EatingAsia

Nyonya Fireworks

    Nyonya dishes are labor intensive and time consuming. It's said that the best are served in private homes. I believe that, because in Penang nothing I've eaten in any traditional Nyonya restaurant compares to the food I've eaten at Madame Khaw's cart.

    I last wrote about Madame Khaw almost 6 years ago. Every morning she rises early, prepares a mess of Nyonya curries, stews, vegetables and relishes, and wheels it all over to Pulau Tikus market, where she sells from her cart from 6 or 7am till noon. Madame Khaw is a Penang-born Nyonya (Nyonya are the female descendents of long-ago marriages between Hokkien traders and Malay women; the male descendents are called "Baba") who learned to cook, she tells me, from her Hokkien father. (Her brother mans a cart selling homemade Nyonya kuih, or sweets, which he sets up next to her stall in Pulau Tikus on Saturdays.)

    Madame Khaw's Nyonya delights are transcendent. She cooks with an assured hand, often pushing  the edge of the envelope by upping the quantities of strong-flavored ingredients in an already strong-flavored dish. This is how I cook too, like an addict feeding an addiction: just a few more chilies, another teaspoon of each dried spice, fresh herbs by the handful instead of the quarter cupful and 5 different types of fresh herb when a recipe calls for 2 or 3. I love strong, really strong flavors, and foods that leave me searching for descriptives. After a meal at Madame Khaw's stall the best I can come up with is "fireworks". That's a compliment.

    This morning was no different. Two friends in town, our last breakfast together after almost 48 hours of bordering-on-pathological indulgence. Dave and I love all of Madame Khaw's dishes. But our bellies had been stretched, and our taste buds bordered on fatigued. So we opted for three favorites, all punchy enough to revive faltering appetites.

    First, Madame Khaw's stellar asam fish, a deep-fried whole specimen or steak marinated in turmeric-infused oil and vinegar. Many recipes for this dish call for a few whole chilies. Madame Khaw's version is approximately one third to one half chilies in volume. There's plenty of turmeric in there -- the oil is good and orange -- and finely shredded ginger and sliced garlic and sesame seeds too. It's tart (asam is the Malay/Indonesian word for "sour") with a wonderful hit of astringency. Should you choose to eat one of those chilies (I always do) the jolt of heat will cut right through the vinegar and then quickly subside. It's a powerfully addictive dish, one I'm sure that I could eat every day.

    An appropriately gutsy accompaniment is Madame Khaw's nasi ulam, a cool dish of rice mixed with (she says) twenty or so rhizomes (turmeric, ginger, Chinese keys) and fresh herbs -- including wild lime, turmeric and wild pepper leaves (the latter of which is often mistakenly called "betel leaf") and Vietnamese mint -- as well as sliced shallot. Madame Khaw does not own a food processor, preferring to chop, to the minutest dice, all of her rhizomes by hand. The leaves she rolls and slices into the wispiest of chiffonades. Tossed with the vegetables, the rice remains fluffy, each grain distinct. There is so much going on in this dish in terms of flavor and texture that you have to pause after each mouthful to take it all in. It tastes healthy in a way that no other rice dish I know does and, like the asam fish, is thoroughly addictive. It's also usually the first dish on Madame Khaw's cart to sell out.  

    We rounded out our plate with Penang-style acar, a fantastic relish of fresh pineapple, carrot, long beans and cucumber tossed with a dressing heavy on vinegar and crushed peanuts. Usually eaten as a side dish, acar is one I'd be happy to give star billing to. (I also envision its freshness enlivening slices of roast pork in a Penang Nyonya-style banh mi.)

    Penang's Nyonya food is generally more sour, less coconut milky, fresher (incorporating more fresh herbs as opposed to dry spices) and spicier than the Malacca's -- a result, presumably, of Penang's proximity to Thailand. Madame Khaw's food, and these three dishes especially, embody everything I love about it.

    I understand the occasional desire for a restaurant meal now and again, as opposed to one eaten standing around a cart outside a wet market. Believe me, I do. But if you have time for one Nyonya meal on Penang, make it at Madame Khaw's elbow. (She also sells everything for takeaway, and offers plastic spoons.)

Get Your Grill On: The Liver-in-Diyarbakir Edition

A Diyarbakir kebap usta fans the flames

    If there is a country that loves grilling more than Turkey does, I don't know it. This is a population that stows barbecues in the trunks of cars, ready to be stoked up -- in a park or a parking lot, on a hill, by a river or a roadside, even on a traffic median -- at a moment's notice. In winter of 2012 we passed a group hunkered in a snowdrift by the freeway breakdown lane on Ankara's outskirts. As a middle-aged woman skewered meat, her (presumably) husband fanned the grill's flames. The thermometer on our dashboard read 1C.

     "Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow ...." The old saw about the American postman would apply to the Turkish griller, if it also included a reference to Hades-like heat. Such were the weather conditions at the beginning of last week in Diyarbakir [dee-YAHR-bah-ker], in Turkey's inland southeast, where the skies were cloudless and daytime temperatures hovered around 41C (106F). Night brought little relief.

     After several hours wandering the city's old section the last thing I wanted to do was sit in the smoke path of a flaming grill. But in Diyarbakir the night belongs to the izgara usta (BBQ master). After dusk it's near impossible to walk a block without bumping into a wheeled cart belching meaty smoke.

Assembling a couple to go

     We were there to sample local specialties, and grilled anything -- liver especially -- is one. So we gave in and selected a mobile operation that came with tables and proper seating -- banquettes with backs and cushions, no less! -- set not street-side, but in the street. This was no Penang-style barebones street food operation. The grill anchoring one end of the cart was big, with room for at least twenty skewers laid side by side. At the other end a refrigerated case displayed liver, heart, gizzard, neck, kidney, chicken wings and chunks of beef and lamb and chicken breast, all skewered, seasoned, and ready to char.

     We placed our order (chicken wings, beef chunks, lamb liver) and sat. The usta's helpers layed before us the fixings of a feast: roasted whole small onions and long thin green peppers, sliced tomatoes and fresh onion, two plates of coban salatasi (chopped tomato-onion-cucumber-parsley salad) and a platter heaped with fresh rocket leaves with wedges of lemon for squeezing. We raised a hand to the teenager tending a nearby ayran cart, and soon we held glasses of ice-cold salted yogurt thinned with water and seasoned with fresh herbs.

    Soon the guests of honor arrived, each kebap on a separate platter, another piled with thin flatbreads. The beef was smoky and surprisingly tender and the chicken wings, seasoned with nothing other than salt and pepper, were deeply browned and crackly-skinned with moist flesh that fell off the bones.  

A common night sight on Diyarbakir streets

    To be honest the liver was a bit on the dry side, despite the fact that our usta had skewered it between chunks of lamb fat (a common technique).  There are probably better liver kebapci in Diyarbakir. But I was happy enough to eat my fair share, and I'm not what you'd call an offal obsessive. We ate our kebaps as rolled sandwiches, using our flatbreads to slide the meat off its skewers and then adding salad, a bit of onion and green pepper (the latter surprisingly spicy), a few leaves of rocket, a squeeze of lemon, relishing every bite as sweat ran in rivulets down our backs.

    I've never been much of a liver lover, but that kebap turned me. Was it the liver? Or was it Diyarbakir itself, a city that confounded, challenged and intrigued me all at the same time. I'll return, and I'll order liver kebab again, too. But not till autumn, after the mercury falls.

The grilled kebab capital of Turkey may well be Gaziantep, a great eating city some 3 hours (by car) south of Diyarbakir. Dave spent a few days there in March, shooting a story on grilling for the June-July 2013 issue of Saveur magazine. He shares portraits of Gaziantep's grill masters, and mouthwatering photographs of their specialties, here.