A sticky situation: Laos cooking has some interesting ingredients
Lao food is almost unique in Asian cooking as it uses ‘sticky’ (glutinous) rice as its main staple for all meals rather than – as in other countries –just desserts. This type of rice is named for its high starch content, which means that it sticks to itself and can be rolled into balls with the fingers and dipped into sauces or stuck to dried meats.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and the sticky rice is a perfect example of this. For the Lao people, whose mountainous homeland necessitates the cultivation of a rice strain that can be grown without paddy fields, this unusual rice was a godsend and it’s treated as such.
Sticky rice is what has created subtle differences in their lives compared to other lowland or paddy-growing peoples in Asia: how they eat (with their hands), how they sit (on the ground with shared condiments and sauces) and even how they pray.
It is revered as a spiritual substance and used in various rituals: as an offering to ancestors in the temple, given to monks as alms (for merit-making) or rolled into balls and left on shrines outside houses and in temples to appease bad spirits.
Sticky rice can be eaten as an accompaniment to many things, but especially jaeowbong, a condiment with the consistency and taste of a sweet chili jam, but which traditionally contains buffalo skin and so much garlic that your breath stinks for more than three days after eating it.
I know all this from the excellent cooking course I joined this week (my second of an intended S-E-Asian culinary extravaganza) at the Tamnak Lao in Luang Prabang. Along with the sticky rice and jaeowbong, I learned to cook the famous Laotian Laap (see previous writing), Khua Maak Kheua Gap Moo (Fried Egglant with Pork) and Kheua Sen Lon (vermicelli with pork and fungus).
The fungus isn’t the only unusual ingredient used in Lao cooking – frog, ant eggs and rotten fish are also still seen on menus. In the markets you can also buy rubix-sized cubes of gelatinous pig’s blood, used for flavouring stews.
These adventurous ingredients are – like the rice – a hangover from past times when Laotians of various tribes would make good use of their cut-off but forested and riverside terrains to supplement their diet with ferns, honey and fruit from the forests and perhaps some eel, water rat or frog from the river.
In those days poverty was rife, anything was fair game and no part of an animal would have been wasted. In hard times even beetles or other insects would have been made into stews to accompany and bulk out a meager ration of meat.
Reading this in my Laotian cookbook, I was excited by the idea of trying a beetle stew or perhaps a pig’s blood soup. Unfortunately the course had toned down its dishes for the western palate so we cooked Oh Paedak (a casserole made with pork and ‘paedak’, rotten fish) without the paedak and jaeowbong without the buffalo skin. Very tasty but not exactly authentic.
Still perhaps it’s for the best since I have a cookery book and will be trying these recipes out at home. Can’t see dinner guests thrilling to water rat head cheese or buffalo skin curry, or for that matter asking for woodear fungus in Hackney market – “You ‘aving a laugh?”
[more photos to follow]
