Penang

On the way down in the vans, I finished off David Sedaris's book Me Talk Pretty One Day. Probably the funniest American writer, he's a perfect holiday read: constant giggling. Giving an extract probably won't do him justice because an autobiographical story of his builds and each part relates to the others. But here's a sample. He's talking about when he was twelve and had a speech therapist at school, whom he calls Agent Samson (as if she was an FBI agent).

    It turns out that Agent Samson was something along the lines of a circuit-court speech therapist. She spent four months at our school and then moved on to another. Our last meeting was held the day before school let out for Christmas. My classrooms were all decorated, the halls – everything but her office, which remained as bare as ever. I was expecting a regular half hour of Sassy the seal and was delighted to find her packing up her tape recorder.
    "I thought that this afternoon we might let loose and have a party, you and I. How does that sound?" She reached into her desk drawer and withdrew a festive tin of cookies. "Here, have one. I made them myself from scratch and, boy, was it a mess! Do you ever make cookies?'
    I lied, saying that no, I never had.
    "Well, it's hard work," she said. "Especially if you don't have a mixer."
    It was unlike Agent Samson to speak so casually, and awkward to sit in the hot little room, pretending to have a normal conversation.
    "So," she said, "what are your plans for the holidays?"
    "Well, I usually remain here and, you know, open a gift from my family."
    "Only one?" she asked.
    "Maybe eight or ten."
    "Never six or seven?"
    "Rarely," I said.
    "And what do you do on December thirty-first, New Year's Eve?"
    "On the final day of the year we take down the pine tree in our living room and eat marine life."
    "You're pretty good at avoiding those s's," she said. "I have to hand it to you, you're tougher than most."

There's no doubt about it, Penang is a foodie's paradise. I was only there two full days (three nights), but it was a magical food experience. I had a quick Indian meal when I arrived in the capital, George Town, and then went to bed. I wanted to try and get a good sleep before a cooking class the next morning. But as it happens I was still awake at midnight (New Year's) and would have awoken anyway to the gigantic bangs of fireworks nearby. I figured that by the time I got dressed and outside (and the doors were supposedly locked at midnight), it'd be over anyway.

I was staying at the Old Penang Guesthouse, which was the highest rated on Trip Advisor. My room cost 75 ringit (NZ$32). Here are a couple of pictures (the second one's taken from the loo – I hadn't planned on including a photo of me on the loo, but I thought it made quite a nice photo).

One more photo from that night. There are street stalls everywhere you look in Penang.

The next morning I got up early and went and had a masala dosa (for those that don't know, this is a large wafer-thin pancake made of fermented ground lentils and rice, filled with a potato mixture). I used to think congee (rice porridge) was my favourite breakfast, but I think it might be dosa.

At 8 a.m. I was picked up by Nazlina, who ran the cooking class I was going to. Originally I was meeting up with my cousin Louise in Penang (hi, Lou), but sadly she had to work through the holidays. But she did mention a cooking class she wanted to do, and I ended up taking it. It was great. There were only seven of us, probably because it was New Year's Day – a group of Brits and a couple of Aussies (of Malaysian and Indonesian origin). First we started with a tour round the Spice Garden, where our class was held. The garden is great (I'd seen it last time in Penang), but the guide, an old Chinese fellow, was pretty irritating. He kept making cheesy schoolboy jokes with sexual innuendo. It also seemed that absolutely everything in the garden was curing cancer as we speak. I'm a great fan of natural remedies, but don't overdo it or plausibility is compromised. It also didn't help that every time he mentioned a great weight-loss herb, he joked that I could use this.

At any rate, the class began after an hour and Nazlina was fantastic. She's a warm and gentle woman with a playful sense of humour.

People were assigned various jobs cutting and pounding and so on. Here are the chillies:

My job was to toast the freshly grated coconut.

Now in my defence, I will say that I had asked how long this should take. Nazlina had said maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. She'd also told us all that it must go a dark brown – that usually someone asked if it was ready and it invariably wasn't. So I was prepared for the long haul. She put the gas on and left me to it. After five minutes it definitely looked pretty dark to me, so I hastily called Nazlina over. "Quick, put it in the mortar," she said. She assured me that it wasn't burnt, but perhaps it could have been a little less done. The gas was too high, she said. Well anyway, it was an interesting experience. I volunteered for the job because it was both high-risk and because it wasn't something I'd done before (not with fresh coconut).

The dishes we were making were apparently festive ones. There was a chicken one (not a rendang, she said, but like one), a steamed rice dish, and a salad. The salad was pineapple, tomato and carrot, with a pepper, sugar, and vinegar dressing. The aim was to cut the richness of the other dishes. The rice was steamed with coconut milk until it was about half done, then a mixture of fried onion and garlic and cooked chopped tomatoes was added, along with some water. As the steaming continued, Nazleena added water occasionally. The chicken pieces were deep fried and then a mixture of onion, garlic, and ginger was fried, along with some spices and lemon grass. Nazlina said that the Big Four in Malaysian cooking are cloves, cardamomn, anise and cinnamon (although I read elsewhere it was cardamon, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper, but you get the idea). Tomatoes were added and a few minutes later when the mixture was a more brilliant red, the chicken was added. At some point some coconut cream was also added. It was stirred continuously to prevent sticking and burning.

Now the coconut I had dry-fried, I had pounded severely. But it hadn't been enough, so Nazlina got one of the others to continue. In the end, it was like dark, thick, runny chocolate. I wouldn't have thought it was possible, but it must have been the oils in the coconut. In the photographs below you can see the dollops of this stuff being added towards the end. It wasn't meant to be quite that dark, but it wasn't actually burnt. Nazlina tactfully suggested it would impart a nice smokey flavour.

We all sat down to enjoy the meal. It was truly fantastic. I realised I vastly preferred Malaysian cooking to Thai. I'm not one of those people who lives in a relativist world. To pretend German cooking is equal to French is to pretend that French philosophers and composers are equal to the German ones. When I first visited Thailand, Thai cooking was one of the great disappointments of my life (partly because the quality of ingredients at the street stalls struck me as so poor). I had loved the idea of it – it was a pure cuisine, belonging to one of the few countries in the world that had never been invaded. (Moreover it was a dairy-free cuisine, and I have a fairly strong skepticism of dairy products, but more on that later.) But the food tasted one-dimensional. I realised that you need the invasions to cross-fertilise the native cooking. That's why Malaysian food has such depth of flavour. Anise is used in Asian cooking, but cardamon is largely Indian. Those Big Four symbolise the complexity of the cuisine. That chicken dish really was stunning. Unlike the Thai counterpart, the sauce wasn't thin and runny, and the taste had unusual depth.

I was also impressed by that wok in the photos. Nazlina said she used it for everything. It was "coasted in some kind of black paint," she said, by which I think she meant it was an enamel-coated wok. It seemed perfect for doing that grated coconut (and didn't have a bad reputation like Teflon). I didn't really need a new wok as before I left I'd bought a hand-hammered Chinese one, but I asked Nazlina where I could get one from. She told me where there was a  row of cooking shops, and once back in town I headed off there. Walking back with my new purchase, it struck me what a cliche this was. I had come to Asia and bought a wok. What a dick I'd look like on the plane, I thought. Moreover, unlike Nazlina, I couldn't buy my freshly grated coconut from the market, I'd have to do it myself, which from the few other times I'd done it was a laborious process. I pictured the new wok high in my cupboard mocking me.

Incidentally, the street my guesthouse was on had an amusing name, but I assure you it wasn't the red light district.

This building across the street from my guesthouse typifies the old buildings of George Town:

In the early evening, a friend from work, Ai Ling, and her brother, Leo, and his wife came to pick me up to go to dinner. We were headed to a celebrated Nyonya restaurant. Nyonya cooking is a hybrid of native Malay and Chinese cooking, which came about when Chinese traders married local women. It had become rather a fad in recent years, but understandably so because the food was supposed to be excellent. I had a list of dishes I wanted to try and Ai Ling made sure we tried them all. First up was perut ikan, or fish stomach stew. You'd think this would be an exotic name for a benign dish, but no, they really were fish stomachs (rather slippery and spongy in texture). It was very nice.

We also tried otak otak, which is a kind of fish mousse steamed in banana leaves. There was a tamarind prawn dish, and various others. It was excellent food.

After dinner we drove past a dessert stall Ai Ling liked, and she bought some treats for me to try. I recall one was made of sweet potato and grated coconut, and another of rice flour, but I forget what they were called or what the rest were. They were really lovely. I think Indian sweets had put me off trying foreign sweet treats. I mean, Indians might as well set up an intravenous drip to get the sugar into their system, they're so fond of it. But these were less sweet and didn't have the savoury taste that Indian sweets often have (like cumin or cardamon).

Then Leo kindly drove us out to Batu Ferringhi. I had heard there were a thousand night stalls out there and was keen to get some DVDs. This areas was where the tourists with no imagination stayed. It was an endless line of high-rise hotels, and people apparently spent the time swimming in their pools or just lying about. Why they didn't go to the islands for some nice beaches, or to George Town for some culture, was beyond me. At night time the street sellers set up and it was pretty chaotic. It seemed packed with locals as well, though they seemed to just come and look. The first DVD stall was pretty surreal: we had to go to the back and down some steps, where someone manned a large sliding door and seemed ready to shut it at any moment. The sellers talked constantly on walkie-talkies, and Ai Ling said they were paranoid about police raids. I got something there and then went to another stall. When I passed back by that second stall, it was no longer there! The entire operation had disappeared in under a minute.

The next morning I visited a market that Nazlina had recommended, and it was the best market I'd ever been to. Every food item you could imagine was for sale, and the place was packed with locals.

These are called, naturally enough, snake fish:

There's a certain sequence to these next three:

This is freshly made coconut milk:

This was my breakfast being cooked:

As I was about to head home, I bumped into Nazlina, who was showing a group round. I thanked her for putting me onto the market. I headed back to my guesthouse, and along the way had one of the best samosas I've eaten. I decided Penang would be a great place to live.

Ai Ling and Leo picked me up mid-morning, and we headed off to a favoured street stall which sold cendol. This was perhaps the key revelation of Penang for me. It's shaved ice with palm sugar syrup on top, then coconut cream, then some green worm-like noodles (made of rice flour and coloured with a kind of grass) and a few small beans and probably something else added. It was exquisite. It was like ice cream only better because there was more texture and deeper flavour. I absolutely loved it.

Next it was off to another market. The stall I was particularly interested in wasn't open yet, so we headed off to a mall so I could do some more DVD shopping and Ai Ling could look at cameras. These were actually DVD shops, but the type of DVDs they sold was the same as the stalls the previous night. I wondered why these were not afraid of raids and asked Ai Ling if you could pay the police off here. "Yes, yes you can," she said, as if confirming it was a nice day.

Then it was back to the market, and the fried sago stall was there. This was something I had read about on a food blog. It used to be more common but now there this one lone stall selling it in all of Penang. In truth it wasn't the most delectable thing, but it was nice enough. Naturally it had a squidgy texture.

I also tried a duck dish called duck mee koay teow, and it was fantastic. A kind of soup with noodles and duck meat. At one point Ai Ling and Leo praised my ability with chopsticks, something that every Eureopean foodie wants to hear from an Asian.

I also tried a dish called pasembur, a salad with bean curd, prawn fritters and turnip, I think. It had a beautiful, sweet sauce, though I couldn't place the flavours. I'll have to look it up.

After lunch, Ai Ling and Leo dropped me back home and said they'd pick me up for dinner. Really I was getting Royal treatment. I think I went for a wander in the afternoon, only I had fallen down my bathroom steps in the night. To add to my already injured back (possibly from a hammock mishap back in NZ), I had virtually sprained my foot. After a while, I was limping like a motherf-----. Sorry to be crude about it, but my entire left side had seized up. Not to mention I was starting to get a little dizzy from the heat. I must have looked like Quasimodo on drugs.

For an afternoon snack I went and tried the assam laksa. There were actually three reasons I came back to Penang – I'd been here briefly once before. To go on the funicular (a fantastic, ridiculously steep cable car), to do a canopy walk I'd missed last time, and to try the assam laksa that I'd run out of time for last time. As soon as I got to George Town I found out the funicular was out of operation due to an upgrade and the canopy walk had been close for a year. I figured I had at least better try the laksa. Ai Ling and Leo told me where a great street stall was, and it was an excellent dish. It's a sour, tamarind-flavoured noodle and seafood dish. The people in this city are just so spoilt for food.

For dinner we headed down the island to go to an obscure little beach restaurant that sold fresh seafood.  We started off with some fantastic satays from a stall outside. They didn't have a traditional peanut sauce, rather they were coated in something sweet before grilling. They really were exceptional.

Among the dishes we had was a lovely deep-fried squid dish, and this dish of bitter gourd and salted egg:

We also had a crab dish (which I found a little too viscous), a dish with mantis prawn (which are generally huge) that had been cut into pieces and crumbed with oats and deep fried, and this frog and dried chilli dish:

Those frogs legs were the single most tender meat I have ever tasted. Frog meat is tender anyway, and each time I have it I marvel at its delicacy. But this was ridiculous.

The food was superb, and it was a great evening. Ai Ling and her brother and his wife were great hosts. Only on the way home did I find out Leo and his wife were having a traditional wedding the following week (they'd already been married at the registry). They seemed remarkably calm and together, not to mention generous with showing me around.

The next morning I got up early to go and have some dim sum before going to the airport.

That one in the middle was really nice. It was rice encasing fish and water chestnut. Really, Penang is food heaven, and I know I'll be back.

Then I left to catch a flight to Kuching in Malaysian Borneo. I had an appointment with a jungle.