A culinary journey into the Burmese heartland

At roadside joints, fresh and tasty fare

By Jane Perlez

International Herald Tribune

George Orwell, who memorably sketched the stark existence of living on
bread and thin soup in Paris in the 1930s, hardly seems like an obvious
guide to exotic food in the tropics. Yet, in his classic novel "Burmese
Days," Orwell creates a vibrant scene of his hero and heroine wandering
through market stalls filled with ripe pomelos the size of green moons,
red bananas, dried fish, crimson chilies, ducks cured like hams, larvae
of the rhinoceros beetle, heart-shaped betel leaves, and "baskets of
heliotrope-colored prawns the size of lobsters."

The list, in full, is so extravagant and inviting that, for me, it
served as a kind of mental eating map during a recent road trip through
Burma, now called Myanmar by the authoritarian government.

Much has changed in Myanmar since Orwell served there as a policeman in
the 1920s, but because of the government-enforced isolation from the
rest of the world (the country has little processed food and imported
food is rare in the countryside) Burmese still live off the land and its
abundance of vegetables, fruits, fish and spices.

Even before I crossed the border from China into Myanmar, I had a taste
of the delicacies to come. At Ruili, the bustling trading center in
Yunnan Province that serves as the entry point for cheap Chinese goods
into Myanmar, a Burmese trader invited my guide and me to a lunch of
multiple dishes - steamed whole black chicken that fell from the bone,
tiny grilled fish that you eat from head to tail, bean leaves with
garlic, and most unusual, opium poppy seeds with tofu.

Chopped coriander sprinkled on top added a little spunk - and color - to
the mild tasting seeds that had been churned with the tofu into the
consistency of a soupy porridge.

Immigration officials don't allow foreign travelers to dawdle at Mu Se,
the first Burmese town over the border. So we drove down the old Burma
Road - the artery that the Americans used in World War II to hold back
the Japanese - to the village of Kutkai, then to Lashio and on to
Hsipaw, a town with a good market and friendly guesthouse, a favorite
stopping spot for tourists.

Our destination, though, was a sleepy dot off the map, the village of
Ohnoma, about two hours south of Hsipaw. Ohnoma was a major destination
of our 10-day trip. It is the home of a trucker's restaurant known
fondly as the Fatty Lady's Place - the formal name of the five-table
establishment is Napi - which I remembered with great fondness from a
trip several years before. I had eaten lusciously then - the freshly
caught fish, in particular, cooked several different ways, was
memorable. So was the invitation into the kitchen to observe short-order
cooking of the Burmese kind. I remembered, too, the lusty appetites of
the drivers who had parked their huge trailers outside.

I was not disappointed this time, either. Tucked on the ground floor of
a two-story house bearing large advertisements for London brand
cigarettes, Ma Aye Shwe - owner, chief cook and a woman of large
proportions - was still there, whipping up tangy fish, vegetables and
sauces in less than 20 minutes over a wood stove. Burmese cuisine veers
between the influences of India with its tradition of curries and
Thailand and its flavors of basil, lemon grass and coriander with a few
oddities left over from the British. At Fatty Lady's, you get
straightforward Burmese cooking with a slight tilt to the Thai side of
things.

As soon as we arrived, tired and dusty, for a late lunch, Ma Aye Shwe
asked one of her nieces - three of them work as her helpers - to catch a
foot- long catfish from the pond just outside the kitchen window. This
was done rapidly by grabbing one of the fish by hand, giving it a wallop
to kill it and then gutting it and chopping it up into about one-inch
pieces. The niece sprinkled some salt on top of the pieces, some ginger
as well, and threw the pieces into a pan of super hot fat. That was to
be our fried fish.

In a second wok, the chef stir-fried some garlic, ginger and sliced
tomatoes, added some water, added pieces of the fish, a huge bunch of
basil leaves, and then covered it all for some 15 minutes, fanning the
flames with rapid flicks of a reed fan. A second niece prepared a quick
chicken stir fry with bamboo shoots. For a vegetable dish, our hostess
tossed tomatoes and garlic with cauliflower pieces and their leaves (a
leftover from the British days) in a wok for five minutes.

Accompanying everything were side portions of a spicy yellowy sauce: dry
mustard, garlic, ginger, chilies, and onions boiled with the green
stalks of the mustard plant. For the fried catfish, there was a sauce of
tomato, garlic, green chili, vinegar and sugar cane.

The food was served on large white china plates placed in the center of
our round wooden table, along with a large bowl of white rice. I hadn't
expected to find any of the wonders of Orwell's market stalls here. I
got what I came for: an invitation into the small kitchen (two benches,
a couple of chopping boards and sharp cleavers, two small overhead
fluorescent lights) and a mouthwatering straight out of the pan meal -
for about 7 kyat, the equivalent of $1 a person.

During the rest of the trip, we ate at several roadside joints that
offered unfamiliar combinations of tastes. Yellow papaya flowers sautéed
in garlic seemed a variation on the classic papaya salad.

Frogs cooked with an assortment of bitter leaves, and braised cashew
leaves served with raw cucumber slices gave a sense of the pungent
streak in Burmese cooking. I rarely spent more than 10 kyat each for a
meal. Most of the time my guide helped with the ordering, though with
smiles and gestures I could have managed on my own.

At the beachside resort of Ngapali on the west coast, I found my way to
Best Friends, a simple indoor-outdoor restaurant nestled among a row of
small places catering mostly to tourists. I settled into a table on the
deck where a few tables were taken by Germans and French.

I savored the most delicious avocado salad on earth, and asked for the
recipe. It turned out to be basic: chopped avocados, sliced onions and
shallots and tomato cubes, mixed with a little sugar, vinegar, oil and a
dash of fish sauce. Coriander on top. What made the difference was the
lush avocado straight from the farm.

At Ngapali, where the Indian Ocean laps at the shore, I expected to
revel in prawns the size of lobsters, as recalled from the pages of
"Burmese Days."

After all, I had seen pomelos, red bananas, mounds of dried fish, green
coconuts and strange-looking bugs in almost every market. Heart-shaped
glossy betel nut leaves, just as Orwell described them, were abundant at
the ubiquitous stands that serve up the betel leaf and a piece of hard
chewy nut laced with lime.

But the prawns were not to be had in the markets or at Ngapali Beach. I
glimpsed them only briefly - on the steel tables of a fish export
factory - as they were weighed and packed for air freight to Japan.

For better or worse, this was a sign of modernity since the days of
Orwell.