"This is the time of year when my kitchen starts to tell the truth about who I am. Scottish crab, fresh from Tarbert, is lowered gently into a bubbling chilli bath of sambal and egg to become chilli crab, scooped up with steamed mantou buns and eaten messily with friends and family. Oysters from Lindisfarne are deep-fried in a light cloak of rice and corn flour, fished out of the wok with long chopsticks and dipped into sweet chilli sauce."
"Noodles are prepared slowly and deliberately to become prosperity noodles. And then there's haggis: steamed, peppery and unapologetically gamey, served properly with creamy mash, neeps and a generous peppercorn sauce. But there is always leftover haggis. And leftover haggis leads to questions. Questions like whether it might be better curried, folded into crisp spirals of pastry and fried into something resembling a Malaysian-style haggis curry puff. The answer, inevitably, is yes. Haggis spiked with Sichuan doubanjiang is something to behold. This crossing of food cultures is when I feel most myself."
A Scottish-Malaysian cook uses winter celebrations as cultural lifelines, centring food to mark time and gather. Dishes range from Scottish crab in a chilli-sambal bath and deep-fried Lindisfarne oysters to deliberately prepared prosperity noodles and traditional haggis with mash, neeps and peppercorn sauce. Leftover haggis becomes a site of fusion experimentation, imagined curried, wrapped and fried into Malaysian-style curry puffs and spiked with Sichuan doubanjiang. Burns Night brings poetry, peat smoke and ritualised reflection, while Lunar New Year follows the lunar cycle and ushers abundance, renewal and forward momentum.
Read at CN Traveller
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