Make it hot
Hot sauce, to me, is as American as the Marlboro Man. Tabasco, my first encounter with the genre, runs in the same tradition of weaponized American material culture, exported with a blithe imperialism that seems as quaint today as petticoats (because it is now no longer geopolitics, but simply what we do). What apart from the iron imperatives of capitalism would explain shipping glass bottles full of chili and vinegar from Louisiana to South East Asia, home to the most nuanced and varied chili-eating culture on the planet? The peppers used in Tabasco sauce are clones of whatever used to grow on Avery Island when the first McIlhenny stumbled upon it, but the Tabasco company has for some time now outsourced the growing of the peppers to South America, shipping the seeds out from Louisiana with a little red stick for gauging ripeness, sowing monoculture in the cradle of the gloriously mutable chili pepper.
What made Tabasco unusual to a kid who’d grown up eating spicy food was its blandness. It was hot, but that was really all it was and the medium emphasized the message. You dashed this crystalline liquid onto your food like cologne, and like cologne it disappeared, leaving only a haze of heat behind. To eat such plain chili felt transgressive and foreign and exotic, like the American chain restaurants that introduced it to me. These were just starting to appear in Singapore when I was growing up, outposts of companies with strange names like Hard Rock Cafe and TGI Friday’s. There was no such thing as a perfect amount of Tabasco unless it was too much, too much like the larger-than-life amounts of meat and pasta and potatoes on the plates. The Tabasco became a digestif.
The chili I grew up with was not meant to be hot. It was hot, but heat wasn’t its raison d’etre. Chili was a flavoring like garlic or vinegar, and was used with that sensibility.
The chili sauces of Southeast Asia, the sambals of the Malay world and the nam phriks of Thailand and the upper peninsula, were originally the food of the poor - this at least they have in common with the hot sauces of America. They were created to bring interest to food of surpassing plainness and simplicity - steamed rice, a few steamed or raw vegetables, perhaps a piece of fish cooked fully dry so it would keep at least a day or two. They are condiments that are also staples. Many sambals contain fermented seafood because it is delicious, but also because it is the protein source most readily available to a rice farmer in a pre-modern village. Sambal isn’t merely a source of heat, but a pleasure, a corrective action, a balm for the soul when the food on the table is a daily reminder of privation.
Sambals and nam phriks are complex, finding a balance between heat, pungency, and sweetness. Sourness and salt are used to bring them into balance, rather than as driving forces. They’re invariably made with a mortar and pestle, not simply cut together or mixed. I associate fried sambals with the Malay world, but Thai nam phriks are more likely to be made with ingredients that were grilled over charcoal before being pounded together. Malay ones tend to rely on belacan (fermented shrimp paste), Thai sauces on fish derivatives. Beyond this it is nearly impossible to generalize because the genre is so diverse.
An American might be able to name a few brands of hot sauce, but Frank’s and Crystal and Tabasco and indeed any well known hot sauce in America are much more similar to each other than a sambal tumis (shallots, chili, garlic, a little shrimp paste, fried, smooth, see also footnote 2) and a sambal belacan (chili, a lot of shrimp paste, lime, fresh, coarse, see also footnote 3). Most eaters in Singapore can easily name a dozen styles of sambal, all of which have their distinct flavor and place. This is the difference between a culture that eats chili and one that eats hot sauce.
In spite of this Singapore has its own industrial, homogenized chili sauce. It’s made by Maggi the way ketchup is made by Heinz, and is hard to find in the US. The Thai sweet chili that’s made its way into most supermarkets is similar, but in my memory Maggi was less translucent, less sweet, perhaps more complex. Maggi chili sauce has no basis in tradition that I am aware of and I put it on everything when I was 12 (before I encountered Tabasco). It has a delightful coating quality achievable only by the careful hydration and cooking of highly engineered starch, and with its sweetness and moderate heat it’s like a blankie for your food.
Maggi and Tabasco are hot sauces of cheap abundance. They’re there in every college dining hall and office canteen, my colleagues each have their own bottle of Frank’s at their desks, for their Chipotle burritos and New York slices. These meals in the end are all the food of Sysco, and if we cannot make this food truly nourishing, at least we can make it hot.
I know this is where I put the footnotes last time. Well, this time the footnotes are longer - they’re actually representative recipes for a few sambals - so they’re going at the foot, like footnotes should.
That said, this is a great place to say thank you to everyone who’s written in with comments and suggestions, and an extra, super-special thank you to the awesome Jen Thompson, whose suggestion was “get a proof reader!” and proceeded to volunteer, which improved the quality of writing immensely.
New York has acquired not one but two places that serve Malaysian coffee, a fact which pleases me even more than it amuses me. I mention this because the larger of the two outfits, Kopitiam, also sells jars of sambal.
Kopi-pek, photo by D. Kudayarova.
The sambal is genuinely delicious, made in-house to go with their nasi lemak, a dish of rice cooked in coconut milk frequently hailed as the national dish of Malaysia. Their version of the dish is simple, served with raw cucumber, some peanuts and anchovies fried together, and that sambal, complex and tangy and puckery and just hot enough. It doesn’t taste like the sort usually served with nasi lemak in Singapore, but innovation sometimes has its benefits.
Though the nasi lemak is ostensibly their tentpole dish, I find the rest of the menu is executed much better, especially the kuih - Malay and Nyonya cakes, a whole pastry idiom based on coconut milk, palm sugar, and glutinous rice, one that will be completely, thrillingly unfamiliar to people who’ve mostly eaten Western desserts. These are better than many specimens in Southeast Asia.
I’m not going to belabor the intricacies of kopi culture - the internet has done a fine job of this already. However, a couple of things might not be obvious from these articles. First, this mode of coffee service is actually quite complicated, because there’s no way to reduce the number of ingredients that have to be individually dosed into each cup (coffee, water, sugar, condensed milk, evaporated milk, sugar), and everything has to be free-poured at speed. There is no such thing as batch brew. Second, the aesthetic considerations in roasting the coffee are unfamiliar to American coffee drinkers. It’s meant to be full and fragrant rather than bright and juicy, roasted very dark, but without making the flavor of the dark roast prominent. Rather, it’s a means of making the cup pang (香), as they say in Hokkien - it should have an intense, irreducible aroma of itself. Kopitiam serves a cup that’s almost glutinous, like coffee ice cream left too long in a pot on a stove. It’s not inauthentic but it is definitely on the richer end of what you might find in Southeast Asia. Personally, I like my kopi with a little more coffee.
This has been your first, totally accidental, restaurant review on Let Them Eat Cake.
1. Nam phrik num, a representative version:
Grill over glowing charcoal, until charred black outside and completely soft within:
About a pound of large, fresh green chilies, 3 ounces of shallots, and 2 ounces of garlic.
The alliums should be grilled with skins on, so that you can peel the charred exteriors off everything after grilling. Pound everything in a mortar and pestle (I use a food processor and season my sambal with the tears of my ancestors). Start with the alliums then add the chilies. You want something between coleslaw and mashed potatoes. Coherent but not at all homogenous. Season aggressively with salt and/or unfiltered fish sauce (pla ra). Some recipes ask for some small, firm tomatoes to be peeled, chopped, and mixed in. The end result should be distinctly spicy, and quite fragrant.
2. Sambal tumis, a representative version:
The simplest versions of this involve dried chili (about 8, de-seeded and soaked in water till soft), shallots (5-6), garlic (5-6 cloves) and belacan, pounded (or you know, just…) together and then fried in a generous quantity of oil. Make the paste pretty smooth - start with just the chili and some salt, then once they’ve got a good head start add the alliums (sliced fine) and finally the belacan. You don’t need too much belacan, half of a 1/4” slice. Start with a cold pan, and add enough oil so that the ingredients are almost but not quite submerged. There should be islands of paste rising from a sea of oil like bits of reef among the breakers. Don’t be afraid to add more in the process of cooking. Fry over low to medium heat, stirring constantly and making sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. The paste absorbs the oil as it cooks, then breaks and releases the oil, now deeply flavored, once again. At this point the paste should have darkened considerably and be very fragrant. It’s crucial that the paste breaks, but how long you cook it after that is a matter of taste. At this point, add some tamarind water, palm sugar, and if need be, salt. It should be balanced, a little sweet, with real depth. Warmth rather than spice, but heat isn’t a flaw if it’s there. Some recipes for this get positively baroque - lemongrass, tomatoes, fresh chilies as well as dried. It’s one of the most loved and hence most modified sambals in the repertoire.
3. Sambal belacan, a representative version:
Slice 8 large red chilies (the kind generally sold in Korean markets, or sold as Thai chilis) very fine. If you don’t want this killer hot, you can de-seed some of the chilis first, but bear in mind that this should be a very assertive accompaniment. Cut two 1/4” thick slices of belacan from the block and toast in a foil packet in a toaster oven till dry and crumbly. Pound the chilis with salt, or process in a food processor. The pieces should be quite small, the size of a chili seed, but it’s not a smooth paste. Add the belacan, pound or pulse till integrated. Check the seasoning. Add enough lime juice to moisten and brighten. Some people use more belacan, some less.
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