WHAT IS BURMESE FOOD?
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If you head down Pansodan Street in Yangon’s historic downtown district, the view of the century-old colonial architecture is often obscured by makeshift stalls serving samosas, hand-mixed noodle salads, and steaming bowls of mohinga, a fish noodle soup that is, for all intents and purposes, Myanmar’s national dish.

This scene of street stalls is repeated all over the city. In the morning and late afternoon, tea shops fill with workers downing their first cup of tea brewed the color of burnt caramel and lightened with condensed and evaporated milks. For lunch at a popular restaurant like Feel, customers point at dishes set out on the counter and then sit down and wait as servers bring small plates to the table in rapid-fire fashion. To escape the afternoon heat, locals pop into shops serving sweetened yogurt drinks or a “heart cooler”—coconut milk served over agar jelly, tapioca pearls, and ice. Before dinner, people line up in front of vendors frying up the Burmese answer to tempura. Like the rest of the country, the city grows quiet at night, with the exception of 19th Street, which turns into an open-air market where you can pick and choose from stalls offering skewers of whole fish, squid, pork intestine, or mushrooms. Pitchers of Myanmar beer tide over groups of customers while the stalls grill selections.

Eating in Yangon means sampling a range of culinary traditions, from regional ethnic foods to dishes adapted from neighboring countries, especially China and India. No matter which heritage hits the table, one thing is certain: it’s easy to find a dish—or several—that you can’t wait to eat again.

Looking at a map, it’s tempting to tuck Myanmar in with the rest of Southeast Asia. Yet the food of Myanmar has its own distinctions. It is savory, occasionally salty, sometimes sour, and often unapologetically funky. Slow-cooked onions and garlic, ground chiles and turmeric, and shrimp paste are the building blocks of countless dishes. Tamarind water is just as important as lime juice for adding acidity to a salad or soup. And breaking up all of those flavors is crunch: fried split peas, fried garlic, crushed peanuts, and toasted chickpea flour are mixed into just about everything.

Burmese food also has a very familiar feel to it, thanks to liberal borrowing from neighbors throughout the centuries. In the geopolitical sense, Myanmar has long occupied a strategically valuable location between India and China. And while modern Burmese history is best known for isolationism, the country wasn’t always so cut off from the rest of the world. Even the origin story that all Burmese schoolkids are taught speaks to the influence of outsiders: Abhiraja, a prince of the Sakayan clan from India, founded the kingdom of Tagaung. The legend maintains that all of Burma’s kings could trace their lineage back to Tagaung, which today is a dusty village near the Burmese city of Mandalay. India, where Buddhism originated, continued to influence Burmese high society in ancient and modern times. And when Bagan, the country’s famous Buddhist kingdom, reached its height of power in 1100 AD, many of the ideas in art, architecture, and language it was absorbing came from South India—the cultural capital of South Asia at the time.

Yet it wasn’t all about peace and love. Burmese kings also fended off invasions by Mongols and sparked battles with Siam. Closer to home, rival Mon and Rakhine kingdoms and city-states posed threats at different times. One of the results of a tumultuous history is an unusually diverse country. Myanmar’s population comprises 135 ethnic groups officially recognized by the government—and many more that go unrecognized. And while today the Bamar people (formerly called Burman by the British) make up the majority, the largest minority groups, particularly the Mon, Rakhine, Kayin, Chin, and Shan people, have played significant roles in shaping Myanmar’s food traditions.

In modern times, outsiders have also had a substantial impact on Burmese food, especially in Yangon. The British captured the city during the First Anglo-Burmese War ending in 1826. After the Second Anglo-Burmese war in the mid-nineteenth century, the city became a hub for commerce and later was named the colonial capital. British colonists called it “Rangoon” because that was easier for them to pronounce. By the early twentieth century, Rangoon was booming, drawing in everyone from Scottish traders to Armenian hoteliers. Even today, the interiors of the remaining colonial buildings in downtown Yangon are striking spaces, with tiles from England and steel beams from Scotland.

In 1927, Rangoon surpassed New York as the greatest immigrant port in the world, wrote Thant Myint-U, the grandson of former UN Secretary-General U Thant, in his book The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma. Ancient golden pagodas—from downtown’s Sule Pagoda to the gleaming grounds of the famous Shwedagon—coexisted with churches, mosques, Hindu temples, and a synagogue or two. In part because of British rule, roughly half the city’s population was Indian, and the popularity of certain Indian dishes, from biryanis to samosas, became widespread. During this time, the Chinese population in Rangoon also grew. Chinese cooking in Rangoon meant turmeric and ground chiles as well as noodles, soy sauce, and pickled greens. These two cultures also had a lasting impact on what Burmese food is today.

So what does it mean to eat Burmese? It means eating cultural mashups in the best possible sense, from Chinese-style noodles and Indian-style soups and flatbreads to the simple curries, vegetables, and salads made popular in the countryside. It also means sampling foods from ethnic groups little known outside of Myanmar. While Yangon is regaining some of its international cachet (there are now sushi bars, Korean chain restaurants, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken), some of its most popular places serve regional food. Today, you can find both humble and fancy spots serving yellow tofu from Shan State and large open-air restaurants serving spicy seafood dishes from Rakhine State. Fortunately, these flavors travel well outside of the country and are worth making at home on the other side of the world.

The Recipes

The dishes in this book reflect this idea of a great big Asian melting pot. While the recipes are all linked to Burma Superstar in some way, they are not exclusively from the restaurant’s menu. Some are from trips to Myanmar and others are from home cooks in Myanmar and San Francisco. Is everything in this book authentically Burmese (whatever that means)? No. This collection of recipes is a little more eclectic and a little more personal, representative of how Burmese cooking came to be interpreted through the lens of a Burmese restaurant in San Francisco. The goal in this book is also to include dishes that taste good together and are made with ingredients that are widely available to home cooks, even if some require a little sleuthing.

Serving a Burma Superstar Meal

Eating a meal in Myanmar means choosing from a lot of little dishes. Everyone at the table gets a little cup of brothy soup and a plate with a big scoop of rice in the center. Then you help yourself from a bunch of small plates, which include curries, cooked vegetables and beans, and salads.In America, portions are heartier. In this book, portion sizes run large enough that you can put together a meal with a curry, some rice, and a side of vegetables or a salad, and it will serve four people comfortably. If you make several dishes over the course of a week, leftovers generally keep well and can be served a second time around. The exception to the multidish style of eating in this book are the soups, like mohinga, which are hearty enough to be a meal on their own.

When deciding what to cook for your friends or family, heed the advice of Yuncon Tu, a longtime server at the Alameda restaurant. He recommends mixing and matching Burmese with Chinese dishes—making one curry and one stir-fry and pairing them with a side of vegetables to give a meal the optimal balance of textures and flavors. Pork Curry can be served with Fiery Tofu and Wok-Tossed Pea Shoots, or Chili Lamb with Ginger Salad and Nan Gyi Thoke (coconut chicken curry with rice noodles). And platha, a buttery layered flatbread similar to Indian roti, goes with pretty much everything. When it comes to setting the table for a meal, you can offer chopsticks—which are doled out at noodle shops and roadside stops in states near the Chinese border—but it’s far more common (and practical) to provide guests with a fork and a spoon. In Myanmar, the job of the fork is to push the food into the spoon, not the other way around.

Where to Start

To get familiar with ingredient combinations and cooking methods used in this book, start with a curry from the first chapter and make a pot of rice to eat alongside it. (Plain and coconut rice recipes are both available in the Rice and Basics section in the back of the book.) Then add a side of vegetables. When you’re getting into a groove, tackle the chapters later in the book, such as noodles, soups, and salads. Many noodles and salads (and noodle salads) require components that you can make ahead and use in multiple recipes—like fried onions, fried garlic, and fried yellow split peas. Along with the rice, those recipes are gathered in the Rice and Basics section so they are easy to flip to when needed.

The recipes measure certain ingredients, like onions and garlic, in cups and tablespoons. There is just too much ambiguity around the size of a “medium yellow onion.” But don’t get too hung up on measuring out every last ingredient to the quarter teaspoon. Burmese recipes are never ruined by adding an extra tablespoon of minced garlic or quarter cup of sliced onions. And when in doubt, add tamarind salt. While working on this book, we found that there were few things that the mildly tangy salt could not improve.

“MYANMAR” OR “BURMA”?

As of 2011, the country’s official name is the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. But the controversy over what to call the kite-shaped Asian nation started much earlier. In 1989, the military government abruptly changed the name from Burma to Myanmar (pronounced MEE-an-mar, with a soft “n” and “r”). Their reason: Burma was a name given to the country by the British.

The same year, the military also dropped anglicized names of several other cities and places, including the Irrawaddy River (now the Ayeyarwady River), Pagan (now Bagan), and Rangoon (now Yangon). Because the changes were made without any input from the country’s citizens, many countries, organizations, and individuals—including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—refused to implement them for years.

More recently, however, the stance against “Myanmar” has softened. When President Obama visited in 2012 (the first visit to the country by a U.S. president), he called the country Myanmar. By 2015, only a handful of major newspapers still opted for “Burma.” In the country itself, many have become indifferent. For Americans, “Burma” has a familiar ring to it. But on the global scene, it’s only a matter of time before calling the country Burma will feel as dated as calling Beijing “Peking.”

THE LAY OF THE LAND

Sandwiched in between India (and the Bay of Bengal) and China, Myanmar lies within Asia’s monsoon region. Some parts of the country get parched in the dry season, which begins around October, and drenched in the rainy season, which starts up around June. In this climate, mangoes, papayas, guavas, durian, water spinach, okra, beans, and chiles grow easily.

In the eastern Shan State, which borders China and Thailand, cauliflower, cabbage, ginger, eggplant, mustard greens, garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes are common crops. Much of what’s grown there is trucked into Mandalay, the country’s hub for agricultural trade.

A little more than half of Myanmar is the Ayeyarwady River Valley. The upper portion of the valley is the dry zone, where farmers grow staple crops such as sesame seeds and peanuts for cooking oil. Here, the cooking is simple and direct, stemming from the Bamar people, Myanmar’s dominant ethnic group. Directly west of the plains and walled off by mountains is Rakhine State, where the food is much spicier and more reminiscent of the food of southern India. With a long stretch of coastline, ocean-caught seafood is more common in Rakhine State than inland, where most people prefer cooking with freshwater fish.

North of Rakhine State is the rugged Chin State, a rural area known for its main river, the Chindwin, which links up with the Ayeyarwady. There, hills and mountains make rice cultivation challenging, and corn and millet are the more common grains.

South of Yangon, it’s a steamy scene more suited for growing rice. The Ayeyarwady Delta was the most prolific rice-producing region in the world before World War II. Shrimp paste is used more frequently here than upcountry. Farther south is the Mon State, where the main city, Mawlamyine—formerly called Moulmein—is reputed to have some of the best cooks in the country. (It’s said that mohinga originated here.) South of Mawlamyine is Myanmar’s skinny tail of coastline that hugs the Thai border. It’s largely remote, though that’s bound to change as tourists discover its beaches.