Bitter Oxford

Review: Lung Wah Supermarket, Hythe Bridge St, Oxford

You may be wondering by now: “Where can I buy my own Headless Ching Chang?” “Where can I shop and also light incense before Confucius?” “Where oh where can I find the preserved, blacken skins of Assam fruit?”

Of course the world abounds in HCC and Assam Skin; but there’s only one supermarket in Oxford where a giant red Confucius stares you down whilst wielding a pike (see the banner image of this website); and that is Lung Wah.

Lung Wah carries far more than exotic grocery items however; they carry their own cutlery, their own bowls, plates, and pots; all specially imported from China (though there is little to distinguish them from anything in Boswell’s save the packaging). It is this area of Lung Wah that I like the best. The mixing bowls and steel plates live above a cavernous freezer full of fish and a lonely box of frog’s legs that worries me every week. Lung Wah even offers tin cutlery; there is simply no need to buy *anything* for your kitchen outside of Lung Wah.

The bowls and cutlery are perhaps so prominent because they contribute to the myth that Chinese grocery stores are cultural outposts– they do not merely trade in food stuffs, they outfit, they prepare intrepid Chinese and Asian visitors for the lean months or years of life in England. They do not sell steel bowls and cutlery– they sell the necessary accoutrements of loneliness. Here are the impermanent, pale imitations of the homewares you enjoyed in your own country– as you might expect, they are lighter, dustier, and meant to be discarded upon leaving. There are also emergency birthday presents and New Year’s decorations– never enough to really please anyone, but just enough to make some gesture towards the real seat of life (Home, away from the outpost). In solidarity, they offer some African, some Pakistani and some Japanese ingredients– but these too are presented as rations to sustain nostalgia.

When we visit Lung Wah, we may mistakenly imagine it to be rather dim, brooding, or unpleasant– but the true harsh conditions are always outside. Lung Wah is only ever that much more pleasant than the rest of Oxford for its authentic customers.

 

 

Zombi Fungus

I have a horror of eating poisonous mushrooms. British television is particularly obsessed with depicting healthy young individuals at the height of their life going out and enjoying some rare mushrooms, and then quickly speeding forward to a prolonged study of them vomiting, being told that their kidneys are failing, skin blackening, eyes falling out, etc.

But here is a fungus that, once consumed, directs the unfortunate creature’s behaviour– it sends its prey (little ants in a nondescript jungle) up into a tree, commands them to sink their jaws into a leaf, AND THEN IT GROWS OUT OF THEIR BODY.

Better still, the BBC have time-elapse footage of the beautiful tapered fungi growing out of their victims:

Headless Ching Chang

The art of drying fish has sadly been lost in the race to consume ever-fresher treats from the sea. The goal is to rapidly devour fish that are plucked from sea to skillet before they even know what hit them. A headless anchovy that has spent the last few months on a shelf in Oxford doesn’t encourage the palate.

Headless Ching Chang is composed of anchovies that are salted, dried, and then covered in a chili and sesame shellack. Upon biting, Headless Ching Chang explode into a provocative powder that fills the mouth with the aroma of anonymous fish, tainted slightly with caramel and cayenne. They are wondrous. They are plentiful. One feels upon eating them that they could be stored in bomb shelters and see us through a nuclear winter. They combine all the joy of eating caramel-coated popcorn and fish on a stick. While one eats, one can easily imagine that these are not anchovies– they were little powdery automatons, headless, which bumped and careened through the sea. Whimsical idiot fish that dance on the tongue.

I let my daughter Beatrice have a small snap. Beatrice, at 2 and 2 months, no longer begins her exploration of the world with her mouth; she is deeply conservative and careful about introducing unwanted and unexpected flavours into her mouth. Carefully touching the Headless Ching Chang to her tongue, she tasted salt, sugar and oil– enthused, she placed the cracker/fish into her mouth.

What followed? Can Delight and Disgust wed in one grimace? The payload of sugar and salt on the exterior of the fish demanded that she eat; and yet I could tell that she did not relish as did I the flavour of fish shack, of old fishing ropes, of antique fisherman’s gloves. Concerned that Headless Ching Chang contained far more than anchovy and sesame, I didn’t include the crunchy fish in our diet again. But I daydream about eating them; they have lit up a corner of my brain that will never be dark again.

Mexican Coca Cola

America is a country under the impression that reality and authenticity have left it. It views its own products as hysterical phantasms; real beer is made in Belgium or Germany– real wine is grown in France, or Italy, or Chile, or even Australia. Real Christmas is celebrated in Finland.  Real Coca Cola is made in Mexico. My mother has even asked me if Mexican Coca Cola is available in the nicer supermarkets of England.

The power of Mexican Coca Cola can’t be the mere difference of sugar over corn syrup– no one that concerned about corn syrup would swill 40 grams of pure sugar in a sitting and congratulate themselves on avoiding health problems. The real worry must be that America has only survived in other countries, like relics of a destroyed city that find refuge in foreign towns. For most Americans, Mexico seems like the kind of place that would produce honest, authentic Coca Cola because American imaginations populate it with outmoded machinery and a scarcity of synthetic materials. Perhaps the bottles are collected and re-used and come to have the scratches and scuffs that have been removed from America’s own packaging –whatever the specific fantasy might be, the result is that Mexican Coca Cola is not scary, in the way we profess to be disturbed by mass-produced objects like McDonald’s fries and Hershey Chocolate bars.

No one, despite their protestations, would be happy if American Coca Cola producers announced that they were returning to cane sugar; the American drinkers of Mexican Coca Cola are making a statement about the irreality of their own culture. America views itself as ruled by Queen of Narnia– everything produced within the country is very attractive, but is made of foam and nothingness.

Novels and Children

Pictured here is Roland Barthes, happy, smoking, demonstrating the difference between homodiegetique (a narrator that is involved in the story or plot of a film) and heterodiegetique. He has drawn arrows going in different directions and is pointing at them with a pen. He also lectures with a cigarette in his mouth.

When it came to novels and children, Roland Barthes was decidedly heterodiegetique — a narrator and commentator who neither had children or wrote novels. His short essay ‘Novels and Children’ appears in Mythologies, and discusses a feature story in Elle on women that write from home:

“If we are to believe the weekly Elle, which some time ago mustered seventy women novelists on one photograph, the woman of letters is a remarkable zoological species: she brings forth, pell-mell, novels and children. We are introduced, for example, to Jacqueline Lenoir (two daughters, one novel); Marina Grey (one son, one novel); Nicole Dutreil (two sons, four novels) etc.”

Roland Barthes’ interest in the feature was its reassurance that even when women play at being serious, they will still have children and conform to social norms. Nowhere does Barthes explain just how these women managed to rear children and write novels.

As any parent/writer of any gender can attest, children and the writing of novels go as well together as vodka tasting and archery. One is always a wreck once it’s time to take aim. The true moral of the article, for then and today, is that the writing of novels is wholly and utterly frivolous, the very kind of thing with which a parent might occupy himself or herself to play at being professional. Novel writing becomes as leisurely as novel reading; perhaps the two become one solipsistic activity. But the activity is nonetheless marginal, and no longer the site wherein our moral, political, and historical questions are worked out.

(Back on topic tomorrow)

Durian Cookies

Durian Interdit

Durian fruit — or rather, the etiquette of when and where one can have a durian in South Asian societies– embodies the selfish like no other fruit. Smell and taste diverge drastically, leaving the person lucky enough to be eating a durian in a state of enjoyment and cheerfulness; for those around the durian-eater, there is only the disturbing odor of something terribly disagreeable. Hence, India and many other countries are adorned with signs urging others to think before they eat– is this an appropriate time and place to enjoy a durian? What will others think and say?

One can imagine my delight, therefore, when I discovered durian cookies– which I hoped dearly would contain whole pieces of durian enough to fill my house with its political scent.

Alas! My durian cookies would be better described as homeopathic remedy Durian 30x. The cookie matter had once been in contact with durian molecules, and there might be a single fragment of durian matter in an entire box, but the cookies themselves were made of sugar, flour, and jasmine extract. The non-alcoholic lager of durians.

I fed them to my wife and daughter, not caring to taste them again. I vow instead to find a durian in Oxford, no matter what the cost, and to make my own, real durian cookies.

Magnesium Oil Spray

Sprays have a special mythological power in our society. They are quick, instantaneous– they perform their action through affecting a change in the humours of windows, floors, and even human skin. Secondly, they break up or dissolve that which disturbs us, the idea being that there is some pure, clean-in-itself person under there, and you just need to spray and wipe to rid her of stings, tingles, spasms, pains, etc.

Magnesium, the packaging explains, calms muscles, relieves cramps, and renders the entire body serene. This particular product claims to be popular with pregnant women and children– why children? I imagine that when children show themselves to be restless, or jumpy, parents hope that they can merely strip them down, douse them in magnesium, and then stretch out their sleeping buddha forms somewhere cosy and restful. Magnesium, so says Look magazine, is the ‘ultimate anti-stress mineral’ (in that long list of anti-stress minerals you commit to memory in highschool chemistry). It is the final strategy for that person who is willing to bet that everything wrong with how they feel could be attributed to a need for magnesium.

I bought magnesium spray when a few muscle spasms in my hands + the internet convinced me that I either had a mineral imbalance or a neurological disease. The spray promised that it had optimally-absorbable magnesium, that my muscles would soak it up and that I would feel a mild tingling sensation while they fed.

I sprayed, waited, and then, doubting the entire skin absorption route, learned that I could also spray my teeth to promote tooth growth, or something like that. I felt that all I needed was a license to imbibe magnesium oil– so in it went.

All that I have to say about this is DO NOT SPRAY MAGNESIUM OIL IN YOUR MOUTH.

Tiger Balm

Everyone’s familiar with Tiger Balm’s notorious jingle:

Tiger tiger burning bright

Dab in your nostrils for a fright

What immortal hand or eye

Could touch you and not want to cry?

Tiger balm is made of menthol and camphor. Wikipedia is so good as to reassure us that “the rub does not contain tiger parts” (tiger parts?).

I used tiger balm in graduate school to stay awake while reading; that’s not really true. I put tiger balm on my face to sting my way out of boredom, and it’s so potent that half the library would wake up with me. My wife would see my red eyes and pink inflamed skin as I came in the door and refuse to greet me until I’d scraped it off.

I first met tiger balm through the professor of Chinese at my undergrad university. We had a small exam every Friday morning at 8 am, though it was usually delayed by half an hour while we waited for two football players to arrive.

Professor Chi encouraged us to use the half hour to revise and practice; and one morning he produced a little tub of tiger balm. Since few of us had ever left central Pennsylvania, we needed some explanation– it was Chinese, he assured us, and it was useful for head aches and alertness. ‘You put it on your temples like this,’ he said, dabbing his forehead lightly.

Like a group of good natured puppies, we formed a queue and Professor Chi took what delight he could in our naive and farcical attempts to master its name or to apply it without smarting. ‘Very little, very little,’ he urged.

The football players arrived forty five minutes late. Professor Chi held out the jar. ‘You want balm?’ he asked, switching imperceptibly to deliberately bad English.

‘What is it?’

‘You rub on your head for study.’

The football players took deep scoops of the petroleum jelly and rubbed it keenly into their faces and necks. We watched in horror and astonishment. Half the jar or more had been used. It was like sitting in a Roald Dahl novel.

Sure enough, they began to cry, curse, and turn red. But they didn’t attempt to remove it; they remained in their seats, slowly turning red like electric stove tops. Their exam scripts were handed up blotted with tear marks.

If you want to experiment with Tiger Balm, please remember that the company have a theme park in Singapore depicting Buddhist Hell:

And consider.

Bitter Gourd Part Two

Sweetness is only wart-deep. ‘The bitterest vegetable’, bitter gourd, is here pictured with my daughter, who saw me sniffing the gourds for signs of death and quickly imitated me. They are odorless, sadly, presenting no olfactory signs of their intense inner lives.

Children, apparently, love them; and the Pakistani grocer who sold me these particular gourds smiled at Beatrice and said ‘these are all for you!’ presuming that she was already initiated into the privileged world of gourd-eaters.

Having never cooked with them before and rather detesting the flavour, I chose a Madhur Jaffrey recipe with which to ease into the bitter. Here she is, smiling with all the confidence of someone that enjoys everything from raw kohlrabi to toasted bitter gourd seeds. How I envy her powers to appreciate the bitter:

The photographers arranged her to be photographed with a lemon, a tomato, some thai basil, and ginger root. Not a bitter gourd in sight.

Jaffrey suggested that I stuff the gourds with onion, pomegranate, and fennel seeds, and then fry them whole and serve them with yogurt. Yogurt, bread, pulses– anything to manage the bitterness. The gourds don’t improve in beauty when fried:

I needed to feed one to Sarah first, and so I cut off a tiny corner of one of the gourds and set it in a naan. Then I heaped about four tablespoons of yogurt and mango chutney on it.

‘Here, try,’ I said.

Sarah hesitated, took a small bite and missed the gourd. Momentarily excited but then aware that she hadn’t had the shot, she bit again — ‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed in disgust. ‘It’s just not supposed to be eaten.’

She was right– even buried in yogurt bread and pickles, the bitter gourd was as loud a guest as it could be. And yet, the powers that be insist that it has enough iron in it to mint railings; it prevents cancer merely by being in the same room with you. Its bitterness means that you will be able to digest accidentally swallowed pen caps without gastric upsets. It only takes practice and getting used to.

Photo of M Jaffrey borrowed from The Telegraph

Bitter Gourd Part One

Bitter gourd goes by many names; bitter melon, karela, goyo– pictured to the left is the bitter gourd masquerading as a caped superhero in a yellow safety hat, presumably to protect him when he is spat onto the ground in disgust by Japanese children.

I haven’t yet succeeded in tracking down bitter gourd juice– though from the expression of Goyo, it looks like he feels that he has been miscast as a beverage. But I have made my first inroads into coming to terms with the bitter gourd; buying them, basically, and letting my daughter smell them.

I met bitter gourd for the first time at a much older age– 27, in a Nepalese restaurant here in Oxford. We had a baby sitter, were meeting eight or nine friends, and in a moment of elation I decided to order the bitter melon dish. I craved novelty, and was so happy to be out to dinner without children in tow that I felt that I had been transported to the blessed island of Good Food, where nothing could go wrong.

I would like to say that I met the unexpected bitterness with pluck and courage, but my soul was crushed. Bitter gourd is brackish, sour, green, and to the unaccustomed palate, obviously inedible. Time after time a bit of the gourd was passed round to my friends on the end of a fork; each tried it and grimaced and urged me to send it back. But I wanted the Nepalese servers to like me, and to include me in the secret club of those who appreciate the finer points of bitter gourd.

My gourds are currently salted and soaking in a bowl. But I cannot say how encouraged I felt to discover that they have obscene little red seeds inside of them. Look: