POSTING #107

Loading

To Malaysia with Love

In Posting #104  I told about visiting a casino in Malaysia's Genting Highland in 1992 while I was conducting a training course for senior managers of that country's employment service.

During an advance visit to plan the course, my Malaysian contacts and I agreed that the final dinner of the two-week course should be special. It should offer foods from the three ethnic groups that make up Malaysia, the native Malays, the Chinese and the Indians.

The Malaysians suggested that there should also be a typically Canadian dish. I agreed.

When I got back to Canada from the planning trip, Pat and I tried to decide which 'Canadian' dish we would offer.

Leaving poutine aside, there was not a great choice.

As a digression, some of us make fun of poutine because of its grayish gravy of unknown origin and its gummy cheese, but the chefs in one of  Niagara-on-the-Lake's best winery restaurants have drawn inspiration from the humble dish and are now offering a lunchtime poutine dish made of fries (of course) covered with a lobster sauce full of generous chunks of lobster, with a topping of  broiled old Canadian cheddar and fresh cheese curds. A fussy friend said it was wonderful!

Back to business!

When I was still with the Federal Government I sometimes had to help plan the menus for banquets at which foreign VIP would be honoured. We wanted to offer them a unique Canadian culinary experience but soon found that the distinctively Canadian foods boiled down to Arctic Char, Winnipeg Goldeyes, Fiddle Heads, and Maple Syrup.

Slim pickings!

As I remember them, the meals were never very good. They were Canadian, but they were boring.

Could Pat and I come up with something better for our Malaysian friends?

The dish had to be something we could carry on the plane to Malaysia, which ruled out Arctic Char, Goldeyes and Fiddleheads and it couldn't contain any pork products.

After a great deal of thought, we had an outside-the-box idea.

Butter tarts---the treat that is not found anywhere else in the world!

The idea of butter tarts had a special appeal to me because Kenilworth, a tiny hamlet a few miles north of my home town of Arthur, seems to have declared itself the spiritual capital of butter tarts. Every so often Kenilworth has a butter tart festival and enthusiasts from across Canada and from some enlightened pockets in the US make a pilgrimage to this butter tart Mecca. When the festival is not on, the hamlet organizes a Butter Tart Trail Tour (now there's alliteration for you) that lets tart lovers sample the best of Canadian tarts from different communities in North Wellington.

We decided that we would carry two pounds of vegetable shortening (no lard) with us to Malaysia. Pat would then buy the other ingredients in a market and try to sweet-talk the pastry chef at our hotel into letting her use  part of his kitchen to make tarts for the special dinner.

The choice of a recipe could have been problematic.

Lovers of butter tarts can all agree that the pastry has to be flaky and the filling has to come to just below the top of the pastry shell---nothing worse than leathery pastry or a skimpily filled tart.

But there is a dispute about the perfect consistency of the fillings in butter tarts. Some people like the filling so runny that it dribbles in a sticky stream down one's chin. Others like the filling so stiff that it has to be chewed.

We were lucky because Pat's Aunt Margaret (Margaret Pirrie) had a recipe in which the filling was always in the perfect mid-point between the two extremes, firm enough that it didn't dribble but soft and succulent.

Sorry if I have offended any of you who may have a different view of the ideal butter tart, but it is clear that this is the tart that true connoisseurs (aka Pat and I) prefer.

So, armed with Aunt Margaret's recipe and two pounds of Crisco, we set off for Malaysia.

At the hotel, Pat explained her plan to the pastry chef. He studied the recipe and then said he would make the tarts for the dinner himself, but there would be a condition. Pat would have to let him add Aunt Margaret's recipe to his repertoire of recipes.

Pat quickly agreed and handed over the recipe and the Crisco.

On the night of the dinner each of the course participants had a perfect Canadian butter tart.

I would like to be able to say that the course members loved the tarts and marveled at the sophistication of Canadian cuisine.

But I can't say that.

The truth is that the participants didn't like them very much.

As one of the Malaysian fellows explained to me, "We don't like things that are too sweet. We like things that have kick."

That made sense. Malaysians have wonderful tropical fruit---papayas, mangoes, pineapples, bananas, etc---that come to the table truly 'tree-ripened' and naturally sweet. They hadn't (at least in 1992) acquired our taste for super sweet desserts.

So our attempt to introduce butter tarts to Malaysia wasn't a great success.

But I have this fantasy.

An important international meeting is being held at Genting Highland---it is a popular place for such conferences---and the Canadian Minister of Finance or perhaps of Foreign Affairs finds on the dessert plate, along with the chocolate bombe (or whatever),  a perfect butter tart. She or he, starts with surprise and pleasure and looks around, and sees standing in the doorway a smiling pastry chef, who bows modestly.

000

One of the participants, who was from Penang State in the northwest coast of the Malaysian Peninsula, invited us to visit him after the course.

After consulting some tour books we decided to take the train from Kuala Lumpur to Penang (about 370 kilometres)  so that we could get a feel for the Malaysian jungle. When I told one of the members of the course---a woman who came from a wealthy family---that we were going by train, she became alarmed, "Oh no, the train is dirty you must go by taxi, or fly."

"But we're going first class on the train," I countered.

"That just means the cockroaches are twice as big as the ones in second class", she responded.

We did in fact go by train and had a splendid view of the jungle and of rubber, banana, and palm oil plantations.

The menus were a little fly-specked but we didn't see any cockroaches.

000

Our host gave us  a very pleasant tour of beautiful Penang. We could see why Kipling, Maugham and other writers had raved about this 'Jewel of the Orient'. As the tour ended the host asked if we would like to see 'a nutmeg factory'.

Ever ready for an adventure we agreed, and he drove us up into hills outside Georgetown, the main city in Penang, to a farm that had a number of open-air buildings in which the fleshy nutmeg fruit were being processed.

Our host gave us a short lecture on the nutmeg. At the centre of the fruit is the nutmeg seed pod that is covered with a coating that is removed and ground into the spice, mace. The 'nut' that is left becomes the nutmeg that we all have on our spice shelves.

Meanwhile, the fleshy outer part of the fruit is cooked, aged in sugar syrup, and dried in the sun. There is a Malaysian name for it but we just called it crystallized nutmeg. 

We fell in love with it!

It has a rich, strong nutmeg flavour and is sweet but not too sweet. We bought many packages to carry back to Canada.

We ate it right from the package as a kind of candy but I understand that some people use it in cooking, especially in desserts.

There was a Chinese store on Somerset Street in Ottawa that used to stock it but the store changed hands and the new owner, who was probably from Hong Kong (where crystallized nutmeg seems to be unknown) rather than Malaysia or Singapore, stopped carrying it.

Friends brought us a few packages from a trip to Singapore some years ago but since then we have been without the flavourful treat.

I have searched for it in the Asian stores that have been springing up around Toronto but without success.

My plan now is to write to the President's Choice people and tell them that if they want a culinary scoop they should send a buyer to Penang and feature crystallized nutmeg in one of their upcoming PC Reports.

As an indication of my commitment to the suggestion, I will even volunteer to  go along  (no finder's fee, just expenses) to make sure the buyer finds the right nutmeg factory!

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

See you on March 27th for Posting #108 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.