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Of colonial cuisines and fusion foods

If the food we eat is a mirror into our culture and our times, which culture does fusion food reflect?
by Shweyta Mudgal

For years, food has been used for more than just eating. It has provided a lens for social and anthropological analysis. Its production, procurement, preparation, presentation and consumption has always been central to our times and culture.

Of particular intrigue to me has been the concept of fusion in food. Somewhere between my inherent ‘purist’ culinary preferences of eating a cuisine the way it is meant to be eaten (respecting its original, ethnic procedure) and a new-found flexibility in blending various flavours and ingredients together, such that they individually compliment each other, I am now more open to the idea of fusion food – that which is cooked consciously, with definitive techniques, intentionally marrying ingredients and tastes to produce a state of delightful transcendental culinary bliss, appealing to the most refined palate.

Contrary to assumption, fusion food is not really a new world phenomena. It has been around since eons. For time immemorial, knowingly or unknowingly, people all over the world have been indulging in fusion food. Many centuries ago when the Chinese came to America, the Africans moved to Europe, the Brits colonised over half the world and the East Indians and French learned to dine together, was when fusion was born.

Soy Sauce, the quintessential condiment sauce that accompanies Asian meals, is a great example that illustrates how colonialism permeated Korean cuisine. Considered the ‘soul’ of Korean cuisine, soy sauce was originally made in Korean homes, with each family having its own recipe handed down from generation to generation. However, with the industrialisation of its manufacturing process in the 20th century, this distinction began to disappear. The manufacturing techniques drifted, far from being traditional Korean methods into those introduced by the Japanese during the colonial period.

Today, most Koreans do not even realise that the soy sauce they consume on a daily basis is a product of the colonial experience. The story of the soy sauce thus, shows the far-reaching, longstanding and unforeseen consequences the Japanese colonial rule had on the Koreans.

The infamous Indonesian Nasi Goreng (in pic on left) is a stir-fried mixture of rice, chicken, shrimp, and seasonings. This dish exemplifies the complex culinary heritage of the Indonesian islands, which have been conquered and colonised by many different countries over the centuries. Here, rice – the main ingredient – was introduced by sailors from India, who arrived around the time of Christ. The technique of stir-frying came from the Chinese, who explored the islands in the fourth century. Chillis were brought by Renaissance Portuguese explorers who first discovered this ingredient in the Americas and the accompaniment of hard-boiled eggs is a legacy of Dutch traders from the colonial era.

Banh Mi, which is the name for both the bread and the sandwich, is also a classic fusion Vietnamese dish, the ingredients of which have roots in old Vietnam, French colonial Vietnam, and New World cuisine. The bread, although called a baguette, is not the traditional long French baguette, but a smaller ‘single-serving’ size. A combination of French and Asian styles of baking, the Vietnamese baguette is baked crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. To throw in a bit of Asian flair, it is made with half wheat and half rice flour, to give it a light and airy feel.

This baguette serves as the vessel that brings all the flavours of this sandwich together. Stuffed with ingredients such as pork rolls, grilled meats, fried eggs, pâté and seasoned stir-fried vegetables and packed with condiments such as pickles, chillies, cucumber and the must-have cilantro garnish, the Banh Mi is considered the iconic product of French colonialism in Indochina, combining ingredients from the French (baguettes, pâté and mayonnaise) with native Vietnamese ingredients, such as cilantro, chili peppers, and pickled carrots.

Kaya Toast (in pic on right), the classic breakfast dish that has reached ‘national’ proportions in Singapore consists of toasted bread filled with kaya (a jam or custard made from eggs, sugar and coconut milk) and is flavored with pandan (a sweet-tasting tropical green leafy plant used extensively in Southeast Asian cuisine). Butter or margarine may be spread at times, as well.

Served with soft boiled eggs, soy paste and pepper on the side with hot tea or black coffee (or ‘kopi’ as it is called here), the inception of the Kaya Toast can also be traced back to the colonisation of Asia. The Hainanese kitchen hands who worked on British ships were the culinary match-makers of this remarkably local-yet-borrowed breakfast delight. On settling down in the then British colonies of Singapore and Malaysia, they started selling ‘glocalised’ versions of the foods which they prepared for the British, including coffee, toast and French toast, to the local populations. The western jams and preserves favoured by the British were swapped with native coconut jams or butter flavoured with ‘pandan’, thus giving birth to a breakfast staple that has now blossomed into a communal must-do activity in Singapore.

Indian kitchens too have been gifted European culinary influences through their colonisers. One of the first European colonies in India, Goa, manifests the indelible mark that over 400 years of Portuguese reign left on its contemporary culture, clearly most evident on its cuisine. The most famous of Goa’s hybrid dishes, which became a staple of the country’s Anglo-Indian population is undoubtedly the ‘Vindaloo‘ (in pic on left), a spicy stew, usually of pork, that derives its name from the Portuguese vinho (wine) and ahlo (garlic). The Indo-Portuguese version of this dish was modified, by the substitution of vinegar for the red wine and the addition of red Kashmiri chillies with additional spices.

Many aspects of everyday staples from our ‘desi’ diets today are examples of fusion of food from our colonial past. Such as the ‘Vada Pao‘ – where the ubiquitous ‘pao’ is a legacy of the Portuguese, who brought their white bread of the same name to India years ago. Teamed with an authentically construed spicy Maharashtrian vada, it makes for the Mumbaikar’s favourite ‘wherever-and-whenever’ kind of go-to meal.

The British infected us with their taste for tea, making it the nation’s favourite pastime addiction. With our Indian spice box sprinkling its assortment of spices such as ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom and clove in it, we quickly turned the English ‘tea’ into a delectably soothing ‘Chai’; an inseparable element of everyday Indian life.

Clearly colonialism has had an immense effect on cross-cultural culinary match-making. Colonial cuisines such as the ones listed above and many more, have evolved gradually over time. They are an ever-lasting proof of the negotiations and collaborations that took place between the expatriate colonisers and the locals. They are representative of multiple diverse sub-cultures that ingrained themselves into each other, fusing cohesively to metamorphose into one unique greater global culture. This cuisine was not subject to a deliberate act of imposing imperialistic designs but in fact, involved a process of consuming local and foreign foods, usually through the efforts of smart and innovative indigenous staff members – all fusion chefs in their own right.

When food from the ‘outside’ was brought ‘in’, into any part of the world; it was welcomed, contextualised, glocalised and then served back in an incredibly blended yet transformative plate of World cooking. Palates were adapted and taste buds were honed to value and respect, savour and honour that which was served to us. Spice-loving gastronomers learnt to value the simplistic notion of what they thought all along was ‘bland’ while their foodie counterparts who had been unaccustomed to ‘spices’ began devouring masalas gradually, acclimatising their palates to this new sensation of heat and temperature.

Fusion food did not just bring together ingredients and techniques widely separated by geography and culture, but with the marriage or at least the romance between far-flung ethnic foods and their preparations, somewhere along the line, it also helped make the world what it is today – a much smaller, more savoury place to live in!

A Mumbaikar by birth and a New Yorker by choice, recently-turned global nomad Shweyta Mudgal is currently based out of Singapore. An airport designer by day, she moonlights as a writer. ‘Outside In’ is a weekly series of expat diaries, reflecting her perspective of life and travel, from the outside-in. She blogs at www.shweyta.blogspot.com and is a happy convert who no longer thinks of ‘Fusion food’ as ‘Confusion food’, thanks to some really memorable culinary experiences.

(Pictures courtesy belajarindonesia45.blogspot.com, www.thekitchn.com, totalveg.com, vindaloocuisine.co.uk, nor2ind.wordpress.com. Feature image is used for representation purpose only)

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Small talk, big deal

Small talk can help pass a minute of your time, or do something more momentous, like forge a lifelong friendship.
by Shweyta Mudgal

Previously, when someone would casually ask me, “Where are you from?” I would often be left puzzled or flattered.

Puzzled, because a certain part of me went, “Duh? Isn’t it obvious?” for it didn’t take rocket science to decipher my Indian features and skin colour. And flattered, because it was nice to know that for someone, I could pass off as a non-Indian as well.

To me, strangers that usually ask these questions fall under the following categories:

1. Those who are ignorant of India and hence do not know what Indians look like (yes, in spite of how famous we are, there are still some corners of the world where the desi tourist hasn’t ventured as yet, and people do not know what an average Indian looks like. Or even if they do, then thanks to Bollywood, they think all Indian women look like Aishwarya Rai or Kareena Kapoor; both representatives of a marginal population.)

2. Those who genuinely wonder, at my mixed-up accent, if I am an Indian who has lived in America for a few years or a pseudo-desi living in India, who’s merely hurling slang and rolling her R’s because she is trained like that at a desi call centre. (A friend’s father, who obviously did not know that I’d been living in NY and was only visiting Mumbai, once thought I was talking the way I did because I worked at a local call centre in Mumbai.)

Bringing me the utmost delight are instances when someone mistakes me to be Hispanic; a frequent misnomer that occurred with me often in the States. This assumption is largely based on the fact that when posed with any question in Spanish, I always confidently reply with a, “Yo no habla Espanol, (I do not speak Spanish)”, a habit the best friend, now a San Diegan for years, inculcated in me when I was fresh-off-the-boat in La La Land. The fact that I’ve answered in Spanish, convinces the asker of the question that I speak the language and am Hispanic myself, even though what I’ve really told them is I do not speak their language.

3. And lastly, there are those that use the question, “Where are you from?” as an ice-breaker, after the conventional, “Hi, how are you? What do you do?” etc for the lack of anything else to say or ask when introduced randomly at a party/gathering of any kind.

It is the last kind of “Where are you from?” that I am going to write about today. The non-loaded, innocently-asked question, generally asked of “newly-mets” that represents small talk!

Small Talk has been described as a brief conversation, usually made between strangers, regarding the most general and banal topics such as the weather, sports, TV/movies etc. More often than not, this serves as a conversation starter between two people co-habiting a space for a temporary period of time – such as when riding an elevator or while waiting for one’s car to be brought out by the valet.

The concept of small talk never really entered my life until I left Mumbai to move to the States, way back in 2002. I was in my early 20s then and always running late for everything. So naturally, any acquaintances that I ran into rarely got anything more than a rushed “Hello” from me. Besides, in Mumbai, one didn’t really talk to people one didn’t know, and so naturally there was no place for unnecessary chit-chat with strangers just because one was packed into an elevator with them.

America, on the other hand, is the mecca of small talk. One finds small talk everywhere you go in this nation – from a cab to a cube. Even the waitress at your table insists on first knowing how you are doing, when all your famished self would rather do is have her get you the usual No. 20 on the menu. Americans who you have just met and will probably never again cross paths with in your entire life, are always asking you, “How’s it going?” and “What’s up with this weather?”

No, they don’t really care to hear that it’s not going as well as it should, or what your take on this sudden snowstorm is. What they are really trying to do is, for the lack of a better word, ‘unawkwardify’ a moment, for the time in transition in which they are sharing space with you. Because to them, riding up 40 floors in an elevator in complete silence with another stranger might just seem uncomfortable and unbearable.

Usually a pet or a baby with their growl or gurgle respectively work wonderfully as instant catalysts for meaningless chatter, meant to serve only as an accompaniment to the long wait of reaching one’s destination. When one doesn’t have either, usually the weather can help – although that is only relevant in countries where the weather is something to talk about on account of its daily dynamism, always making it the opening conversational gambit. In the Northeast United States, one can at least say, “Wow, it’s freezing out there!” or “Whoa! That rain came down from nowhere.” In Singapore, what would one say? “Wow, look at the rain,” every single afternoon? Or “Hmm…it’s so hot!” for all 365 days of the year?

When people are acquaintances, co-workers or even ‘random-meeters’ who bump into each other all the time, the reference frame for small talk broadens. Now, one can advance from the mundane topics of weather and meaningless chatter on to more meaningful talk or gossip, even things like, “That’s a lovely dress,” or “What’s wrong with the Boss these days?” Familiarity provides one with a wider context thus helping breed slightly more meaningful and relevant conversations.

Small talk at the office, however, could be dangerous as well, especially between workers at different levels, say a boss and his staff, for example. While at times it can help ease working relationships between them, it can also occasionally masquerade itself as a motivational tool used by ‘friendly’ managers to leverage a working weekend, from say, staff that reports to them. Because after all, it is the superior who has the power to close the small talk and “get down to business”. (“Yeah, it’s good to know you’re not doing much this weekend. Maybe you can come in for a few hours and wrap up that report?”)

In social situations such as parties or informal gatherings where people who you’ve never met before come together, small talk can help create networks, forge alliances and foster long-lasting friendships. Whether you want to use it to make your way through the next three hours of the party or the next three decades of your life, is then is entirely up to your discretion.

Most friends you’ve made as yet, other than those that fall in the ‘childhood BFF’ category, are strangers you small-talked with the first time you met them. At school or at work, in a class or a cafe, in a train or a bus or wherever else it is that you meet people, it is through small talk that most of our non-familial relationships have walked into our lives.

Small talk naturally varies across cultures, with different mores and taboos. Americans use it as a mechanism for opening channels of communication by talking about the weather, how you’ve been, the economy and politics – but stay away from salaries or how much your house cost. Indians, on the other hand, can use it as a Q&A session to get to know the person they are dealing with (and his past few generations, if you let them). For example, in the scenario of a professional partnership between an American and an Indian firm, it is not uncommon to find the American employee partly startled-partly amused at being posed with personal questions about his/her family, usually asked by the Indian business partners to forge good personal relationships that, to them, are important precursors to good professional relations.

Yet, it is in the Asian workplace – which has more formal rules for communication and lays a strong emphasis on social hierarchy – that it is considered inappropriate to engage in casual conversation with one’s superiors. In addition, freely expressing one’s opinion during small talk, especially if it could potentially conflict with that of their colleague’s or boss’s, might also come across as impolite conduct. Expressing one’s allegiance towards a particular team or a differing point of view about any other topic might put one in the uncomfortable position of having to suppress their own preference, just to avoid serious conflict.

In some Asian cultures, small talk may come across as intrusive; bordering on nosey and downright rude even. In vain Vietnam, a random shopowner unknowingly threw salt on my wounds, when she harmlessly wondered out loud, in the middle of a market place, if I’d had a C-Section baby, on account of the slight ‘pouch-like’ appearance of my lower abdomen? My aghast yet truthful response to her was a quick nod of the head in the affirmative, as I sucked my tummy in while holding my breath and walking away, vowing to double-up on the number of daily abdominal crunches at the gym then on.

In Thailand, one may perhaps be taken aback at the directness of some questions asked by the locals to tourists. What may be considered impolite in another country is often perfectly normal here. Food, family and social hierarchy are very important, consequentially making small talk around these themes perfectly acceptable. Often, conversations will consist of many questions that enable social categorisations of each other. I personally have smilingly answered queries regarding our family income, what my iPhone cost and when (not ‘if’) I am having Baby no. 2.

Small talk – whether you love it or hate it – is an essential part of meeting, conversing and getting to know people. Any intrepid vagabond can tell you that while travelling, it is the easiest way to understand a new culture through assimilation into the daily life of a foreign land and overcoming our inbred distrust of anyone outside the tribe. In the workplace, interpersonal impressions often created through small talk matter a great deal along the way, and can even shape how people judge each other. In social life, it can escalate random chance meetings into greater associations, such as business partnerships, life-long friendships and perhaps even temporary or permanent romantic alliances. And in the elevator or a building lobby, if nothing else, it can help set the tone for a great start or end to your work day.

In today’s age, when phones, iPads, headphones and other self-encapsulating mechanisms have alienated us from our travel surroundings, go ahead and take a few minutes out of your daily commute to talk to others. Chat up the person next to you on the bus, in the train or in the elevator, even. Ask them how things are going. If in Mumbai, offer them a sounding board to voice their traffic troubles. You might just pick up a carpool ride back home in the process. If in New York City, let them warn you of the impending snowstorm that you weren’t aware of, so you’ll be ready for it when it comes. If in Singapore, be thankful and nod each time your doorman and taxi driver remind you to check if you’ve taken your passport along as you walk out with a suitcase. And if in Thailand, just smile at what might seem like a volley of the third degree coming your way. After all, if you’re ok with virtual small talk – answering Twitter’s “What’s happening?” and Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” so many times in a day, what harm can striking up a round of deep-and-meaningless with the people you meet along the way, do?

A Mumbaikar by birth and a New Yorker by choice, recently-turned global nomad Shweyta Mudgal is currently based out of Singapore. An airport designer by day, she moonlights as a writer. ‘Outside In’ is a weekly series of expat diaries, reflecting her perspective of life and travel, from the outside-in. She blogs at www.shweyta.blogspot.com and as is obvious, always has a lot to talk about!

 

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The colour of me

Shweyta Mudgal was thrilled to know that Americans coveted her skin colour – and then her ‘fair’-skinned daughter was born.

My grandmother has been dark-skinned all her life. The colour of milk chocolate!

Her daughter – my mother, has always been light-complexioned; alabaster-like, like the colour of daylight on a beautiful morning!

Me – when I was born I am told I was somewhere between ochre and honey. Until I decided to go out and ‘play in the sun’ every day, ending up a shade of burnt sienna for most of my childhood. Once the sun-play stopped and I moved out of India to the States, my colour lightened and became what it is now (as suggested by the make-up world) – wheatish medium-toned.

My daughter was born the colour of peaches and cream. Mixed together, in the exact proportion, to form a flawless light creamish-pink colour that I refer to as ‘baby blush.’ Over the course of the past 19 months of her life, she has managed to keep just enough sun under her skin to move on to more peach and less cream, in the process being labelled the “fairest one of them all” in the family palette.

Evidently, the skin-tone lineage in our family, studied over the cross-section of its surviving generations, clearly alternates between dark and light. For instance, in a picture taken standing between them, I am the brown vada between the light-coloured pavs that are my mother and daughter. No surprise then, in an openly in-your-face kind of society such as ours in India, I looked back confounded when faced with this recurring query throughout my childhood: “How come you are so dark while your mother is so fair?” (That my name also literally means ‘white’ in Sanskrit didn’t help at all. Really! What were you thinking, Mom?)

This oft-asked question had affected me enough, I am told, to have created one of the funniest childhood memories of my life. My juvenile brain had finally decided, one fine day, that the solution lay in mommy’s home-whipped white butter. She still cracks up when she recounts how she found me sitting on the kitchen floor with butter smeared all over my face one evening. All this, so I could be as fair as she was!

While the fascination with human skin colour has been of much interest and intrigue to Indians for eons (more so for women, the so-called ‘lighter sex’), it has taken on insane levels in some other Asian countries. Vietnam, for instance.

Creams, fairness gels, deodorants, soaps, moisturisers and even pills that make skin-lightening promises abound on the shelves of convenience stores and supermarkets alike, all over this country. In sultry, humid and 100 deg F (roughly 37 deg C) temperatures in Saigon, women can be seen covered head to toe (for no religious reason), dressed in jeans or slacks, face masks (that double up into anti-pollution and anti-sun barriers) and long-sleeved hand gloves – all in an attempt to shield their skin from the sun.

If you asked their darker Cambodian neighbours, they wondered: why the fuss? After all, they would ask, aren’t the Vietnamese already fair enough? Makes for a good pun, that phrase there, but the Vietnamese, on the other hand, will tell you, ‘fair enough’’ is not good enough!

The significance of being ‘white’ (bordering on albino-like sometimes, what with all the lightening products and procedures available in today’s market) in the cultural paradigm of Asian countries, is enormous. Not just on the socio-economic level but on a global identity level – where Asian women, in their quest for beauty, are trying to achieve the colour of their Caucasian counterparts. In Asia, ‘whiteness’ of the skin has always been directly proportional to beauty and affluence. A dark or tanned skin belonged to a worker toiling in the fields all day, thus reflecting poverty, physical hard work and a socially inferior status.

This obsessive pursuit of fairness leads to accidents, as well. For instance, in today’s day and age, with countless fairness products made available to them, women of the lower social strata in countries like Cambodia often resort to making uninformed choices. Partly due to their ignorance and partly due to the products’ unaffordability, they end up buying cheap skin lighteners, the application of which results in severe skin damage and even death in some cases, on account of their high mercury and/or lead content.

My analysis of this fairness craze has brought me to establish my own hypothesis – all we want is to be like our neighbours on the left. Take a look at the map of Asia – this pursuit of fairness starts from India, Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines, who wouldn’t mind going a few shades lighter, say, like the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese and South Koreans would prefer going still whiter like the neighbours on their left, the Japanese. And the Japanese, not content with their high rank on the Asian shade card, are vying for the Caucasian-like radiance of the Americans (the white Americans, to be specific).

The Americans, infamous for doing things diametrically opposite to the rest of the world, obviously wouldn’t mind bartering their ‘ivoriness’ for some ‘colour’, the pursuit of which leads them to natural or unnatural tanning practices. Tanning of the skin is their equivalent of ‘whiteness’ in Asians, in terms of desirability.

While most Westerners tan naturally by simply lying under the sun, usually by the pool, on the beach or on a lawn, the more popular method that Americans prefer is that of cosmetically tanning themselves indoors, on a bed or in a booth in a tanning salon. Either way, the tan is achieved by exposing one’s skin to UV radiation; the overexposure of which can adversely affect one’s health causing skin cancer (melanoma), cataracts, premature aging and wrinkling of the skin, etc.

Having sun-kissed skin is so highly coveted in the West, that to my surprise, I found myself at the receiving end of compliments, in school here, for being the colour that I am. It was ironic! To be appreciated for something that one had been chided for in their growing years, naturally felt wonderful!

To me, America became the land that loved and welcomed coloured skin, non-judgmentally. Granted, this nation was not always this colour-uncoded, going by its history, and that parts of it are still not as non-discriminatory. Yet, I found that overall, cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and several others celebrated their colour diversity. I had classmates, school staff and co-workers telling me they wished they had some of my colour. That for the first time, someone wanted to be – the colour of me!

The natural Asian tan was a coveted one in America. Here, hues of black, brown, tan, olive, yellow and white seemed to co-exist in harmony, often blurring lines and blending in with each other to create new shades. Black and white marriages yielded light brown babies, as did brown and white marriages. Yellow and white marriages resulted in white babies with Asian features, or vice versa. This was the Land of Colour, yet free of Colourism! Here, the Colour Code did not apply to me anymore. Finally, I had been set free!

Until the day my peaches-and-cream daughter was born. And I took her out for her first walk by the Hudson river. A much elder mother-daughter duo, probably of Asian origin, stopped to admire the little one. “She’s beautiful. And soooo fair!” they said as I smiled, opening my mouth to say, “Thanks!” and gracefully accept the compliment. Until they looked me up and down and added, “Is she your daughter?”

What can I say? I am always going to be her nanny!

A Mumbaikar by birth and a New Yorker by choice, recently-turned global nomad Shweyta Mudgal is currently based out of Singapore. An airport designer by day, she moonlights as a writer. ‘Outside In’ is a weekly series of expat diaries, reflecting her perspective of life and travel, from the outside-in. She blogs at www.shweyta.blogspot.com and loves being referred to as her daughter’s nanny by unsuspecting strangers. 

(Picture courtesy bellasugar.com)

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