The nature vs nurture of food: 14 (They say it's very hot but...)

In my second year in London, I was invited by an Indonesian Chinese woman to visit her in Guildford.

    Her Caucasian husband (Belgian??) worked for Conoco, the American oil company I'd worked for in Singapore, Taiwan and London.  He was away on an offshore rig in the North Sea, so she thought I could go and stay with her for the weekend.

    I arrived on Saturday to find her having lunch:  roast lamb the Western way, but with a bowl of fresh, whole green chilli by the plate.  Like the Mauritian woman (in the blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-nature-vs-nurture-of-food-12-chilli.html) eating her afternoon tea biscuit with regular nibbles at her fresh, whole red chilli, this Indonesian woman worked her way through the bowl of fresh, whole green chilli with each forkful of roast lamb.

    For dinner that evening, she suggested having a takeaway curry.

    Going through the menu at the takeaway counter, she said to me, "This curry called vindaloo, they say is very hot, but it isn't, actually."

    After her derisive remark about the label of "very hot" for a vindaloo curry, she decided to go for the next one up, which is a phall (another one I'd not heard of, and which I've since discovered is not offered on the menus of a lot of high street curry houses, maybe because there isn't a huge demand for it).

    Back at her house, she opened her carton of phall curry to find it a vibrant orange red colour.  Her face lit up, "Now, this looks more like it!"

    She put a spoonful of it into her mouth, then shot up from the table, dashed over to the sink, spat it out, rushed over to the fridge, yanked the door open, pulled out the largest bottle of Coca Cola, and glugged it in huge gulps.

    When she turned round, her eyes were bloodshot and tears were streaming down her cheeks, as she squeaked, "My goodness, that was hot!"

    It was a bit later that the thought sneaked into my head:  maybe the man in the curry takeaway kitchen heard her scoffing at the categorisation of vindaloo, and decided to teach her a lesson by doctoring the phall to beyond how they'd normally serve it.

(Guildford, 1978)

The nature vs nurture of food: 13 (How to know how hot a curry is?)

In Singapore and Malaysia (presumably Indonesia as well), we didn't (still don't?) have labels, like they do here in Britain, to indicate the level of spiciness, e.g., a Korma curry (least hot), a Madras or a Vindaloo curry (at the top end).

    The spectrum might've been invented as a guide for the white foreigners in the old days as they would need some help identifying how hot a curry was.

    I don't remember now how we Singaporeans plump for curries (and their spiciness) when choosing a dish.

    All I remember is: the names of the dishes give a clue to the ingredients, but not the level of heat, e.g., beef curry (how hot though??), lamb curry (ditto), fish curry (ditto), etc.

    Maybe through painful trial and error.  If your taste buds get burned after a particular dish at a particular curry house/stall, you stay away from it next time.

    Once burned, twice shy.

(Singapore, 1960s and 1970s)

Meeting dead friends

I lost a very dear Taiwanese soulmate of a (platonic) friend to a road accident in 1979, which of course was unexpected.

    It was a particularly great shock as I'd just spent a month with him in the summer in Taiwan, walking the Cross Island Highway through the central mountain range (with four other friends, camping on the way), among other things.

    I was plunged into a deep depression and grieved my loss for a long time, until I decided to look at it from the other angle: that I was being selfish, that I was grieving for myself because I had lost a friend, not for him as he'd died and, therefore, wouldn't be suffering (from his accident injuries, and from the horrible things people do to each other in this world).

    Since then, I've talked to him down the decades, telling him how much I miss him, asking him to wait for me to join him.

    A fortnight ago, it suddenly struck me that if one believes in reincarnation, he would've / might've already been back on earth, maybe in more than one life since 1979.

    This would mean that when it's my time to leave this earth and go up to where he'd gone to in 1979, to spend time with him, he won't / mightn't be there!

The nature vs nurture of food: 12 (Chilli with everything)

I've come to know quite a few Mauritians in the last five years or so.

    One of the things I've noticed about them is that they share Singaporean people's love of chilli / spicy food.

    An extreme example is from a visit to the home of two of them, a married couple. At afternoon tea time, which is supposed the English style with tea, cake and/or biscuits, the wife sat down to her biscuit with a fresh, whole red chilli between her fingers -- to be eaten with every nibble of her biscuit.

(Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, 2024)

The nature vs nurture of food: 11 (No chilli, no flavour)

A friend from my teenage days came over on a three-month course, before being joined by his wife and going off to Europe on a 21-day 19-city tour.

    When they came back to London for their last three nights prior to flying back, they stayed in the empty flat of someone I knew at the time.

    On their first night, I bought fish and chips for eating in. There was a brand new, 340g size bottle of chilli sauce in the flat. They poured so much chilli sauce over the fish and chips that it was a sea of red on the plate.

    I left them to their own devices on the following two nights, then went to see them off. They told me that they had fish and chips again on their third and last evening in London, and that they'd replaced the chilli sauce because they'd polished off the whole of the previous bottle between the two of them in two sittings.

(London, 1985)

The nature vs nurture of food: 10 (Chilli machismo)

In the 80s, when I had a telly, I saw a documentary about Mexicans being macho about chilli, proving to each other how hot they were able to endure the level of spiciness, often to the point of going far beyond the normal person's threshold of pain.

    In my younger days, I was considered a wimp at home for being the one least able to take the heat.

    I remember an occasion when a fish curry was served for dinner. I had to have a bowl of water by my dinner plate -- for rinsing off some of the spiciness first.

(Mexico, 1980s; Singapore, 1960s)

The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 04 (Extended to make new concepts)

人 rén / human, person --> you can see the image (seen sideways) of a (headless) human being with one leg stretched out in front

大 dà / big --> the human stretches out both arms, so s/he becomes big

天 tiān / sky, Heaven (the ruling body in the ancient Chinese tradition) --> if the human starts to think s/he is big, above him/her is the sky / Heaven (the ruling body)

太 tài / excessive --> 大 dà is already big, adding one stroke to it makes it too much