Sikpou Saturdays: Lemongrass Chicken

Lemongrass is just such a versatile plant. Its flavour is friendly to both sweet and savoury dishes, and yet it is completely unmistakeable, standing out like an attractive and sociable person in any setting. Even outside of food, it has its uses; the oil is a good insect repellent, especially since it smells better than most alternatives, and also has antiseptic effects.

No wonder it’s so popular in the tropics, where food is strongly flavoured and the bugs are everywhere. The Malays use it liberally to season grilled meats; the Thais put it in their soups. But in my family, lemongrass goes with chicken, and a rich, dark gravy.

I asked my mother for specifics about this recipe, which I rarely do on my own, and now that I have it, there is a striking similarity between her recipe and the Vietnamese recipe for a lemongrass marinade to grill pork with. Of course, as a marinade, the ingredients are properly blitzed and basted; but all the elements are there. How on earth my mom learned this recipe (she doesn’t know any Vietnamese people or restaurants, as far as I know) is a bit of a mystery again. But you know what, I’m not complaining at all. Life is so much poorer without mysteries. And lemongrass chicken.

Being a proper homemaker and cook, she says I ought to use chicken legs with the bones included; the high heat cooking can glean more flavour from the bones. I didn’t do that in the end, but that’s personal preference. I expect chicken wings would do well with this sauce as well, if you brown them first; then the gravy becomes more of a deep-coloured glaze, fragrant with a slight ginger-kick.

Travel Wednesday Special: Review of Riddle and Finns

I’m with George Orwell on a lot of things, but In Defence of English Cooking is an essay I have always been a bit ambivalent about. Nonetheless, in London at least, I can see his point. If someone says that the Brits can’t cook, the capital has plenty of Berkeley-style refutations (kick optional).

But.

Ah, the slippery, denigrating bastard says. I never said Brits can’t cook anything. What I mean is, they can’t cook seafood, and they can’t cook it in a British style.

That’s a bit harder to refute in London, where seafood is generally (and mystifyingly) woeful. But now I have a refutation for that too. It involves taking the critic to Brighton, and then taking them into one of the small back-alleys near the city centre. I’m not advocating violence. I’m saying you take them to Riddle and Finns.

Supplementary Sikpou Sundays: Chilli-Ketchup Sauce

Bless my mum: when, over Skype, I told her about the Roti John recipe and regretted the lack of a good substitute for the sauce we normally use, she immediately told me how to make it. 

So here’s how. (Come think of it, the hint was in the name, wasn’t it?) This sauce is not just for Roti John; it’s excellent on fried noodles, fried rice and grilled chicken, and no doubt on lots of other dishes as well. 

 

Chilli-Ketchup Sauce

Thai Chilli Sauce and Ketchup, in a 1:1 ratio

Lime at discretion

Sugar or honey, at discretion

 

Yeah, well, you… mix them up. I guess you’d do the chilli and ketchup first, then the sugar, then the lime, but there honestly isn’t much difference. Drizzle on top of the Roti John. 

Sikpou Saturday 2 – Roti John, or Pain Perdu de la Mer du Sud

Sometimes the temptation is there to group Singaporean dishes along communal lines, given the vast range of culinary influences. It’s harder than it sounds, though, especially for a dish like Roti John.

Roti is a Malay and Indian word for bread, but the bread in question here is Western, a baguette. As for John, every westerner must have been called John those days, runs the assumption. So was it something Malays cooked for sale to the Brits? Was it a habit passed on from the Brits (Brits eating baguette?) to the Indians, and then to Singapore?

Goodness knows. But there is firm, historical evidence for the following assertion. This is a favourite dish for hot, humid late afternoons in an open air food court, freshly off the griddle and sliced, the aroma of onions and egg and a hint of heat. The sun is finally beating a retreat, and you celebrate with a swig of freshly mashed sugar cane juice. (Or beer, because why not.)

So here’s to some pain perdu, in the style of those from the Southern Seas.

The filling for Roti John is flexible; anything goes, from chicken chunks to beef or lamb mince, or even canned tuna. Here I’m using turkey mince and some mushrooms.

The Mid-Autumn Festival (and a little bit on Calendars)

I know this is very Western-centric, but I like how, back in Singapore – where there were technically two public holidays catering for each religious/ethnic group – each community’s festival reflected how time itself flowed and was notarised differently for each of us.

The Western festivals, Good Friday and Christmas (and National Day, things like that) stood firmly in one spot in every list, rooted like trees. But there were other grounds, other completely different bases to count the days. For the Muslims, from a land without seasons, the purely lunar festivals wandered endlessly around the solar months, following their very own compass.

Chinese festivals, based on a lunisolar calendar, were a little different; the days wandered within fences in an alien system, but were not nomadic. Everyone knew roughly when the festival was going to be – Chinese New Year was not that far off from the ‘real’ one, and it was the same with the Mid-Autumn Festival – it would be somewhere in September. Ish. Only my grandma, flipping through her arcane almanac (I loved those texts and miss them), would ever know exactly which day it was.

It’s a bit easier now; there are ways to just check the date online, which is how I knew it was tomorrow. (The fact that a massive, gibbous moon has peeked over my neighbour’s roof also helps; as does experience, watching the tide, things like that.) But mystique is always a terrible thing to lose, I think, and as with many other things age and technology has taken some of the mystique out of this (ostensibly) arcane calculation. Well, can’t stop progress…

————-

There is a story about mooncakes.

The Mid-Autumn Festival was a day for family union, and so in settlements all around China on that year – probably 1358 or 1359 AD – people gathered to enjoy the confections, not to mention the moon itself.

Packed with lotus seed paste, laboriously cooked and then laboriously baked, the cakes travelled through a China devastated by Mongol misrule – a small pleasure magnified by bad times. They were precious, so everyone got merely a small slice; and it would have to be someone overeager to get his share of sweetness, perhaps even before the moon was visible, to cut into a mooncake bought from somewhere and see the little note curled inside.

‘On the 15th day of the 8th month, take up arms and fight the Tartars…’

It would be ten years to the end, but here under the full moon (so the legend goes) was the beginning.