Identificaci´ on experimental de tipos de fasa fun- fun-damentalfun-damental

in vessels of gold, silver and porcelain.’ Scott in Burma relates a nineteenth-century temple festival, at which ‘Mountains of cooked rice send out spurs of beef and pork, with flat lands of dried fish and outlying peaks of roasted ducks and fowls’, all pervaded by the ‘malodorous varieties’ of fish paste, which

‘loads the air with suggestions of a fish-curing village, or an unclean fishmonger’s in the dog days.’ Generally, however, the South-east Asian table was ignored.

And, of course, there were the novelists and storytellers, notable among whom are Conrad, Maugham, Greene, Orwell, Le Carré and Burgess. Actually, I had remembered nothing to do with food from the first time I had read books such as Almayer’s Folly, The Quiet American, Burmese Days or Time for a Tiger. This didn’t surprise me, as culinary matters have rarely been seen as important enough to be the central theme of fiction (although Maugham has a disgusting little story about what some Chinese cook does to an obnoxious passenger’s food on board a ship), but I did expect some asides which might be useful. However,

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Afternoon tea at the Carcosa and a vintage limousine wait-ing at the entrance to the e&o in Penang have become part of the faux experience of the British Empire.

it seems that Lord Jim was not a gourmet, neither Pyle nor Fowler were much engaged by Vietnamese goˆi cuon, while Flory, despite having some empathy for Burmese culture, seems not to have relished mohinga, and Nabby Adams did not care for much else other than warm Tiger beer. As far as I could tell, there is no South-east Asian food in fiction.

So when I came across Maugham’s complaint at the begin-ning of a chapter of his non-fiction account, I thought I was on to something, particularly as he went on, ‘But I am no explorer and my food and drink are sufficiently important matters to me to persuade me in these pages to dwell on them at some length.’

Me too, wholeheartedly. He had just completed a three-week journey on horseback from Taungyii across the difficult hill country of the Shan States to Keng Tung, and Shan food has some delicious dishes, such as gaeng hang ley, popular in Chiang Mai, where Shan influence is felt. However, what Maugham goes

A Burmese monk approaches one of the stilted temples lining the margins of Lake Inlé, close to Taungyi in the Shan States, from where Somerset Maugham began his trek to Thailand.

on to discuss is ‘two large cabbages. I had eaten no green vegeta-bles for a fortnight and they tasted to me more delicious than peas fresh from a Surrey garden or young asparagus from Argenteuil.’ Then duck ‘with mashed potatoes and abundant gravy’. Professing little knowledge of cooking himself, he never-theless taught his Burmese cook how to make a corned beef hash, trusting ‘that after he left me he would pass on the pre-cious recipe to other cooks and that eventually one more dish would be added to the scanty repertory of Anglo-Eastern cuisine. I should be a benefactor of my species.’

Well, Maugham was something of a snob and more than a little condescending, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise. After the main course he received trifle one day and cabinet pudding the next, which, as he says, ‘are the staple sweets of the East, and as one sees them appear at table after table, made by a Japanese at Kyoto, a Chinese at Amoy, a Malay at Alor Star or a Madrassi

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At Sinbyugyun, downriver from Mandalay, a classic Burmese landscape of rice-fields studded with pagodas at sunrise, encapsulates the romantic view expressed by Kipling.

at Mulmein, one’s sympathetic heart feels a pang at the thought of the drab lives of those English ladies in country vicarages or seaside villas (with the retired Colonel their father) who intro-duced them to the immemorial East.’ This, of course, in a conti-nent where there are, by tradition, almost no desserts at all.

Anthony Burgess, who began his writing career in Malaya after the Second World War while a teacher there, and who wrote about Malay life as much as that of the expatriates, was resentful of the high opinion in which Maugham was held.

When his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956, he wrote, ‘The book was sometimes compared unfavourably with the Eastern stories of Somerset Maugham, who was considered, and still is, the true fictional expert on Malaya. The fact is that Maugham knew little of the country outside the very bourgeois lives of the planters and the administrators. He certainly knew none of the languages. Nor did Joseph Conrad.’

The title that Maugham gave his book is a clue. He called it The Gentleman in the Parlour after a passage by the early nineteenth-century English essayist Willian Hazlitt which celebrates the freedom and independence of travel. It’s interesting how little this means nowadays; almost incomprehensible as a visitor from afar waiting downstairs to be introduced. But Maugham’s idea of a traveller, like many of his contemporaries, was moving from one drawing room to another – visiting the outposts of western civilization dotted around various imperial holdings. In the north Vietnamese port of Haiphong, he was invited to the rooms of an Englishman who was outside colonial society and who had married a Vietnamese woman, and the man advised Maugham to come after dinner, as ‘We only eat native food and I don’t suppose you’d care for that.’ When he did chance to eat Asian, in Bangkok, he found that ‘the insipid Eastern food sickened me.’ Now this is a little strange, because whether you like Thai food or not, it could hardly properly be described as insipid. However, Maugham was talking of the dining room of the Oriental, so goodness knows what they were giving him. Hotels, of course, are known to be bastions of bastardizing local cuisines, given that they think their first duty is toward the prejudices of their guests, and the menus are usually devised by foreign Executive Chefs.

So perhaps Burgess, then. I always found him more generally sympathetic than Maugham to local culture. By contrast to the great old story-teller, Burgess omnivorously consumed the Malay language, culture and sex, but if he also enjoyed laksa

lemak or ikan bekar, he didn’t find it worth exploring in his novels or autobiography. I was disappointed in this, because Burgess was as enthusiastic in his way for Malaya as was Scott for Burma, and even considered taking Malay citizenship when his teaching contract expired. One lesson from this comparison is that differ-ences in class entered into the western experience of food in the region much less than expectancy and creature comforts.

In fact, so much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia since the early and mid-twentieth century that at times it’s difficult to remember that long-haul tourism, huge numbers of ethnic restaurants in western cities and even the inter-est in travel experience that makes a book like this one possible are all recent phenomena. Take Thailand, the most popular destination of the region. In 2006 there were 13.4 million foreign visitors, but in 1990 there were 5.3 million, and in 1980 just 1.8 million. In 1970 there were less than a quarter of a million, and in 1960only a hundred thousand. Before that, most westerners in South-east Asia were not adventurers or travellers, let alone ordi-nary tourists. They were, for the most part, traders, functionaries of empire or, like rubber planters in Malaya, caretakers of various

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Cheroots, untapered (and therefore inexpensive) cigars clipped at both ends, for sale in a Shan market.