MunchinsSaffron-robed monks pole a raft through a dawn mist, while golden temple eaves glint against the undulating backdrop of wispy teak forests. As my long-tail boat fights upstream against the Mekong’s muddy currents, higher into hills as yet uncleared, I’m less Lord Jim than James Beard — come to chart the final frontiers of Eastern eats.
A half-hour north of Luang Prabang — the royal river roost turned World Heritage site — I know I’ve made the right landfall by the rows of bamboo drying racks, resembling painters’ easels and bearing flat green canvasses splayed with ingredients by some indigenous Abstract Expressionists. Scattered along mud lanes on the bluff, the entire village of Maung Kan is devoted to the production of kaipen, literally “weed in sheets,” a scrumptious natural cracker for hot dips. Instead of lines of laundry, this drying foodstuff fills every backyard. Women in embroidered skirts and baseball caps ply their culinary trade to the tune of 8,000 pieces a day, thoroughly washing the dazzling lime grasses culled from the river and tributaries (when low in winter), then spreading them on sieves, binding them with boiled tamarind and galangal, and finally covering with sesame seeds and modern decorative additions of garlic and tomato slivers.
With such energy-efficient use of semi-tropical heat, baking times are measured by “one sun,” “two sun,” and so on. The sun-dried flavor fools me into thinking I’m in Italy, and the whole creation looks to be some lost cousin of Japan’s seaweed nori. At dinner in a pottery-making village just three minutes further across the river (but 300 years from getting its first guesthouse), my hosts bring out bowls of mixed leaves to prepare suppak — a nightly blast of fiber that’s the peasant equivalent of Dr. Weil’s multi-vitamin packs. Expressing curiosity about where these plants grow, I soon regret getting what I’ve asked for. “Not far away” turns out to be a half-hour hike through brambly paths to inland rice terraces that yield numerous weeds around the irrigation’s edges. My hostess’ keen eye for distinguishing clover from clutter makes for an easy, and free, evening’s shopping. Wok-seared with a thick paste of chilies and roasted sesame, they sure taste better than the greens most kids dread.
In place of some internationalized mishmash, Laotians have learned to combine a highly localized bounty. Oliver Bandmann, who gave up the good life in Tuscany to save Lao mulberry papermaking techniques, coins the perfect motto for Lao cuisine. Surveying the neat rows of “salad gardens” that reach to the edge of Luang Prabang’s palace, surrounding hills stocked with wild herbs and game, he declares, “What you see is what you eat!”
Ten years into the new millennium, Laos hosts no McDonald’s or other fast-food chains (rumors of a single KFC went unconfirmed). There’s a decided dearth of instant or frozen foods (even freezers), MSG (though “Knorr” flavor cubes are favored), dehydrated fruit or bio-engineering, bottled liquid smoke or canned anything or supermarkets to shelve them — not to mention modern marvels of flavor-reduction like microwaves. Luang Prabang, too, comes with no neon, no belching smokestacks, no office towers or concrete housing blocks, no traffic jams (and not many traffic lights). Even beggars and con men are virtually non-existent as the natives are too nice to get in anyone’s face. Until a showcase mall came recently to the capital, Vientiane, Laos did not even possess a single working movie house. And for a long time, there was only one escalator in the entire country — a showcase novelty ridden up and down by monks playing hooky.
Of course, one shouldn’t romanticize this lack of development. Local people pay dearly for the geography and geopolitics that have separated them from the rest of Asia’s rapid rise in living standards. To the outward eye, this one-party state shows little evidence — beyond perfunctory press censorship — of a functioning government. Safety net? How about fishing nets? Basic health services, education or road building are advanced only when hands grasp for international funding.
Forget Cuisinarts. Those theorists of gastro-environmentalism driving Europe’s “Slow Food” movement could learn plenty from this remote land’s gracious homemakers’ loyalty to labor-intensive methods. I can’t find a single cook willing to trade in her mortar and pestle or long sessions of hand pounding that yield proper texture and control. “Blender too strong,” concludes one restaurant proprietress, expressing the prevailing view.
Hand work can especially enliven laap, the warm diced salads whose very name means “lucky” in Lao. At birth feasts or mass send-offs for departed ancestors, neighborhood women mash and mix this meaty catchall until they’ve incorporated every sinew, innards or bit of juice with mint and lime. (Only later do I find out that there’s a small risk of brain damage from the kind made with raw fish teeming with parasites from the polluted Mekong.)
At lower reaches of the river, Vientiane is a typical backwater capital: chock with broad avenues going nowhere, overblown monuments to unknown battles, moldering temples alongside equally ravaged transvestites, vaguely sinister five-star hotels mostly for the convenience of five-star generals. Peopled by northern and southern migrants, the town boasts few local specialties (unless one counts Lao Beer, downright earthy next to fizzy Thai brews, but similarly served with ice cubes). Here, dozens of aid organizations feed on nostalgic pseudo-French brasseries while most street stalls are centered around do-it-yourself barbecuing on handy skewers. At Vientiane’s enormously atmospheric central food market, the main take-away treat seems to be the utterly transformed baguette sandwich, stuffed here with no fewer than three kinds of pork (including the rubbery Lao pâté), three hot sauces, plus piles of lettuce, green papaya and cilantro.
“Nothing about Lao food has changed and nothing ever will,” declares Sypaphay Bantayanon, a graceful cooking instructress, who reports that her classes are filled with young people eager to learn the old ways. She invites me to her sprawling complex of a home, fronted with pool tables, for a feast that, in typical Lao style, is eaten all together, without mains or sides. One of her recipes, she jokes, “feeds eight Lao — maybe only three Americans.”
But that doesn’t include naem khao, another salad based around broken shards of golden-brown fried rice croquettes. The best place for this dish, says a friend who works with Lao landmine victims, is an open-air shop known as “The Three Sisters.” In reality, I count six Chekhovian siblings who have been toiling together for nearly 20 years with scrupulous seriousness at their open kitchen facing a vast temple complex. Here, every salad, with rice balls or no, that comes out of their ever-churning mortars is perfectly balanced and wildly tart. The young papaya is peachy in color here, served in chunks not slivers; the peel of green bananas is used as a base for another astringent concoction; and the cold rice noodles, topped with tiny tomatoes and eggplant bits, seemed tossed in a spicy tsunami. These may look like copies of staple dishes found in Issan (Northeastern Thailand), visible across the Mekong from the sisters’ stand. But that would be a condescending misreading. Laos shares the basic palate of Southeast Asia; only here, the lime, fish sauce and chilies seem to have been poured down a funnel to form one pure concentrated explosion. With each bite, there’s a battle going on in my mouth: sweet versus sour, hot versus chilling. But it’s one kind of combat where everyone wins.
Thanks to this side street’s carnal sisterhood, I’ve had my Anthony Bourdain moment. Call it jaded-palate syndrome, call it the flight from conveyor-belt sushi. But I’ve satisfied my cravings in a country known less for bonbons and canapes than American bomb craters.
Yes, Virginia, there really is an eternal Asia, untouched by high-tech booms. For future food explorers to sample an eating culture that’s ludicrously local and sustainable, healthfully harmonious and original, they’d better get to Laos and cover the whole place in one giant swath of Saran Wrap. Whenever UNESCO gets around to declaring the first World Food Heritage site, this should be it.
At one more communal celebration that proves the point, merry teams of women carry on a marathon of endlessly pounding village-sized quantities of pungent buffalo laap. “Bon chance!” I am wished and assured by all the volunteer help. “La laap — c’est toujours bon chance!”
MunchinsAsian Miracle? The only one I know is that I’ve survived a decade’s worth of stuffing face while saving face.
In that time, I’ve gained and lost at least twice my body weight and probably shed my fair share of parasites. A food critic put out to pasture in Thailand, I have to put with the mealtime offerings of a Burmese maid who knows only 12 variants of pork rib soup and even soupier stir-fries doused in bottled oyster sauce. Maybe this is my penance for all the excessive pleasures in which I’ve already indulged.
At close range, with the exotic turned humdrum or simply bulldozed away, the prospects for a much-heralded Asian century don’t look quite so dazzling. The air’s dirty, the sidewalks cracked, the landscape all concrete and billboards, with no shortage of shopping malls and traffic jams, but a decided dearth of civil society — as in anyone knowing or asserting their rights, expressing independent opinions, innovating instead of imitating — with monetary transactions at the core of the most intimate relations, little concern for the natural world or for the faceless poor toiling to erect the glittering edifices of the fifty families with the right connections. Like a good foodie, I’m ready to answer, on those rare occasions when anyone asks, that the only sane excuse for living in a place like Thailand is the fruit.
But who knows what sort of unbridled chemical load makes the mangoes so succulent? And what cost globalization, the best street stalls closing where kids would rather sell insurance than stand over a wok, and the biggest lines forming to the side of the latest Krispy Kreme donuts?
Still, there have been so many mealtimes that prove Asia is a universe to be explored each time we fill our gut: the six-stool counter called Kahala, barely visible amidst the neon bars of Osaka, where all the world’s chefs come to steal ideas from the quiet monk who creates every masterpiece course down to the plates and cups; the Zen lair of the Taipei real estate man inspiring a waiting list of three months for his organic mountain stews of herring, lotus root and pumpkin; the gay Japanese couple who for thirty years have filled the entire length of their obscure fifth-floor bar with ceramic bowls full of every known treat on earth; the world’s best crab fried rice on a folding table set on a Thai Chinatown sidewalk; Delhi’s monstrous legs of raan, mutton falling off the bone though it’s really baby goat; fishermen who know forty ways to fix stingray on the outer reaches of Penang, an island disguised as food museum; a brash cook trying to “go where no Indian has gone” into molecular kulfi and tikka mint foams; banana-leaf breakfast gorges under the banana trees of Petaling Jaya; a hundred kinds of lamb picked from the giant pots of Kashmiri Wazwaan caterers; succulent butterscotch durian, enumerated in “XO” breeds at back-road stalls in Johor; lobster-topped noodles in the back alleys of the red-light Singapore the government wants no one to see, but everyone comes to taste; a tattooed Hong Kong rocker turned so passionate a home cook that he becomes the gonzo chef of Bo Innovation; the astonishing series of seasonal canapes that can’t be described any more than wind in the forest, changed daily at Kyoto’s Kikunoi kaiseki showcase; wild teas scavenged by tribal peoples presented by a young French doctor returned to Vietnam in search of his Asian grandfather; rare mushrooms air-shipped from the wilds of Yunnan by artists turned restaurant owners in Beijing’s trendy Soho; the primal café con leches of Madras, perfect to wash down one shop’s 100 kinds of dosa, paper-thin as diplomas.
An unending appetite for tradition still lends flavor to Asia’s reckless craving for the modern. If there are still miracles within the miracle, it’s mostly mass gluttony, the primacy of edible rituals, that will provide them.