TWO HAWKER DINNERS

My first meal in Penang was a week ago.  I arrived on a Sunday afternoon and when I went for a stroll from my hotel I found I was only one block away from the New Lane Hawker area where more than 40 carts were set up.  I picked out three things to eat.  At the time, besides the sliced duck breast I didn’t have a clue what the other two were.  

One turned out to be Curry Mee (a spicy coconut curry soup with yellow egg noodles, rice vermicelli, and bits of chicken tofu, congealed pork blood and shrimp)

The other was Char Kway Teow (long, flat rice noodles stir-fried in a hot wok with soy sauce, fresh prawns, cockles, scrambled egg, bean sprouts and green onions.)

My second foray to the New Lane Hawkers was two nights ago.  Dinner started with Loh Bak, pictured above.  The signature part of the dish is a ground sausage wrapped in a spring roll and deep fried.  After that it’s up to the you and the chef.  There are lots of ingredients displayed on the cart and you choose what you want put in yours.  Being a neophyte I asked her to assemble it.  Mine came, In addition to the sausage, fish balls, chunks of tofu and banana fritter, and a small spring roll. 

Everything was deep fried and delicious, served with the sides of chili sauce and a thickened tapioca flour, egg, five spice powder, soy sauce and water.

Her spicy chili sauce is homemade and I only wish I could come close to duplicating her smoky savory dip.

Next, I treated myself to Penang style fried oysters with egg.   Perhaps you can make out an oyster or two in the above photo.  You take a very thin batter which has cut up chives, toss it a half ladle full on the griddle, then break a a couple of eggs over the batter and stir like crazy.  When the eggs are just about set throw in a hand full of shucked oysters and give it a stir and a flip.  Wait till the oysters are done through and serve it up.  Like the Loh Bak, I watched my meal being prepared on the spot.  That’s one of the great things about the hawker’s cart.  Fresh ingredients prepared to order. 

Seafood Char Koay Kark, above, rounded out the dinner.  I ate it all and I was mystified about what those chunks were.  I thought they were fried potatoes.  It turns out that they are made from shredded daikon raddish mixed with rice flour and steamed.  You get a firm tofu-like which is cut into chunks , toss that with fried egg, bean sprouts and Chinese chives and you have a scrumptious dish of Char Koay Kark.  

My leftovers, half of the Penang oysters and Loh Bak rested happily in the fridge in my room.  It made a tasty breakfast the next morning with a hot cup of tea.

DINNER NUMBER TWO:

I started with an appetizer of Poh Pea, or sometimes called Pho Piah.  It is a small spring roll containing shredded shrimp, bean sprouts and bamboo shoots.   The wrapper used for the spring roll, which has a sweet and savory flavor is very thin, almost translucent.   

One appetizer down I chose another one called Chee Cheong Fon.  It is a very soft wide rice noodle which is rolled and sliced about ¾ inch wide.  The very light noodle is served with three sauces, fish, chili and one made with peanuts.  I liked the latter sauce.

My main dish was a bowl of Hokkien Mee.  He shrimp broth is filled with noodles. A combination of crunchy bean sprouts, sliced egg, shrimp and pork top the dish. 

I enjoyed all of the above, but I think dessert was the favorite part of my meal.  I carried my treasures, Apom Manis and Apong Telur back to my room to enjoy with a cup of tea.

Apom Manis  is or are small sweet pancakes about three inches across.  They are fried on a griddle and then a filling is put in the center and they are folded in half.  I bought four of them.  One filling seemed to be better than the one before and the first one was a hit.  One held banana. Another a mixture of crushed peanuts and jam.  Another third had a coconut mixture.   

My second dessert was Apong Telur.  It is a small thin crepe.  The batter is sugar, egg, coconut milk and flour. Originally the batter was poured into small clay pots and cooked over a brazier.  Now small tin bowls are used that fit into a frame over a gas fire.  The sides turn out very crispy sides and the center is a bit thicker with a slightly chewy texture. who wouldn't like a coconut flavored crepe?

Someday I’ll have to tell you about my lunch of salted fish fried rice.  This is going to be one of the staples at Chez Greenbrier.

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TOMORROW I'LL DO A POST ABOUT TWO DINNERS I ATE AT THE HAWKER CENTER ON NEW LANE, JUST A BLOCK FROM MY HOTEL.  SOME OF THE ABOVE PHOTOS SHOW THE DISHES I ATE.

‘HOW MANY BONES ARE IN CHICKEN FEET?’

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The answer is, a lot.  In fact once you discount the bones, cartilage and skin the only thing that’s left is the sauce they were cooked in.  In some countries, notably China, they are widely consumed.

After I ordered my pot of jasmine tea and fish in sweet and sour sauce at Prosperous, I ventured to the steam table for some dim sum.  I thought I would treat myself to three of those small dishes.  I chose one dish that contained two small spring roll wrapped items with something colorful on top showing through the translucent wrapper.  They turned out to be filled with pork.  The colorful thing on top was a piece of imitation crab leg.

 

The second item was a traditional steamed bun filled with a mixture that resembled a mild pork barbecue.  The third one was a mystery.  The small dish was full of pieces of meat in a lot of dark rich looking sauce.  I chose it because of the eye appeal of the sauce.  It turned out to be chicken feet.  Being a ‘foodie trouper’ I ate all but one of them.  I spent most of my time using my tongue to separate small bones and bits of cartilage from the skin and pushing them out to my lips so I could deposit them with my fingers on a dish.  It’s not a dainty dish to eat.  At least the sauce was tasty.

The sweet and sour fish was a hit.  A Cantonese mildly flavored sweet and sour sauce with the obligatory pieces of red and green pepper and tomato plus some small slivers of cucumber came with battered deep fried mild pieces of fish.  There was a surprising amount of fish in the dish.   I have been taken in tow since day one by the same waiter.  He now knows to bring me Jasmine tea and today as I was leaving asked me if I were coming tomorrow.  I've made another new restaurant ‘friend’.

On the way back to the hotel I felt like a little fruit for dessert.  My fruit vendor is only at his location at night and my larder is down to a single orange.  I crossed Jalan Macalister to a restaurant that had a fruit cart in front.  This cart instead of selling whole fruits sold them already cut up in small clear cellophane bags.  Each bag comes with a longish thick toothpick for spearing the pieces of fruit.  I chose watermelon and paid.  The vendor pointed to something I didn't know and said ‘very good’.  It turned out to be jackfruit.

I took my watermelon and stood in a shady spot and polished it off.   I still felt a little peckish and thought, hey why not.  If I can try chicken feet.  Why not jackfruit?

After I bought a small cellophane bag of it he pointed off to the side to the jackfruit he was carving to put in the bags.  This is a blimp-sized fruit.  Wait till you see a picture.  Only a small portion is edible.  It is yellow in color similar to a mango and is sheathed in a lot of non edible fiber.  The fruit itself is tough and chewy.  It is almost as chewy as a dried apricot.  The flavor, well I’m having a tough time describing the flavor.  The aroma is slightly peppery.  The taste changes in my mouth as I chew on a piece.  I get slightly 'citrusy', then it changes to a flavor not unlike a piece of citrus flavored hard candy.  There is a hint of melon in there as well as mango. I am thinking complex citrus flavors.  The flavor lingers in my mouth long after I have eaten it.  I guess we’ll just have to sample one when I get back.

After Prosperus then what?  Over the next few days I’m going to concentrate on the tried and true Penang hawker offerings that many websites tout.   Take, for example,  CNN Travel’s article about Asia’s 10 greatest Street Food Cities.  (http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/eat/asia-street-food-cities-612721)

They lead off with Penang and list the 10 most popular street hawker foods in their opinion.  I've eaten four of them.  My goal will be to knock off the other six over the next few days and then continue my forays into hawker food and open air restaurants using other similar lists as my guide.

I did go to Tokyo Seafood for dinner last night, picked out a nice fresh red snapper, and went to my table to await my meal.  It came on a large tray.  The fish had been split and cooked in a liquid which appeared to be mostly soy sauce and water.  A few shreds of ginger topped the fish along with some mushroom slices and pieces of fresh tomato.  The fish had been cooked to the semi mush stage.  In a few words, it was not only uninteresting but also cost what I had paid for a dinner at Mama’s.  However, I've been here for a week and it’s the first lackluster meal I have had. 

Another note of interest, for virtually all of my meals I have been the only ‘foreigner’ in the restaurant or at the hawker stall.  I can think of only two times in my 14 plus meals that I saw faces like mine, and then it was only one couple.

Finally, the jackfruit has piqued my interest in fruits we don’t normally see in the US.  On my way back to the hotel I saw a small street corner restaurant with an awning and several tables and chairs.  His only item for sale was durian.  He was splitting them and taking them to customers seated at his tables.  I could see those luscious custard like lobes nestled in the fruit hull.  It has been over a decade since I have tasted the fruit that is both loved and reviled in the orient, partly because of its pungent aroma.  I vividly recall walking by hotels in China and seeing plaques posted on the outside saying ‘NO DURIAN’.

Well, today jackfruit, tomorrow durian, and who only knows what for the day after that.

WEATHER UNDERGROUND:  ‘91 DEGREES, FEELS LIKE 107’

Igor not make same mistake twice.  I waited in my lovely air conditioned room until almost 1 pm, walked slowly to Prosperus Dim Sum, and took a seat under the large marquee near a fan.  One advantage of going late is the availability of several tables, notably near fans mounted high on the wall.    Mother Nature’s breeze augmented by the fan made it very comfortable.

I am catching on to ordering at Prosperous.  It is basically a noodle restaurant offering about 3 dozen noodle dishes.  You can get them with chicken, pork, fish, or plain.  There is also a long steam table which has about a dozen or so dim sum items.  You first sit and order your noodle dish from the menu.  The waiter/waitress ticks off what you ordered on a ticket and tucks it in a container on the table. You have the option to wait for your dish, or, you can also order additional items from the dim sum steam table.

There, you select an item or items and hand your ticket to the person behind the steam table.  They tick off what additional items you have ordered, and pass the ticket back to you along with your treasures on a cafeteria tray.  I suppose you could just eat a selection of dim sum, but hey it’s a noodle shop and there are other places you can order a la carte dim sum till you’re heart’s content.

My favorite pot of tea, a highly scented Jasmine, came scalding hot along with my hot tea cup.  I delved into my two dim sum selections. I knew what one was when I selected it because I could see the pork filling nestled in the wrappers which were open at the top.  There were three of those little piggies which I dipped into soy sauce.  Two I managed to eat with my chopsticks like a pro.  The third, well let’s just say that if anyone were watching I provided them with an entertaining minute and a half.

The other dim sum was also pork.  Two small rolls of minced pork were wrapped in a thick soy bean sheet and had been steamed half submerged in a tomato like sauce.

Dim sum dispatched, I turned to my noodle dish – pork cooked so long it fell apart served with thick Cantonese style wheat noodles in a heavy, for the lack of a better term, reduction sauce.  These noodles were much lighter in color than the ones I ate yesterday.  They were very chewy but tasty.  The surprise of the otherwise lightly flavored dish (a characteristic of Cantonese food) was small pork cracklings throughout the dish.

For a moment I’ll lapse into one of my favorite childhood memories.  A six year old getting up on a chilly early November morning at my grandparent’s farm near Richmond, Kentucky .  There are five large porkers, smooth and ivory white in color, hanging from a beam suspended about six feet off the ground.  Steam is rolling off their bodies because they were previously dipped in scalding water to loosen the hair so they can be scraped smooth.  They are on display in an area up near the milk house.  I can see the steam rolling off their bodies now just as clearly as I did over six decades ago.

Later in the day after hams and bacon had been buried in salt, chops and other pieces cut up, there was one chore left.  That was to render lard.  A huge black cauldron about 4 feet across and 3 feet deep sat over a fire.  Chunks of fat were tossed in with a little water to start so the fat wouldn't burn.  A couple hours later the fat had liquefied and small pieces of skin that had clung to some pieces of the fat were now cooked to a golden crisp and floating on top of the cauldron of grease (lard).  They would be skimmed off, drained of grease, put on a plate, and sprinkled with salt.  To me, the taste of a hot salted crackling was one of the true joys of being on a farm.  Who knows, maybe that contributed to me becoming a ‘foodie’.     

So, if you didn't before, now you know what a cracking is.  And, while we are on the subject, there is a different style you get along with your eggs for breakfast if you take the Bluenose ferry from Maine over to the bottom of Nova Scotia.  I don’t recall the name of the breakfast but it has a cutesy name, something like the ‘Fisherman’s  Breakfast’.  They call them pork scrunchions.  Whereas the crackling on the farm had a bit of skin attached to it and could be quite chewy, the ones on the Blue Nose were simply small cubes of fat deep fried to a crispy goodness so when you bit into them you got an unbelievably rich flavor of juicy fried pork fat  YUM.   That’s how the cracklings were in my noodle dish at Prosperus, a rich and delicious recollection of those on the Blue Nose.   Once again, just like the ubiquitous pork belly, we have another form of the pig showing up at different places on the planet.  Versatile animal that pig.

I got so carried away with pork fat I almost forgot to tell you about dinner last night.  I ate at an area that is a common configuration here.  Carts where people cook their specialty, usually one or just a few items per cart, are chockablock, jammed up against another.  Behind them is a sit down restaurant that serves only drinks.  The idea is that you wend your way among the carts and decide on what to order.  Once you buy the food you go sit in the restaurant area where you order a drink and wait for the food to be bought to you. 

I had intended to eat fresh fish last night at ‘Tokyo Seafood’.  However, somehow I missed the place and wound up at a spot that had about twenty separate carts offering well over thirty dishes.  One was wood fired pizza! 

There was everything from duck to you name it (some you wouldn't want to hear).  I cruised the place twice before settling on a plate of crispy fried duck with rice.  You would have picked it too, solely from eye appeal.  Just wait till you see the photo of those crisp rich mahogany colored ducks hanging in the window area of the cart.

Tonight for sure I’m going to eat fish.  On the other hand, you never know.  Last night I said the same thing and got waylaid by a duck.

‘WEATHER UNDERGROUND:  TODAY IN PENANG - 91 DEGREES, FEELS LIKE 105’

I left the hotel about 11 this this morning intent on going for an hour and a half stroll before lunch at Prosperous Dim Sum Restaurant.  In three days I have seen very little of the city of Georgetown other than the businesses and restaurants between my hotel and Mama’s, a fifteen – twenty minute walk.  Plus, a little exercise would be a good thing, given my eating regimen.

I was headed toward the ‘Little India’ section of Georgetown.  I thought I could get there and back to ‘Prosperous ‘ by about 12:30.  I didn't want to go to the restaurant any earlier because the 80+ seats would all be taken.  It is a very popular place.

A couple minutes after I left the hotel it felt like I was walking through a continuous veil of water vapor ladened air.  I slowed my stride even more and put on my cap and sun glasses.  Over the next hour and a half I alternated taking my cap and sun glasses off when I walked through each short shaded stretch and then donned them when I walked back into the sunlight.  If someone were watching me, they would have thought I was performing some sort of ritual. 

Only when I returned to the hotel after lunch did I look up the temperature.  This taught me to check the temperature in the future before I go out.  If it is like this I’ll stay in the hotel shortly before lunch, head out to eat and then return to my air conditioned cocoon until 4 or 5 pm when the day's heat starts to dissipate.  I can always use the time in the room to work on my new novel (5^th in the Richard Slaughter series).

I failed to reach ‘Little India’ and after a while decided to retrace my steps to arrive at Prosperous at 12:30.  That part I succeeded at. 

I wandered around inside the food area and quickly determined I didn't have a clue how to order.  I went outside to a vacant table and stood around trying to figure out the system.  Fortunately, I was taken in tow by a waiter who gestured for me to sit, fetched a menu and handed it to me.  That was nice, sort of.  There were fully 40 items on the menu and I had no idea what they were.  Finally, I did my ‘restaurant in China’ thing.  I stood up, went to the next table where two young women were eating, pointed to the two dishes of food on their table and said ‘I’ll have that’.

‘That’ turned out to be steamed buns filled with shrimp and a large plate of wheat noodles swimming in some sort of sauce.  The sauce, interestingly enough, turned out to be exactly that of Moo Goo Gai Pan.  It is a lightly flavored sauce thickened with egg and cornstarch.  The resemblance to Moo Goo ended there other than a couple thin slices of chicken (a couple of shrimp were thrown in also).  The main part of the dish was the mound of noodles in the center of the plate.   .

I ate it all, fumbling with the noodles at times with my chop sticks.  The sauce on the plate was at least a quarter inch deep after I'd finished the noodles.  It served as a 'soup' to finish the meal.  Later at the hotel I found the dish on the web.  It is called Yee Foo Mee with egg.  The noodles are a Cantonese style made of dark wheat flour.  Interesting.  Moo Goo Gai Pan is a Cantonese dish.

The meal came with a pot of scalding hot Chinese tea.  Two tea cups also appeared in a bowl of scalding water.  I fished out a cup, almost burning my fingers.  I poured the tea and even after a couple of minutes the cup was too hot to pick up with my fingers.  I nudged it over to the edge of the table where I could bend down and take a small slurp.  Delicious tea.  Needless to say, I finished the pot.

The price of lunch just went from $16-$17 at Mama’s down to shade under $3.  I’ll be back at Prosperous tomorrow and the next day for lunch, and, a little better prepared to select my food.

Speaking of Mama’s, for the last two meals I have not been able to pick out what I was going to order from the menu.  The daughters have become 'benevolent dictators'.  Last night I was ‘ordered to order Assam Pedas Fish, another Nonya classic.  The daughter suggested that prawn fritters would be a nice side dish to go with it.

I would really like to make the fish dish.  Out came a bowl with a large piece of what I think was grouper, swimming (no pun intended) in a fragrant broth.   Who would ever think about making a fish dish with pineapple for sweetness, tamarind pulp for sour flavor and then top it off with mint leaves and ginger flowers?  The kaleidoscope of flavors seemed to change with every spoonful.   

Dinner was topped off with black stick rice with plums embedded in it.  Again, fresh coconut milk was served with it.  You may recall the difference in flavor of my previous dessert of yam and sago that went from ho hum to outstanding when I poured the fresh coconut milk over it.  Same thing here, although I preferred the yam and sago mixture.

One of the high points of my meals at Mama’s was yesterday evening.  One of the daughters insisted that I have my photo taken with them.  I had walked in there a stranger three days ago, and last night, I left with fond memories of four 'friends' along with memories of sampling of excellent Nyonya cuisine.

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‘CHEWING THE FAT WITH MAMA (PORK FAT THAT IS)’

I have been faithful to Mama.  Five lunches and dinners in a row there. (I’m beginning to feel a little like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day).  And it isn’t cheap by Penang standards.  A meal at Mama’s costs anywhere between 15 and 20+ bucks.  To put this in perspective, with $20 in your pocket you could eat like a king every night for a week at hawker stalls and have a little money left over.  I go to Mama’s tonight for meal number six.

Yesterday I ate Tau Yu Bak, chunks of pork belly slow cooked in a dark soy sauce mixture.  It is interesting that Mario Batalli several years ago came back from one of his cooking stints in Italy and announced that a discovery –pork bellies would be a staple be on his Babbo menu.  It was immensely popular.  I wonder if he really thought it was a ‘new dish’? 

It is interesting to note that the pork belly is an international dish.  We in America of course slice it up and fry it as bacon.  It has been around for a century, probably much longer, in China and Korea, and likely here too as a Nonya classic.  It also shows up in Alsation, Swiss and German dishes.  The pork belly sure gets around.

When I was seated at Mama’s at lunch today one of the sisters asked me if I would like to try something that was not on the menu.  Hey, she was asking the guy who ate Fish Head Curry and pickled fish stomach soup.   What do you think my answer was?

Out came what she called a traditional Malay breakfast.  There were three rectangular plates.  One contained chicken in a thick sauce.  Another held a small barbecued fish covered in a red sauce (I’ll come back to the sauce later).  The third held two large shrimp that had been cooked in a heavy soy sauce, and two small sardine sized barbecued fish.  When she set the plate of rice before me she said it had been bathed in coconut milk and was high in cholesterol.  I said good, I needed more cholesterol.  Another chuckle earned.

Now for the sauce on the barbecued fish.  It is complex and absolutely delicious. The complexity comes from the mix of red chilis, shallots, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice, lemongrass, shrimp paste, sugar, and tamarind paste.  Spooned thickly on top of the roast fish, this was the definite star of the whole meal.

I think my Chez Greenbrier Nyonya dinner will be chopped meat in spring roll wrappers deep fried and otak-otak (that steamed fish custard) for appetizers.   Soup will be roasted pork and salted mustard greens.   I’ll choose an entrée from a number of favorites.  For dessert it will be the Sago and yam mixture with fresh coconut milk poured over it.  You’ve got experience how that coconut milk brings the dish alive.

I have experienced a number classic Nyonya dishes at Mama’s – Fish Head Stew, Otak-Otak, Kiam Chai Buey, Perut Ikan, Loh Bak, and on and on.  After this sampling I have come to the conclusion the cooking style is unique in many ways.  One simple example is that the sauce in which the meat or chicken is cooked is reduced down to thick quasi paste-like consistency.

In some ways I think of it as a classical style of a bygone era.  The flavors are lovely and well balanced.  They are truly well prepared and very tasty.  Another thing to say for Nyonya cuisine is that no matter how spicy or sour the food, (it is never overpoweringly spicy)  it is very satisfying and ‘sits well on your stomach.’  Some dishes are surprisingly sour, which I like.  For example the Kiam Chai Buey which is a soup made with roasted pork and salted mustard greens sour flavor comes from sour plum.  

That having been said, after dinner tonight it will be time to move on to other Penang culinary experiences.  However, before I depart the topic of Nyonya Cuisine, I am confident that I can make many of the dishes back at Chez Greenbrier. Recipes are already tucked away in a folder on my netbook.

Now, perhaps one of the reasons I'm setting my sights on exploring other foods here in Penang is due to the website Malaysianfood.net.  I highly recommend taking a look at it.  In a few short pages it sums up the influence other cultures have had on the region’s cuisine.  

There is not only the Chinese (Peranakan) influence resulting in Nyonya (the origin of the word - Chinese immigrants in Melaka Malaysia referred to the woman as nyonya and the man baba) , but also Indian, Eurasian, Malay, and even indigenous people of Borneo.  I suspect the sum total of foods in the hawkers’ carts and those prepared in the open air restaurants represent an amalgam of these other cultures’ influences on what is eaten here.

I’ll take just a moment to say that Malaysians in Penang love to eat.  It is a festive occasion, be it at a hawker stall or in an open air restaurant.  The air is filled with the mingling sound of happy voices just as much as it is with the mingling aroma of the food being prepared.

Aside from the ubiquitous hawker stalls, there are countless restaurants that are open to the sidewalk (what I referred to above as ‘open air restaurants’).  They serve an impressive number of varied dishes.  When you walk by, you see not only individual dishes being cooked but an array of fresh ingredients lined up, be they meat, seafood, duck or vegetable, etc. 

You experience the cooking aromas wafting in the air as you walk by and are enticed by the eye appeal of fresh fish or vegetables resting over crushed ice.  It is the lure of these places that has proved to be irresistible during all my trips to and from Mama’s.   

Add to that, each day when I walk to Mama’s for lunch I pass the Prosperus Dim Sum Restaurant with fifty or so patrons sitting at outdoor tables under a large marquee.  I can’t help but notice the small delightful morsels being consumed.  Tomorrow I’ll start sampling foods influenced by some of the other cultures I mentioned above.  Maybe a dim sum lunch would be a good way to start.

‘COME TO MAMA’

Mama’s opens at 11:30.  I arrive at 11:15 and am seated.  I am the first person in the restaurant.  I guess Ang Lee got temporarily delayed by that Oscar thing.

I was waited on by one of Mama’s four daughters.  I think over the next 6 or 7 days I’ll probably get to meet the whole family.  First, a little about the menu. 

There is one appetizer and four desserts.  Between those items are 8 fish, 6 shrimp, 4 chicken, 5 pork, 1 wild boar, 13 veggie and 3 soups.  Several of the veggie dishes also have shrimp, etc.   So, the entree count is about 27.  Even if I eat two meals a day there for ten days I could only expect to get through 20 of them.  Time to be selective.

My first meal at Mama’s, lunch today, was Fish Head Curry.  Think fish gumbo without the filet powder.  The curry is very thin and had a soup like consistency.  It is a mixture of lemongrass, turmeric, chili paste, shallots, shrimp paste, tamarind pulp and laska leaves.  I don’t know if we can get the later in the US.  The curry actually resembles a light fragrant mixture you would find in a Thai soup (sans coconut milk)

As Bill Clinton once said, “It’s the economy stupid.”  For Fish Head Curry it’s the soup part.  If you get it right like Mama’s it is a sophisticated blend of flavors.  Think of it as being as smooth as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers gliding across the floor.

Before I headed to Mama’s I stopped at the Gee Hiang Bakery at 216 Macalister Rd.  They must be doing something right because they’ve been in business since 1855 (that’s right, a century and a half).  I told the lady who waited on me that it must be a very famous place.  She said yes, it was over 150 years old.  I replied that she didn’t look a day over thirty.  That got a giggle.

The boxes the biscuits and cookies come in are works of art themselves with many varieties to choose from.  I asked her to choose three different ones for me.  I now have breakfast plus snacks for the rest of the time I’ll be in Penang.

Mama’s at 6 pm for dinner.  I’m the first diner again.  But by 7 the place is packed.  I put in an ambitious order because I am only a party of one and if I eat only one dish a meal I’ll sample just a fraction of the menu.  This would be a good time to be travelling with three other people.  We could all order different dishes and an in only a few days we could work our way through the menu.

So I order the anchovy appetizer, followed by otai-otak, then curry Kapitan, and a dish of vegetables called acar awak.

Out comes the appetizer.  The anchovies used in the dish were the dried ones about an inch or so long.  You can buy a bag of them in an oriental market.   They last forever and maybe just get a little more fragrant as time passes.  I like to take a few out of the bag and sprinkle them over plain steamed rice.  They have a pungent flavor and crispy crunchy texture.

These had been deep fried.   There were a lot of them mixed in with a lot of finely sliced raw shallots and thinly sliced hot peppers.  The seeds had been removed so the dish was only spicy and not hot.  The dressing was on the sweetish side.  I asked if it were sugar and rice vinegar.  The daughter waiting on me said no, it was sugar and lemon juice.  You should try this combo some time.  Make it to your taste.

Otak-otak is a classic Nyonya dish (plus in a childish way, it’s fun to pronounce).  It is basically a custard surrounding a small fish filet.  You first make a paste out of shallots, garlic chilies, lemon grass galangal (oriental ginger), turmeric and shimp paste.  The old fashioned way is in a mortar and pestle.  I’d used a blender.

The custard base is a mixture of eggs, coconut milk, Kafir lime leaves, salt and sugar.  A little rice flour is used as a binder.  The juice of the Kafir lime by the way is a much more flavorful than the one we get in the US.  The leaves are very aromatic and play a role in many Thai, Lao and Malaysian dishes.

You mix the two together, put the fish in the middle, make a banana leaf packet, seal it, and steam it.  Out comes the fish custard surrounding the fish in the center.  It has both a delightful texture and flavor.  We can’t get fresh banana leaves in the US so let’s all put on our thinking caps and think of an alternative.

Chicken Curry Kapitan is another classic Nyonya dish. It is a very very thick curry using tamarind juice, candlenuts (a tree fruit which is available in the US), fresh turmeric root and shrimp past among other ingredients. The chicken is cut up like you get it in China.  A cleaver is taken to the chicken and it is whacked up onto small pieces, bones and all.  So you get these small pieces of irregularly cut chicken and eat the meat off the bone (I think Shira will skip this dish).

I failed Penang etiquette 101.  I ate it with my fingers.  Later I saw diners use their fork and a table spoon to remove the meat from the bones.  I’ll know better next time.

Dessert was cooked sago with sweet potato.  I had to look up sago.  It is the pith of palm stems, and resembles tapioca pearls.  I tasted the combination and found it to be rather bland.  Then I poured the fresh coconut milk that came in a small container over the mixture and tasted it.  What a transformation.  The coconut milk turned it into a luscious dessert.  I know how to make fresh coconut milk from my class at Tamarind in Laos and look forward to preparing this dessert at Chez Greenbrier.

‘THE WAY TO A MAN’S HEART IS THROUGH HIS STOMACH, BUT THE WAY TO MAMA’S DAUGHTER’S HEART IS THROUGH A FISH's STOMACH’

I have been waited on by the same daughter (there are four) at every meal thus far.  Today for lunch was no exception. I ordered an otak-otak and chopped meat which had been rolled in a spring roll wrapper and deep fried.  Those were my appetizers.

For the main course I ordered Perut Ikan.  It is a classic Nyonya dish made with pickled fish stomach.  What the hey?  I got past the head yesterday for lunch, why not this?  The daughter shook her head and said ‘foreigners don’t like’.  I replied ‘I’d like to try it’.  How many times have you gone into a restaurant to order and the wait staff said ‘hey, you really don’t want to eat that’?

When it was set before me it was with a bit of trepidation that I lifted the first spoonful of Perut Ikan to my lips.  Well, I actually sniffed it first before I took a taste.  To my pleasant surprise it turns out to taste like a weak kim chee.  Not as hot and not as spicey, but with that distinctive sour taste you get from the fermented cabbage. 

I proceeded to eat all the otak-otak, two sausage rolls.  And, there was nothing left of the Perut Ikan but the bottom of the bowl.  When I went to pay the bill the daughter was positively beaming.  She said ‘you are the first person (gringo implied) to eat a whole bowl.’ 

I think I’m scoring points with the family.

 iang