The nature vs nurture of food: 03 (臭豆腐 chòu dòufǔ / stinky doufu)

 

I’d heard the name 臭豆腐 chòu dòufǔ / “smelly bean rot” in my younger days in Singapore but never came across it there pre-1974.  

    In December 1974, en route to Taipei to take up my new job with Conoco Taiwan, I’d stopped over in Hong Kong for one night, arriving on Saturday afternoon and leaving on Sunday afternoon, long enough for seeing Hong Kong for the first time.

    At one point during my walkabout in the back streets and alleyways (which I find more interesting than the big touristy streets in any country), I walked past a roadside stall, parked at the junction of a back street and an alleyway.  A bad smell was emanating from the stall.  Spotting a drain (needed for chucking uneaten food into) next to the stall, I thought, “That’s a very stupid man, selling his food next to such a smelly drain.”

    The following day, I flew into Taipei.  My flatmate took me into the bustling cinema area of Taipei for a look around.  As we were walking to the bus stop for the journey home, I caught the same bad-drain smell in the air.  My flatmate suddenly said, “Oh, can you wait here for a moment.  I need to go and get something.”  

    She returned a few minutes later with a bag of takeaway food.  As she got closer, I realised that the bad-drain smell was coming out of her takeaway bag.  It was 臭豆腐 chòu dòufǔ, a famous Chinese bean curd dish.  An apt name that, interestingly, doesn’t put off the Chinese at all.  (The Chinese have no qualms about giving to dishes names that would be nauseating to the Westerner — a blog in the making.)

    I’ve never plucked up the courage to try it, but those who have say that the smell is much worse than the flavour, and that one can actually get to like it.  Hmmm, I’m not convinced yet — need more time (and nerve) to get round to trying it…

(Hong Kong / Taipei, 1974)

The nature vs nurture of food: 02 (Durian)

 

Durian is another marmite-effect item.

(MBP dictionary)

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a spiny oval tropical fruit containing a creamy pulp. Despite its fetid smell it is highly valued for its flavour.

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Note the use of “fetid” for describing its smell.  Obviously written up by a non durian fan (and most likely a Westerner), because it’s not fetid at all to lots of S.E.Asian people.  Mind you, “fetid” is not as disgusting as some of the other words I’ve heard that are used for describing the smell of durian.

    I grew up hearing a saying: 

榴槤出，沙籠脫 / 榴梿出，沙笼脱

liúlián chū, shālóng tuō

“durian emerge, sarong remove”

    This means that when the durians come out on the market, the smell is so irresistible that the native people will take off their sarongs and pawn them to get the money to buy one.

    An English friend called Guy loved durians.  He was once in Bangkok with another Westerner who wanted to sample Bangkok’s red light area.  Guy said to go and buy his durians first before the stalls packed up, as the red light district would be open all night, so his friend agreed to it.  

    Shopping done, they walked down the red light street, with Guy dangling his durians.  The prostitutes all fled. 

The nature vs nurture of food: 01 (Marmite)

 

Marmite (MBP dictionary)

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a dark savoury spread made from yeast extract and vegetable extract.

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There is a term in English: the marmite effect.

(MBP dictionary)

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• used in reference to something that tends to arouse strongly positive or negative reactions rather than indifference

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I grew up with marmite being a constant item in the kitchen.

    My family’s routine was for the domestic help to be the first to get up, cook a pot of rice porridge and brew a flask of coffee, ready for tapping into.

    The kind of Chinese rice porridge varies with each region.  

    The Cantonese version (粥 zhōu, called "chook/jook" in Cantonese) is an all-in-one, with various sorts of chopped up stuff in it, e.g., minced pork cooked in the rice, giving it flavour; thinly sliced pig’s liver and raw egg poached by the piping hot porridge poured over them; spring onion sprinkled on top at the end.

    My dialect group (潮州 / Cháozhōu / Teochew, in S.E.China) is a bland-food group, so our version (called "muay" in Teochew) is plain rice porridge eaten with mostly pickles. 

 

    The idea is that one doesn’t overload the digestive system first thing in the morning (or throughout the day, when one’s ill) with meat (cf. bacon and sausage in a traditional English breakfast), or fried food (therefore no omelette/scrambled egg, or even stir-fried veg, as there’s still oil in a stir-fried dish).  The combination of plain rice porridge and pickles is also a clean taste for the palette, so it’s not a shock to the system straight after one gets out of bed. 

    From as far back as I can remember (aged 5 at least), I had been a night owl, and therefore a late riser.  

    On school days, I’d make up for lost time by multi-tasking when it came to getting ready for school:  stir some marmite into my rice porridge; then get out of my pyjamas, a spoonful of porridge; put on my school uniform, a spoonful of porridge; put on my socks and shoes, a spoonful of porridge. 

    When I came to London, I discovered that a chap at university also liked marmite.  Being a Westerner, his way of eating it was to spread it on toast — which I found odd.  When I told him I’d eat my marmite with rice porridge, he found it odd.  Recently, I found out that some Mauritians, who are into marmite as well, it seems, stir marmite into their Western-style oat porridge, which I find odd.

    Horses for courses, as the saying goes.

(Singapore, 1960s / early 1970s; London, 1978)

Be careful what you wish for (London)

 

(Merriam Webster) (idiom) 

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…used to tell people to think before they say that they want something and to suggest that they may not actually want it 

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(From googling) 

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Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true! The origin of this saying is Aesop's Fables, the world's best known collection of morality tales (circa 260 BC). 

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I was telling a friend about this neighbour who is a lot of things under the sun — this is the abridged version, just to save you going through the long list.

    I said I wouldn’t extend a hand to pull her out of the water if she were to fall in.  Then, feeling that I shouldn’t be thinking such wicked thoughts, I added, “I’ve said to God that I’ll be willing to go to Hell for this, because she doesn’t deserve saving.”

    The friend said, “Be careful.  You might meet her there.”

    Hahahaha.

(London, 2024)

Chinese sayings: 28 (漏洞百出)

漏洞百出 

lòu dòng bǎi chū

“leak holes hundred emerge”

This saying is pretty much self explanatory:  that loopholes emerge all over the place.

    Met a couple last year on the allotment, and have been helping out with watering and weeding.  

    Also giving them massage and Long G (Longevitology / 長生學 / 长生学) energy adjustments for their aches and pains.  Portuguese husband is a builder, Brazilian wife a cleaner, so they’re constantly sustaining fresh inputs of pain.  

    My massages do not claim to be so effective as to achieve 100% pain relief after just one session (although there have been the occasional miraculous successes which surprised even me — or maybe they claim to have become pain-free just to avoid another torturing session??), so it’s an ongoing project, going to them regularly for massage and Long G.

    Wife tries to make me stay for dinner each time to thank me for my time and effort.  I try to decline if I can, for various reasons — one of which is not to add to their food costs, even though I’m not a big eater (and certainly not as a guest — see more on this in https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2014/10/chinese-hospitality-etiquette-01-china_25.html).  So I have, of late, come up with the reason of dropping in on Supermarket X on my way home, to get some shopping done — which is true.

    Yesterday, I’d gone to them with some pork steaks as a treat for them, marinaded Chinese style (bean paste, ginger, garlic) but can be cooked Western style (pan fried or grilled or oven roasted).  

    Husband had told me that the Portuguese people don’t like to eat things cut up into small pieces like how the Chinese do it, although he does like Chinese food, especially if ginger is used.  So, I went for a compromise:  Chinese marinade ingredients, but cooked and eaten Western style as a chunk of meat. I also wanted to save her work, because she was always having to go and cook dinner after the massage, hence the 4pm start for her massage and Long G. 

    It turned out that they were going to make a big meal so that they wouldn’t have to cook today.  This means that my original plan of the dinner taking very little time to cook went up the spout. 

    It was already 8pm when he started cooking after his massage and Long G.  The supermarket closes at 10pm, so after waiting until 9pm, I said I had to leave, to catch them before they shut. 

    The wife insisted I stay for dinner.  I said, “Next time, next time.”  She kept insisting, so I said, “Food is not important.”  The husband said dinner was almost ready, offering to let me take a bento box of food away with me if I really couldn’t stay.  (Watch out, Chinese people:  the Brazilian and Portuguese people seem to have equally good, if not better, stamina when it comes to trying to persuade the guests to eat.) 

    To make it convincing that I really had to turn down their kind invitation, I said I had to go to the supermarket “to shop for food”, since it’s a staple.  

    Brazilian wife’s English is not that good, but she came up with a clever retort, “You said food is not important, so no need to go to the supermarket to buy food!”

 

    I’d tripped myself up, hadn’t I, using those self-contradictory arguments?  Haha.

How far back do memories go? (Singapore)

 

I’ve heard it said over the years, more than once and by lots of sources, that one’s memories of earlier times could’ve been a pastiche of what one’s heard from the adults down the decades, rather than what one actually remembers from first hand experience.  You’ve heard it described so many times that you start to take over the memory as your own experience recollection.

    In my teens, I came across a photo of myself as a one(?)-year-old.

 

    It was obviously posed for the occasion in a photo studio (common in those days when the majority of people wouldn’t have a camera, going to a studio only for a memento to mark the event, usually a wedding as that'd be important enough).  

    I was sat, cross-legged, next to a porcelain Alsatian, also seated but the same height as I.  My right arm was around the dog’s shoulder in a “we’re chums” pose, with my right hand fingers gently holding the dog’s right ear.

    I was kitted out in a pair of dungaree shorts, but the fabric was not denim.  As I looked at the photo, my head flashed up the colour scheme (patchy mixture of subdued lime green and lemon yellow) and the texture (seersucker type with small raised blobs). 

    Now, where would I have got the colour and texture from, since it was a black and white photo?  

    Even if the grown-ups had talked about the photo (but to whom and why? — it was only a posed studio photo of a one-year-old, after all), I doubt that they’d have gone to such detail as the texture and colour scheme on the child’s garment.  They’d more likely have talked about how hard it was to get the child to sit still for the pose, or how much it had cost — IF they had talked about it at all.

    I can only conclude that what flashed up in my head was from my own experience on that day — as a one-year-old at the time of the photo shoot: the feel of the material and the colours that fed onto my eye screen.

(Singapore, 1960s)

Tell or not tell?

 

I’ve always kept things from my family, especially after moving abroad, and certainly if they are problems.  After all, what can they do, being so far away?  Telling them will only add to their worries — we have enough stress already in modern life as it is.  A number of friends I've spoken to about this subject in the past say they feel the same way.

    An 82-year-old student’s daughter has moved to another part of the world and is trying to get her dogs out there to join her.  The papers are all in place but she’s having trouble getting the approval of the authorities at the other end.  

    My student mentioned this yesterday, more than once, so it’s obviously playing on her mind.  

    It is true that a lot of old people tend to repeat things, often because they forget that they’ve said it, but probably also because old people usually have a smaller input of external experience: no work-related matters because they’re now retired; they don’t go out that much; a lot of their friends are no longer around; so they end up dwelling on a narrower (and usually more immediate, time-wise) range of matters.

    Dog-lovers (/ owners of cats, parrots, any pet animals) might protest at this, as pets are mostly seen as family, but I personally don’t think that having trouble re-locating one’s pets is important enough to add to an old person’s stress levels.  

    Old people have unavoidable health issues that are related to growing old to plague them:  diabetes, thus restricting their range of food; high blood pressure, ditto; cholesterol, ditto; arthritis; poor eyesight; etc.  Why add to their list of woes?

    This is only an idle personal opinion expressing how I see things on the scale of levels of importance.  I’m not downplaying the importance and value of animals as living beings.  It’s definitely not a criticism at all of my student’s daughter to tell her mother about the hassle with the dogs.  I know that families and friends do often share the most trivial of details about their lives, because they need to talk.

    My father started to pass out blood in his urine or stool (can’t remember which) back in 1978, aged 61.  

    He thought it might’ve been because of an internal injury from a fall while pruning the fig tree a while back, for which he’d taken some Chinese herbal concoction, so he wasn't terribly concerned, but went to get it checked out all the same.  

    It turned out to be cancer of the liver, which the family decided not to tell him about.

    On the last day of his time at the hospital, he went round the ward, cheering up everyone else, feeling sorry for them that they were stuck there while he was going home.

    So, my father died not having the worry and stress of knowing he had cancer of the liver.  

    My last landlord in Highbury died of a heart attack just three months after being diagnosed with cancer of the liver.  I was/am glad for him that he died a quick death and didn’t have to continue to suffer the horrible side effects of his chemo and radio therapy — or, worse, the more stressful mental anguish of worrying about his cancer.  

    I personally think that, being the hypochondriac his wife had said he was, he’d scared himself to death, worrying about his cancer.  

    Stress is a much bigger killer than actual physical ailments, I feel.