no. 81: putrescence, euphoria

After the heat came the euphoria, and after the euphoria came the doubt. I was tasting sambal belacan, a condiment most people don’t sample on its own, for the same reason people don’t usually taste gunpowder, or sulphuric acid. 

Sambal belacan is what other hot sauces get shown in ads, the idealized, triple distilled essence that underpins Matouk dreams and Cholula fantasies. It’s hot enough to wake the dead, and funky enough to get them dancing. The heat of course is chili, in copious, flagrant, eye-watering quantity. My friend Christopher, a cook of the most delightfully finicky sort, insists that a “properly kampung style [i.e. pleasingly rustic], blow your head off” sambal belacan must include true chili padi, not the Thai bird’s eye chilis sold as “chili padi” in most markets in Singapore. In Thailand it’s a compliment to tell a woman that her fingers are shapely as chili peppers, but true chili padi are knurled and hard as a hawker’s fingers. You can’t find them in America, presumably due to arms controls. 

The je ne sais quoi is belacan, fermented shrimp paste that’s usually described as “intense,” or “putrescent.” Some recipes include makrut leaves, which give it a touch of femme fatale: heady, floral, knowing. They don’t round things out so much as bring a beguiling instability. The fourth rider of the apocalypse is calamondin juice, used to loosen the paste at the last moment, like activating cement with water. The flavors get etched on your tongue with acid and lightning. 

There are two ways to learn to make sambal belacan. 

The classic approach is to learn it at some relative’s knee. The relative is usually your mother, or grandmother, but might be an aunt or the family help, and this version of the process is the stuff of glossy cookbooks and chef hagiography. It’s inextricable from learning to use the mortar and pestle, because the pounding practically is the recipe. Everyone agrees on the right way to pound sambal: bring the pestle down against the side of the mortar in a circular movement, almost scraping. Make it rhythmic, make it musical, make it ritual. Start with the makrut, then add the chili, belacan goes last. Do not, for instance, send chopped chili geysering from the mortar (as I always do), or bring the pestle down on your thumb (as I may have once done). The lesson takes a minute, the practice years.

So it’s not really pestle technique that’s being handed down, though that’s part of it. What you’re really learning is that you add the big chilis before the small ones, because second aunt swears she can tell the difference, that first uncle and mum will always argue about whether you should pound just before or a day ahead, that you always use Prawn & Coral brand belacan because that “special” belacan your cousin brought back from Penang was dreadful. Sambal belacan is neither recipe nor technique, it’s lore. 

But let’s say you didn’t grow up in a home where sambal belacan was a fact of life. 

Maybe your family, like mine, were sinkeh (新客) “new guests” in the Straits of Malacca, only there three generations. Or maybe you grew up in one of the many households in Singapore that never cooks at home, or where sambal always comes from a packet, because mum and dad are too busy at work, or in one of the increasing number of households where the primary cook was the domestic helper from the Philippines or Indonesia or Myanmar, who didn’t make sambal belachan because “ma’am” never taught her to. Or you took an interest in cooking only after your grandmother died, and your parents are of the generation that was only too glad to get out of the kitchen. How do you learn to make sambal belacan then?

You could start by eating a lot of it. You can still try hundreds of versions in Singapore’s eateries, though more and more places get theirs from a packet. Maybe you’ll taste one that makes you hear the sound of bells. But what then? Some folks may have the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch, and can taste a dish and immediately divine how it was made. I’m not one of them. I learned how to cook mostly by being bad at it, by reading a lot, and exercising a kind of cussedness. 

If you’re like me, you might then read a recipe. Or several. There are seven among the cookbooks on my shelf. They vary wildly, and each was written by someone with an unassailable claim to authority. Google gives me 2.7 million results. This photo is a recipe too – from a cook of the oldest school. 

And you could follow these recipes with the devotion of a medieval virgin, but which of the 2.7 million will make you hear the sound of bells? If the first one isn’t what you’re looking for, how do you tweak it, or pick the next? Recipes are akin to knowledge but not the thing itself.

This is how I found myself with sweat on my forehead and 6 samples of sambal belacan in front of me, so red they pulsed like anger solidified (for the curious, I’ve detailed the process and recipes below). Sambal belacan is spicy enough that the capsaicin resets your palate, or launches it into a new plane of consciousness, so the same sambal will taste different from one dab to the next. You have to taste the sambal both with rice and without, because you’d never actually just eat sambal on its own.  By the time I’d gone through every sample thrice, I was delirious. 

Sambal belacan straight from the blender is looser and brighter than sambal from a mortar. I was tasting with a panel of a dozen other people, mostly Americans who had no real reference point – but they clearly preferred the version from the mortar, describing “depth” and “savor.” I liked the brightness of the one that came from the blender, my sacrilege for the day. 

A pinch of sugar in the sambal is entirely unidentifiable, but perceptible enough to make that version the favorite, though no one could explain why. 

Malacca belacan and Penang belacan are different in every way when raw, and every household has their avowed favorite. Fermented krill are as diverse as fermented grapes, but the Malacca/Penang dichotomy is the big one, at least in Singapore – a crustacean equivalent of the whole cluster/destemming debate. Malacca belacan comes in loose, pinkish logs which crumble readily and smell almost like a shrimp farm, a cocktail of seawater, hot sun, and masses of live, wriggling, shitting shrimp. Penang belacan is a dark, smooth brick, dense and clayey. It smells of earth and sous bois and spent grain and lobster shells roasting. But after they’re toasted, dried, powdered, and finally ground into the sambal, there’s only a slight difference in texture, and almost none in flavor. 

I feel at home with this kind of understanding, which I suppose makes me a modern rather than a traditional cook. Comparison has the heft of knowledge. But this tasting, done blind in America’s Test Kitchen, with recipes measured to the gram, methodical as I could make it – this tasting taught me nothing about how sambal belacan ought to taste. Maybe “how it ought to taste” is a meaningless notion when there’s a different sambal belacan in every kitchen in the Straits of Malacca, and writing recipes is just trying to bottle the wind. 

Maybe what I’m after is a bit of column A and a bit of column B. The technique feels like a dead end without the lore, but loremongering feels like an incomplete and stultified kind of teaching. Insistence isn’t an aesthetic, a record isn’t a compass. I don’t know if you can have an aesthetic without a community – that seems like just an idea in your head. Maybe community is just company, knowing that you’ll sit down to dinner again next week, just like you did the week before. That’s a kind of tasting panel convening every week, talking about whether the sambal belacan is too pungent today, or needed more makrut, or how last week’s sambal was too loose and today’s is better – and this isn’t knowledge, but meaning. 

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This essay came about partly because I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what community is and means. One major catalyst for this was Kristen Ghodsee’s fabulous book, Everyday Utopia – her interview with Ezra Klein provides a good summary. If you’re interested in the subject, I’d also suggest looking into what Sheila Liming and Rhaina Cohen have to say (again, their interviews with Klein are a useful introduction). 

It’s also partly inspired by one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, Lucius Shepard, and his great novel about knowledge, causality, and American hucksterism, A Handbook of American Prayer.

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The comparative tasting I mention was really 3 A/B tests conducted at the same time: 

1. Penang belacan vs. Malacca belacan

2. Ground only in a blender vs. using a blender only for comminution of the chili, with all else done in a mortar and pestle

3. Seasoned with a subliminal quantity of sugar vs. no sugar at all

The “control” version used Penang belacan and the blender only for comminution of the chili – this was the method for both samples in 1 and 3.

Everything else – the use of makrut leaves, the blend of chilis (chili padi vs. large red chilis), and the proportion of chili to belacan – varies so widely I considered those variables to be a matter of taste.

The recipe for these tests was:

50g large red chili
50g Thai bird’s eye chili
30g belacan, weighed after toasting and grinding to powder
2 makrut leaves
20g lime juice (calamondins are impossible to find retail in most of the US)

In practice, most diners add lime juice to taste. My samples were pretty thick, more paste than sauce. The sugared sample had 2g sugar.

There was no clear preference for either Penang or Malacca, and no consistency of language.

There was a clear preference for the sample finished in mortar and pestle, and consistent language in the comments.

There was a clear preference for the sugared sample, but comments were vague on why.