An oft-repeated open secret of Thai-American restaurateurs, one likely applicable to those adapting other foreign cuisines for spice-averse palettes, is that when cooking for Americans not familiar with the cuisine, the safest method is to prepare the food as they do for children, with spice levels pushed way down, and sugar content way up. This leads to legions of syrupy pad thais, bogged down with ketchup and peanut butter, the sharp, sparkling flavors of the cuisine buried in viscous goop. I spend an inordinate amount of my time figuring out how to avoid such goop, and yet sometimes it’s worth surrendering to the allure of something intended specifically for a child’s palate. Enter Happy Soda (a.k.a. Gembira), a roseate cartoon beverage overflowing with mysterious sweetness. I spotted this one at the now-monthly Indonesian Food Bazaar, held inside Elmhurst’s St. James Episcopal Church, where vendors gather to sell homemade batches of native meals and snacks. The onslaught of unfamiliar items (Indonesia being another of those countries whose dozens of regional cuisines I’m only beginning to understand) forced me to do several laps to take it all in before ordering, and on these the thing which kept standing out to me was not any specific food item but this glowing soda, clutched in the hand of many a dawdling child, the source of its color still a mystery. My initial suspicion after purchasing one, which was prepared fresh before my eyes, was strawberry; a little research reveals the answer is actually coco-pandan syrup, a mixture of two maritime Asian staples, blended with condensed milk over ice, filled out with a healthy pour of seltzer for the requisite fizz. A tad too sweet for me, but I’m glad to have added this particular shade of pink to my rainbow of consumed beverage colors.
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The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
The guts in question here refer to shiokara, a fermented suspension of salted sea life - commonly squid, skipjack tuna, sea urchin et al - mixed with malted rice, and sometimes kombu, to complete the marine melange. I've never had the stuff, which is favored as both an ingredient, a standalone dish and a companion for sake, but it's reasonable to assume, as this character believes, that it bears some similarity to Burmese shrimp paste (Ngapi), also the salty end product of a process designed to stretch every possible use from traditional seaside staples. This is a film concerned with exploring cross-cultural parallels between a collapsing empire and the country it briefly lorded over, and so the exchange of goods here, between Japanese POWs and a small-scale Burmese merchant-woman, is interesting on both a literal and a symbolic level. Stripped of their arms, freedom and pride, the deprived dregs of the Imperial Army are forced to consider the things which connect them and the people of this foreign land, right down to the use of salted fish guts as a flavoring and a meal base, proving that they may not be so different after all. |
The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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