BootsnAll Travel Network



Secret Flavours

Every cuisine has its secrets—often some herb or spice that is locally common-as-muck but fiendishly difficult to find back home. Sometimes it is just the way in which things are cooked. And occasionally it is something that, in one way or another, is found in different cuisines the world over. Something that different cultures have learned to appreciate quite independently from each other. Something that lends a certain flavour.

No, I’m not talking about chilli or similar common spices.

I was preparing a dressing for steamed purple-sprouting brocoli the other day (another River Cottage recipe) when it struck me that this dressing was a typical example of Italian cooking:

Dressing for steamed brocoli (or spring greens)
25g anchovy filets; 75ml olive oil; 2 cloves garlic; pinch fresh thyme; 1tsp finely chopped basil; pinch chilli flakes; ½ tsp Dijon mustard; 1 tsp red wine vinegar; salt & pepper
Warm gently and whisk to emulsify.

—Yet it shared something in common with Lao cooking which I had just read about in Natacha du Pont de Bie’s charming, if occasionally stroppy, ‘Ant Egg Soup’. Both cuisines use salted or fermented fish as a flavouring ingredient. So does Sri Lankan (Maldive fish; tiny and salted). In Taiwan, I often found little salted fry in pots of dried noodles (the best, I may add) and in Africa, smoked stockfish lent a strong flavour to the stews I enjoyed in the former Zaïre. Granted, they were ingredients in their own right, but they were a form of spice at the same time. I found out later that dried shrimp is commonly used in African cooking and I must have eaten quite a bit of it.

Strong pastes made from fermented fish are used all over SE Asia. Then there is Thai fish sauce, nam pla, and its Vietnamese equivalent, nuoc mam. And moving to other kinds of seafood, we have blachan shrimp paste, ubiquitous in Malaysian cooking, and Chinese oyster sauce. Anchovies pop up in much European cooking and have been adapted by chefs for such common British dishes as roast lamb with garlic and rosemary or fried steak with red wine jus. Try it—I guarantee you’d be surprised.

In fact, the use of fermented fish or shellfish in cookery goes way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and probably further than that in Asia.

There is something about fermented seafood that adds that little je ne sais quois to the art of cooking.

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