the author of
Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War
and co-author of
Pacific Lady:
The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World’s Largest Ocean
. She is a 2010–11 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can get another taste of her writing on her food blog, Rambling Spoon.

It’s November in northern Thailand, right on the brink of seasonal change from sultry to sublime. The rains have ended and the evening brings a wintry nip. We crowd around wooden tables with chipped red paint, sipping strong Shan tea from little blue-and-white cups. I grab my notebook and the feast begins.

For the past three weeks I’ve been teaching basic journalism to Southeast Asians, and tonight I’ve invited my Burmese students to dinner. I’d like to repay them for a slew of small kindnesses – for carrying my bag, buying my rice, bringing my tea during classroom breaks. But I’m also hoping for a favour. I’d like them to teach me everything they can about Burmese cooking. I lead them behind a boisterous local market to a small, quiet alley with a little Burmese restaurant tucked inside a garden of leafy trees.

Shredded ginger salad,
gin thote,
arrives with peanut, tomato and onion in a waft of pungent, nasal-clearing goodness. The salad – the
thote
– is the welcome mat of any Burmese meal. This I learned on my first trip to Burma several years before. My students tell me that almost every
thote
begins with shallots fried in peanut oil, garlic mixed with onion, fish paste, salt and something sour, such as tamarind or lime. Chickpea powder, I’m told, is key; it adds a hefty graininess to the salad that I have always loved.

The students order a plate of pork in soybean paste,
wat pone yae gyi.
Sauce is paramount to this dish, I learn. ‘The main thing is the juice. It’s better than the meat,’ says one of the students, who counts eating his wife’s cooking among his favourite hobbies.

We try the pork curry,
wat hmyit chin,
with a sweet pickled bamboo that takes months to prepare. ‘We have two kinds of bamboo – sour and sweet,’ another student explains. This, he says, is like ‘infant bamboo, infant of the big bamboo tree.’

A heady dish of fish paste,
nga pi,
comes in a ring of raw vegetables. ‘This is essential food,’ says the only female in the crowd. ‘In Burmese villages some people cannot eat a meal, so they eat this with rice and vegetables, and that’s all. Because they are poor.’ As a single woman from a family with little money, she rises each morning before the sun to cook for parents and siblings, then goes to work to earn money for the family coffers.

Most of these students are men, and they don’t cook at home. But they learn everything by watching the women in their lives. They know as much, in fact, about cooking as their female colleague. Towards evening’s end, the eldest in the group leans to my ear, and he says: ‘Karen, I want to tell you something because I think it is useful for your story. We all know how to cook our curry because it is in our culture.’ Every woman cooks, and she talks to her friends about food. Every man eavesdrops, and he learns the secrets of the Burmese plate.

I ask his opinion of this restaurant. ‘Is it the
real
Burmese food?’

‘Nearly,
nearly
!’ he answers with a big, toothy grin. Translation: it’s as good as it gets away from his wife’s kitchen.

We’re all stuffed and happy, chatting over little cups of tea, nibbling on sweet cubes of jaggery, customarily served gratis. I duck downstairs and open my wallet, but the waitress shakes her head. The bill has been paid, and I never even see it. My students don’t have cash to spare. Yet their kindness never runs out, and it’s always a few steps ahead of my own.

It’s early January. My husband, Jerry, and I are on a plane to Burma, our first return to the country in six years. It’s a short flight from Bangkok to Yangon, barely an hour, but it feels like a journey between worlds. Time lags half an hour on touchdown: 10am in Bangkok is 9.30am in Burma, which sets a pace thirty minutes askew to the rest of the region. Author Chris Offutt once wrote that time doesn’t move forward; it stays put, and people move through it instead. Humanity has its comings and goings, but time stands still around the commotion.

It’s that way in Burma. Little has visibly changed in six years. A few new buildings and billboards, a few cell phones and
internet shops. But little else seems different for the people. It looks eerily similar to what I remember. But the Burmese people move – constantly, swiftly, with necessity. And the moving is never easy: rusty old Toyota taxis with broken windows and missing knobs; buses crammed with bodies, bumping over potholed streets; rickshaws with wobbly wheels pedalled by drivers with cracked and callused feet.

Jerry and I spend eighteen hours on an overnight ferry through the Irrawaddy Delta, to the city of Pathein. We sleep in the open, on the hard metal floor above rumbling engines one deck down. Each passenger is given a rectangle of space, approximately two and a half feet wide and five feet long, on which to keep body and luggage. I count 130 people squeezed together, head to head, toe to toe, all of them crammed into a space the size of a three-car garage. Everyone is kind and polite, taking careful steps so as not to tread upon another passenger’s mat while moving between the deck and the fetid bathrooms.

Vendors pass through, shouting offers of fish and rice, fried fritters and fruit, and a spectacularly spicy and bitter tea-leaf salad known as
laphet thote.
It’s a national snack made from pickled leaves, crispy dried yellow peas and beans, sharp raw garlic, potent red capsicum, a drizzle of oil, a hint of sour. It’s a pleasantly bitter sensation, sour but savoury, with a unique crunchy, oily, moist consistency that ends in dragon-fire breath born of so much garlic and chilli. Jerry brings me a flimsy plastic plate with a dollop of salad, and I lap up one luscious green bite after another.

We sleep that night to the constant chug of the engine beneath us and wake to a saffron sun, lifting over the mangroves of a vast delta.

It’s three months later, and we’re back in Burma. Yangon is a sauna in April, its pavement like hot coals, its air like blistering steam. It’s the season of waiting – for rain, for relief, for release.

I’m teaching creative nonfiction writing to a small group of journalists. For days, we hash out the differences between fiction and nonfiction – blatant distinctions to me, but not to my students. Is a how-to manual fiction or nonfiction? A movie review? If a reporter writes a truthful article but makes up the main character, do I call it fiction? (I call it verboten.)

The students hurl questions at me for hours. So seldom is the truth allowed in print that Burma’s best writers tell it through imagined stories – this I learned on my previous trip. Forty years of that, and readers’ minds are blurred. People know the difference between truth and lies, but they no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. So we discuss Dexter Filkins, John McPhee, Peter Hessler, Susan Orlean. We read Chris Jones’ prize-winning story ‘The Things that Carried Him’, and I email him a list of students’ questions about method and story structure (to which he replies at great length).

At lunch break, we take our conversations to the corner canteen. We sit at tiny tables with little stools beneath leafy trees eating homemade curries, soups and
thotes.

Right around this time, I pitch pickled tea as an article for a new travel magazine, and the editor jumps. When I tell the class interpreter that I’ve been assigned to do a story on
laphet thote,
his eyes begin to dance. He teaches me a term,
shoo-shee,
which is onomatopoeia for the sound one makes when fanning the lips after eating a piquant plate of the salad. The Burmese don’t just
like
this dish. They feel it in their teeth. They gobble it up, then swipe a finger through the juices and lick that finger clean. That last taste, a young reporter tells me, is better than the salad. It is the concentrated essence of every ingredient combined.

I set off with one of my students on an afternoon mission to find the best of the city’s
laphet thote.
We trudge through scalding heat and black puffs of smog belched from old buses as we angle towards Sule Pagoda. There we find a long-time shop that serves excellent salads made to order – each customer can select the number of chillies, the amount of oil and the desired amount of pickled tea.

But this is not the way most Burmese eat
laphet thote,
my student tells me. A small plate of
laphet
typically costs 500 kyat (50 cents) at the corner shop. ‘This is expensive,’ he says. So people of few means – as in, mostly everyone – buy the ingredients in their local market and take them home to prepare. Every market has a
laphet thote
aisle with sacks and bins of pickled tea, dried beans, seeds and peas. ‘Many Myanmar people eat
laphet
salad and rice for their dinner,’ my friend says. ‘They are very busy and they have not much money.’

A week later, I’m in Mandalay to teach a three-day workshop. Early one morning before class, Jerry and I visit a well-known family-run factory that has packaged and sold
laphet thote
ingredients for more than a century. ‘The business has been handed down for six generations,’ the owner tells me. That history hangs in photos across the family’s mint-green living room walls.

He’s excited to have foreigners here, beneath dusty old whirring fans, around an elaborate lacquered tray with partitions separating all the ingredients for a proper handful of salad. We’re given small silver spoons to dip into the moist pickled leaves, crispy dried garlic, crunchy peanuts, roasted sesame seeds, dried yellow beans, dried green beans, pumpkin seeds, prawn powder and dried insects (which live in local spirulina ponds).

‘My favourite is pickled tea leaf with tomato and all the ingredients,’ says the man’s 76-year-old mother. ‘We mix and enjoy very much. We also add sliced cabbage.’

Our host is also an architect, and he tells us about a market he designed, a boisterous place where traders buy and sell the dried ingredients – beans, peas, seeds – eaten in
laphet thote.
We must see it! he insists. He invites us on a tour, and makes plans to pick us up at our hotel later in the week, after my workshop has finished.