La energ´ıa de los flujos no puede ser dirigida desde fuera del sistema

78

The chief sources of pun-gency in South-east Asian cooking are chillies, both fresh and dried in various colours and varieties, and pepper, here shown both as fresh green peppercorns still on the stalk and dried white pepper.

First, definitions. English, for once, is unusually the least pre-cise language for any chilli discussion. The word ‘pepper’ is used liberally, but this can mean any of three different plants. There is pepper as in salt and pepper, also known as piper nigrum, or black pepper. Then there are bell peppers which, although they look like oversized chilli peppers, have not one molecule of ‘heat’

effect. And then there are chillies, small, fiery, and for want of a better word, piquant. Indeed, most European and Asian languages refer to chillies in terms of something else, usually the nearest foodstuff that had a similarly biting effect. Variations and qualifications of black pepper are the most common, thus, poivre rouge in French and peperoncino in Italian, pimienta picante in Spanish and fulful har in Arabic). These last two mean ‘hot pepper’, and the same term crops up in parts of Asia, as in the Chinese la jiao. The New World languages of chilli-cultures suffer from none of this secondhand reference, which is no surprise.

Things on the definition front get worse when we come to the effect of eating chillies. Oddly enough, there is no generally agreed specific word for this burning effect in English, even though many other languages do, quite precisely. The most common term is hot, but this gets confused with temperature,

so that it sounds strange to say, though perfectly accurate, that much Thai food is not served hot. You could distinguish between the two as heat-hot versus chilli-hot, but that sounds just clumsy. Fiery, for the same reason, doesn’t get us very far either. The most recognized food-academic word is pungent, but this too has its own confusion, as pungent can also mean (and I quote from a range of sources) acrid, astringent, strong, assertive, biting, aromatic, earthy, brisk. Part of the problem is that it is used in the terminology of wine, tea and coffee, in each of which it has different connotations. One wine-tasters’

glossary, for example, has it as ‘very aromatic or earthy. It is a good or bad term depending on the style of wine; it’s a good term in Sauvignon Blanc, for example.’ Not, I fear, if we are talking about chilli pungency.

Chillies are native to South America, and it is believed that they were being eaten as early as the seventh millenium bc.

Between the fifth and third millennia they were cultivated, and by 2300 bc they were being grown by the Incas. By 1500 bc they had reached Mexico where, under the Olmecs, and later the Zapotecs, Mayans and Aztecs, they were adopted as an important

Among the most pungent of chilli varieties is the small Capsicum annuum cultivar known in Thai as prik kii noo.

part of the cuisine, not only for their pungency, but also for their flavour. The idea of chillies having identifiable flavours may strike non-addicts as strange, and the popular view is that, what-ever other merits a chilli may have, it actually destroys flavour.

This, though, is a subjective view, and you’ll excuse me for stat-ing the obvious that it’s an uninformed view. As the chemistry of chillies suggests (about which more in a minute), people who eat them regularly become inured to the heat-and-pain component, and this enables them to discern taste differences between culti-vars and species. Among the several excellent websites devoted to chillies, all run by informed obsessives, I like the argument given by Gernot Katzer on his website at Graz University against chilli’s flavour-killing reputation: ‘I do not doubt that novices really feel this way, and that chiles really spoil a dish for them, but the argument is not directed against chile use, but against untrained taste buds. After some experience with fiery but tasteful food, most people develop the ability to discern subtle flavours behind the chiles’ heat, and actually I feel that chiles enhance and amplify the taste of other food ingredients.’ In par

-80

A Chiang Mai housewife dry-ing chillies in the winter sun.

ticular, the key chilli-using American cuisines, Mexican, Peruvian and Bolivian, use specific chillies for specific dishes. As Katzer comments, ‘It is absolutely no sin to employ Thai chiles for Indonesian or Tamil food, whereas a Mexican mole Poblano pre-pared from Bolivian ají amarillo would probably terrify Mexicans and Bolivians alike.’

It was the Spanish court physician Diego Alvarez Chanca who, accompanying Columbus’ second expedition to the Caribbean in 1493, brought chillies back to Spain. The South-east Asian love affair with chillies and pungency began in the sixteenth century, no more than two decades later. The first Portuguese envoy to Siam arrived in 1511, and while there are no records that the first chillies arrived with his delegation, it cannot have been long after, because from what sparse accounts survive, chillies were taken up rapidly.

It was not only the Thais who fell in love with them. In 1553, the O Chau Reports written by the then Vietnamese Prime Minister Duong Van An listed chillies among the produce of the southern province of Quang Tri.

The adoption, however, was and remains patchy. Beyond their American source, the main strongholds of chillies’ pun-gency are southern India, central China and Korea (outside our scope), Thailand, Laos and Burma. While they appear in every South-east Asian country’s repertoire, the other nations tend not to be quite so fixated on them. Moreover, there are regional patches, such as Padang, which is the largely curry-based cuisine of the Minangkabau in western Sumatra. There are five cultivated

A little milder than the

‘mouseshit chillies’ illus -trated on the previous pages are these long prik chi faa or

‘chillies pointing to the sky’, another cultivar.

species of Capsicum – C. annuum, C. baccatum, C. chinense (absolutely nothing to do with China), C. frutescens and C. pubescens – with close to thirty wild species in addition. Of the chillies imported into South-east Asia, most are C. annuum, although there are by now many cultivars of this.

But down to the effect. The active ingredients in chillies are a class of compounds called capsaicinoids, which are concentrated in the placental tissue that holds the seeds (rather less in the seeds themselves, contrary to popular opinion). The most common capsaicinoid is known simply as capsaicin, and its chemical description is n-Vanillyl-8-methyl-6-(e)-noneamide. As its name suggests, it is a vanilloid, of which others are the compound that gives vanilla its flavour, but also zingerone, which gives the distinc-tive ‘hot’ flavour in ginger and mustard. The reason why chillies taste ‘hot’, or pungent as I’d better start calling it, is simply that these capsaicinoids bind to the same receptor sites on the tongue and in the lining of the mouth that register ‘real’, high-temperature heat. They do not actually burn the mouth, but the nerve endings certainly get the full impression that this is happening. Signifi -cantly, more and more exposure to capsaicinoids actually depletes the receptors and so increases the taster’s tolerance.

There is even a scale of pungency, invented by one Wilbur Scoville in 1912, and Scoville units are still very much in use today, although the modern measurements are by chromatography rather than the subjective tests that he originally used. A panel of tasters was asked to say when an increasingly dilute solution of chilli peppers no longer produced a burning sensation. Approxi -mately, one part per million of chilli pungency is rated as 1.5 Scoville units. Classic red Tabasco sauce, an easily tasted standard, is between 2,500 and 5,000 units. A basic New Mexican chilli, so widely touted in the United States for its pungency, is actually only a miserable few thousand units. The serious stuff starts in the tens of thousands, with a typical Thai prik kii noo (literally,

‘mouse-shit chilli’ because of its size and shape) scoring around 60,000. Pure capsaicin, thankfully not encountered outside the laboratory, rates 16 million Scoville units.

The increasing tolerance of the blistering heat of capsaicin explains why chilli users can go on eating more and with higher doses, but why start in the first place? The answer, or maybe just part of the answer, lies in the body’s chemical reaction to the sensation. It releases a class of neurotransmitter known as endorphins, which act as a pain-killer. Specifically, they bind to

82

certain receptors in the brain in the same way as do opiates, and have an analgesic effect as well as creating a sense of well-being and happiness. Other activities for noticing endorphins at work are sex and concentrated physical exercise (the ‘runner’s high’).

On the pain side, there has to be a balance between the amount of heat in the mouth and the size of the neurological reward, and most people will still not think the experience worth it.

There is, of course, the ‘manliness’ component of how-hot-can-you-take-it, which encourages certain western males to prove themselves by demonstrating pain tolerance. This recalls the old Burmese proverb, ‘A real chilli, seven fathoms under water, will still taste hot’, meaning that an outstanding person will rise to any occasion.

And the solution for quelling the heat sensation if you’ve just gone a chilli too far? Not that glass of beer or water on the table in front of you, despite what you may think you need. As it turns out, the most efficient way to ease the pain is to drink milk or take any other dairy product. This is because the casein in dairy foods acts like a detergent at molecular level, and strips away the offending capsaicin from its receptor binding site on your tongue. Ironically, though, this is the very region of the world where you are least likely to find milk on the table, for genetic reasons. South-east Asians on the whole are genetically intoler-ant of milk. What we in the west have been brought up to think of as one of the best things for children to consume tends to make many Asians feel somewhere between mildly uncomfort-able and violently sick, with flatulence, abdominal pain and diar-rhoea the main symptoms. The cause of this reaction is the lack of the enzyme needed to digest lactose, which is milk’s natural sugar. The enzyme is lactase, and if your body doesn’t have it, dairy products become indigestible.

A 1972 survey found that 98 per cent of Thais were lactose intolerant. I almost wrote ‘suffer from’, but of course, in a culture where livestock for consumption has traditionally been a rarity, it hardly matters. It has become significant only since economic growth and westernization of habits have created a demand for things like ice cream. There are ways around the problem, if it can be considered one, such as milk processed to contain little lactose, and dairy product companies have been quick to adopt measures like this. And lactose tolerance appears to be on the increase. A 2004 study by Mahidol Univeristy in Bangkok concluded this after tests showed that almost half of a sample

of adults showed no significant gastrointestinal upset. The inter-esting assumption in most of the literature written on lactase defici ency is that it is in some way abnormal. But really, the reverse is true. Worldwide there are many more people averse to milk than there are milk-drinkers. Genetically, lactase was originally acquired as an enzyme by Scandinavians, and then spread through northern and western Europe.

I digress. The question of why some cultures took to fiery pungency with such alacrity while most kept it at arms length has never been satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to think that chillies were taken up where there was already a predisposition to foodstuffs containing compounds that also bind to the tongue’s heat receptors. Black pepper, for example, does this through its compound piperine, and has a related ‘bite’ or ‘kick’. So do some gingers, and if we look for evidence of what was eaten before the sixteenth century, we ought to find foods like this being used significantly. The problem for South-east Asia, however, is lack of early written records on culinary matters. In Thailand, the former Prime Minister and writer Kukrit Pramoj claimed to be ‘reasonably sure’ that Thai

84

Fresh green peppercorns on the stalk.

food in the Sukhothai era (the twelfth to thirteenth centuries) was very similar to modern northern Thai, featuring ‘hot’ sauces and condiments known as nam prik, made with garlic, salt and peppercorns and various native gingers. The modern Thai word for chillies is prik, while peppercorns are distinguished by being called prik Thai, meaning ‘Thai pepper’ and suggesting that these were the original ‘hot’ ingredient.

There is a further piece of evidence to support this from out-side the region – Szechuan, another epicentre of volcanic pun-gency. This central Chinese province is home to the Szechuan pepper, quite different botanically and effectively from black pepper. Once, in Tibet, I landed up very happily in a Han Chinese restaurant. The sign painted on the window – ‘Customer is God’ – had that no-nonsense appreciation of the dynamics of catering that filled me with confidence. To be honest, I can’t remember the meal, other than that it hit the spot, but the menu had an entry that afterwards I loved to quote. The item was ‘Hot and Anaesthetic Pig Tribe’, which I thought a cute but odd way of describing the destructive effect of chillies on the tongue. Strangely, it was years later that I had the chance to taste real Szechuan food in China, and then I got it. Anaesthetic is the perfect description for the blend of those unique Szechuan peppers and chilli – a totally numbing effect laced with hints of the dentist’s chair. The Szechuan pepper produces a unique sensation of tingling numbness known to the Chinese as má. Combined with chillies it creates málá – ‘numbing-and-hot’. Very different from the Thai version, more powerful, especially with the quantities used.

The complexities of spice and pungency do more than any other ingredients to define South-east Asian cuisine, and this, as I hope I’m managing to show, is the logic of a rice culture.

If rice dominates your diet, you need to find strong flavours to accompany its essential blandness. Thus far, I’ve deliberately con-centrated on the search for flavour rather than food ingredients, which with other cuisines might seem an about-face way of doing things. Spices, savoury fermented concoctions and the fire from chillies are indeed hallmarks of South-east Asian. Rice dominates, but why exactly? And what are the other food ingre-dients, the ‘fixings’, on which all these flavour ideas work?

Elsewhere in the world, variety comes from other sources, notably animal products. But here in South-east Asia there has tradition-ally been a problem with meat. For a start, tropical grassland is

nutritionally quite poor for raising livestock, with the additional scourge of a wide range of diseases. And in any case, it is the sheer ability of rice to sustain a higher population that has made it so dominant here, and against its yield, animals raised for their meat are a very poor option. Cattle can convert only 6 per cent of their grazing into weight, and humans eat only about two-thirds of this, meaning that 96 per cent of plants grown to raise livestock is wasted. Put another way, a hectare of food crops in Asia can produce around 10 million calories, but if used for dairy pasture, the same land would deliver only 1.7 million calories.

The result is that traditionally, meat plays a very small part in the South-east Asian diet and the culture. This might not seem so obvious to most westerners, but then our normal experience of these cuisines is in restaurants, not homes in the countryside.

None of this means that South-east Asians don’t like meat.

Far from it, with the exception of devout Buddhists. The religious constraints of Islam shift the preference in much of Indonesia and Malaysia towards beef and chicken, but across the region meat is popular when affordable. This has caused one of the great recent shifts in South-east Asian cuisine. Back say fifty

86

Ducks, cooked and hanging, waiting to be served.

A Burmese poultry farmer near Ava drives his flock of ducks homeward.

years, the great majority of the population was agricultural at a level that varied from subsistence to moderately comfortable, but with little surplus for luxury. The national cuisines were established under these conditions. Now that the economies are either booming or about to boom, meat is much less of a luxury.

No doubt one result of meat being traditionally rare on the table is the love of all parts of the animal. And I do mean all parts. Calf’s brains, sweetbreads (the thymus gland), intestines and other offal have a precarious position in western cooking, and are generally considered mildly adventurous food. Mild, certainly, compared with a tasty stew that I discovered in north-ern Thailand – made from water buffalo’s penis. The local name for this is a charming euphemism, tua dio, ahn dio, translating as

‘one body, one thing’. From a culinary point of view, there is very little else but stewing that can be done with this impressive organ (about two-and-a half feet long as sold, flaccid, in the market).

Only long, slow cooking can make it tender enough to eat. I had the dish prepared in a friend’s restaurant. As I photographed the preparation, watching the girl in the kitchen doing the necessary chopping with a meat cleaver produced a slight feeling of disquiet,

88

One of Chiang Mai’s best-known duck restaurants does a roaring lunchtime trade.

particularly as she was grinning. I ate the results with reduced enthusiasm, despite the fact that it did, indeed, taste very good. I’m not sure how much the penis contributed, other than the tex-ture – the Chinese kougang or ‘mouth-feel’.

Not far from here, the northern Thai town of Phayao is especially known for its culinary use of all possible parts of cattle and buffalo, including, in the plastic bag, the cloudy green liquid called phia, from the second ruminant sac. Locals call it khi phia, the prefix being the word for excrement, and use it to flavour dishes such as spicy salads.

Holding the clear plastic bag, tied up with a rubber band, to the light, I tried

Holding the clear plastic bag, tied up with a rubber band, to the light, I tried