Southeast Asia's Best Recipes. Wendy Hutton
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AND FISH 120
Crunchy Thai Stuffed Shrimp 122
Marinated Shrimp Skewers 123
Squid with Garlic and Black Pepper 124
Delicate Squid with Thai Herbs 125
Fragrant Steamed Mussels 126
Famous Singapore Chili Crab 127
Fish Mousse with Basil and Red Curry 128
Thai Fried Fish with Ginger Sauce 129
Fish with Sweet Tamarind Sauce 130
Grilled Whole Sambal Fish 131
Fragrant Grilled Fish Cakes 132
Grilled Fish with Sweet Soy Dip 133
CHAPTER 6: VEGETABLES AND TOFU 134
Stir-fried Vegetables with Oyster Sauce 136
Cabbage Braised in Creamy Coconut Milk 137
Spicy Sambal Eggplant 138
Stir-fried Pumpkin and Snowpeas 139
Fragrant Spiced Pineapple 140
Laotian Grilled Eggplant 141
Stir-fried Tofu and Bean Sprouts 142
Red Curry and Tofu 143
Silken Tofu with Chinese Vegetables 144
Fried Tofu with Tomato Sambal 145
CHAPTER 7: DESSERTS 146
Sweet New Year’s Rice Cakes 148
Rice Flour Crêpes with Sweet Cinnamon and Peanut 150
Mangoes with Sweet Sesame Coconut Rice 151
Water Chestnut and Sweet Corn Pudding 152
Sago Pearls with Sweet Coconut Cream 153
Coconut Pancakes 154
Thai Red Rubies in Sweet Coconut Milk 155
Banana and Sago Pudding 156
Balinese Black Rice Pudding 157
Index 158
A Tropical Culinary Adventure
At last, here is the book I have long awaited from a food writer I really trust. Wendy Hutton is one of the too few Western food writers on Asian food who knows her subject inside out. She takes the trouble to research painstakingly and then conveys her knowledge and enthusiasm for Southeast Asian food with recipes that really work.
I have known Wendy for almost 30 years and from the moment we met, recognized in each other a kindred spirit. She was half the editing team who worked on my Complete Asian Cookbook, making an onerous task one of great satisfaction.
Her Singapore Food is the only other cookbook (besides mine) that I keep in my kitchen and actually cook from. We consult each other on matters culinary and track down elusive ingredients with the enthusiasm of bloodhounds. Wendy has a much more adventurous attitude to food than I have and often sends me jottings from the wild, as it were, where her descriptions of dishes she has tried during her travels in Asia fill me with awe.
While we might not all live in a tropical country with mangoes dropping from the trees and lemongrass growing happily in the garden, thanks to immigration, a wide range of Asian ingredients is now readily available in most Western countries. This book will open the door to those exciting hot, sweet, sour, salty, spicy and sometimes bitter flavors which make the food of Southeast Asia such a palate awakening experience. Even for those whose culinary aspirations are limited, this book is an inspiring read as Wendy Hutton shares her experiences and her recipes.
Fabulous Flavors from Bangkok to Bali
Southeast Asia is my adopted home. I came intending to stay two or three years. More than forty years later, I’m still here. How could I possibly tear myself away from such a fascinating region which also—or could this be the real reason?—offers some of the world’s most sublime food.
When I first arrived in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, towards the end of 1967, I was overwhelmed by the astonishing variety of food created by the three major ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese and Indian. It was a revelation to someone who previously had only ever eaten Chinese food, considerably adapted to what were perceived to be Western tastes; several rather indifferent Indian curries and just one Southeast Asia dish, Nasi Goreng or Indonesian-style fried rice prepared by a Dutchman who’d left Indonesia and migrated to Australia after Independence.
I felt almost inebriated by the sheer exuberance of Malaysia’s lush tropical surroundings, the almost bewildering range of faces, styles of dress, incomprehensible languages and above all, food. I went on a non-stop voyage of discovery, eating in coffee shops, roadside stalls, restaurants and in the homes of friends, all the time trying to find out how to reproduce some of these amazing dishes myself.
Today, with cookbooks and TV shows telling you how to make just about anything from just about anywhere, it’s strange to recall that back in the late 1960s, there were virtually no English-language cookbooks on Malaysian or Singaporean food. I eventually found my first cookbook, which I still have today and which is probably now a collector’s piece: the 9th edition, published in 1962, of The YWCA of Malaya’s Cookery Book: A Book of Culinary Information and Recipes Compiled in Malaya.
Armed with a list of ingredients and their local names, I was able to start buying what I needed to try to some of the recipes in this treasure of a cookbook. Thanks to Aminah, our amah who didn’t speak a word of English, I had a crash course in Malay and was soon able to ask for ingredients by their local name in the markets. I must confess, though, that when I read of curry leaves, a popular southern India herb, I thought it must have been a joke (the Indian counterpart to the “spaghetti tree”). But once I learned that the curry leaf was daun kari in Malay (easier to pronounce than the Tamil karuvapilai), I was able to ask for it without feeling I’d provoke a burst of laughter.
This was the beginning of a process which continues even today, asking how unfamiliar ingredients are used, begging to be allowed to watch how the food is prepared in kitchens around Asia, asking friends or their cooks for their recipes and comparing these with recipes in cookbooks I was able to find. Whenever I traveI, I look for locally written cookbooks and have a wonderful collection including gems such as The East Indian Women’s Association Cookbook; a book on Indonesian regional cooking, Resep Masakan Daerah and Cook and Entertain the Burmese Way.
Following recipes as I’ve scribbled them down while watching a cook, or starting with recipes from a local cookbook, I then tweak or modify the recipe until it produce the flavors that I remember and may even adjust them to suit my palate. It may sound presumptuous to change recipes from someone who belongs to the particular culture that produced the cuisine, but I soon learned that is just what cooks do around Asia. Written recipes are rarely used. Most dishes made from memory, the cook tasting and adding a pinch of this or that, a splash more coconut milk, a spoonful of Chinese rice wine or a small amount of sugar to bring together all the flavors of a dish.
When I lived in Singapore, our home-base for forays into the rest of Asia for many years, I was delighted that a similar ethnic mix