A Burmese Food Education with MiMi Aye

20190920_143905.jpg

Listen to this episode here.

Food and digital culture are so intrinsically linked for me. I can’t really imagine navigating my love for food without being able to look recipes up on the internet, watch videos of people cooking salmon 100 different ways, browsing photos of the menus in restaurants in towns I may never visit, tapping through Jonathan Nunn’s instagram stories trying to work out where he’s eating (rarely with any luck, I might add), butting into conversations between people whose names can be found on my kitchen bookshelves. While this is enthusiastically demonstrated today by instagrammers and the Bon Appetit test kitchen YT channel, I suppose the origins date back to the early days of twitter, and when blogs were actually a really big thing. MiMi Aye was one of those who truly embraced this first giant wave of online food conversation.

“I think I was in the first wave of bloggers!” she laughs, explaining how her online food writing started because her husband got sick of her moaning about Masterchef and asked her to find another outlet for her critique. This coincided with the early days of twitter and soon traditional food media were quaking in their boots; or at least inviting MiMi and her fellow bloggers to a slightly unnerving luxury dinner where they grilled them about their writing and tried to get them to dish the dirt on their online nemesis. “It was a bit like Hansel and Gretel, I didn’t know whether we were going to have a lovely meal or get slaughtered!” She was well aware of the dichotomy between her and what she viewed as ‘proper’ food writers - but didn’t necessarily mind the separation.

One of the many ways in which the internet has in some way democratised food is by giving space for those who felt they weren’t represented to create something of their own. MiMi grew up in Kent with her Burmese parents, and spent her childhood eating her mum’s amazing home-cooked Burmese food. Not only were many of the dishes completely unknown to both her friends and the mainstream food media, but her mum even struggled to get basic ingredients that formed the backbone of staple dishes she’d grown up eating and making in Burma (also known as Myanmar). And that led to a keenly developed ingenuity when it came to putting certain dishes together. Some things were hard to get but not entirely impossible; MiMi has a wonderful story in her latest book about how her parents would travel to Port of Tilbury every few months to go aboard a ship manned by Burmese sailors and buy things from them that were otherwise completely unavailable in the UK.

MiMi’s written two cookbooks, the first one about noodle dishes in general (entitled Noodle) but her second, Mandalay, is specifically about Burmese food.  As well as being a recipe book: in fact, a personal catalogue of recipes significant to her and her family, it’s also almost a memoir, interspersed throughout with personal essays about her family’s food culture. It’s also a deeply educational text - I’ve learnt more about Burmese food and history than I’ve ever known before from reading it. 

20190920_135042.jpg

I found myself in MiMi’s kitchen on an overcast Autumn day, watching as she prepared me a dish from it. She claims one useful side effect of writing the book is that she now has an official record of all the dishes she loves to cook: “It’s for my own ailing mind because I can’t remember how to make my dishes!”

Unlike Kent, Burma’s not a place with much need for dishes that keep you cosy and the dish that MiMi is preparing is about as autumnal as her food gets. It’s Coconut Chicken Noodles (အုန်းနို့ခေါက်ဆွဲ; ohn no khao swè), consisting of wheat noodles and chicken submerged in a rich coconut broth thickened with gram flour and topped with various garnishes, as is custom. The Burmese name translates directly as above; lots of Burmese dish names are very self explanatory: for example the quintessential ရှောက်သီးသုပ် or Shauk Thi Thoke translates simply as ‘lemon salad’ (more on that later) and a raw quince dish translates as ‘offensively sour fruit’. Few Burmese dishes actually use coconut milk; it’s theorised that this dish could be a take on Malaysian laksa.

MiMi begins by slicing the chicken ready to fry: greater surface area is the key here so the edges can crisp up in the frying process. She always uses chicken thigh, never breast. Garlic, ginger and spring onions are blended as a base, onion is added and blitzed then the mixture is fried before the chicken is added. The broth is poured over at the last minute just to infuse the chicken with coconut flavour without stewing the milk.

MiMi finds this dish a real crowd pleaser as many Burmese dishes can be a slight challenge to your average white western palate. The aforementioned Lemon Salad (Citrus and Shallot Salad in Mandalay) can be a hard sell for people despite looking beautiful on the page: the lemon peeled like an orange and sliced thinly so that they resemble Murakami blossoms and combined with slivers of raw onion and shrimp paste. But once people taste it they’re convinced; as MiMi writes in the recipe intro in Mandalay: “It does start with a wallop of sour and spice but then mellows out into savoury goodness and you’ll come back for more.”

Lahpet (လက်ဖက်) is something else that confuses people; it’s pickled tea. Tea leaves are fermented for 6 weeks until they break down into a savoury, salty thing that’s usually eaten as a snack or side dish with different garnishes for texture. It’s a dish that’s woven into the fabric of Burmese history; traditionally consumed to mark the end of wars and cement a truce between kingdoms. It’s now served at the end of a meal in the way that petit fours might be, or instead of tea and biscuits when people come round. It’s also customarily present in Buddhist coming of age ceremonies.

MiMi chops onions for the base. “I don’t have any knife skills, that’s why I’m not willing to call myself a chef!” She describes the initial process of writing Mandalay as making a list of everything she likes to eat and putting together the table of contents involved lots of consulting with her parents about whether dishes they ate together at home were actual Burmese traditions or domestic inventions. I ask MiMi whether she thinks there’s loaded expectations around the notion of ‘authenticity’ for cooks and food writers of Asian heritage; “I don’t like to use the word authentic as it’s used as a stick to beat people over the head with with!” she replies. She prefers to think of recipes and meals in terms of whether they’re ‘traditional’; meaning that a particular dish can generally be found in some form in restaurants and homes across the country.

Part of the problem with authenticity, she says, is availability of ‘correct’ ingredients outside of the country of origin for the cuisine. Particular ingredients such as lahpet aren’t really on sale widely in the UK, which meant that MiMi had develop recipe substitutes for dishes she considered non-negotiable in a Burmese cookbook. A lot of the inspiration for this came from her mum’s cooking; using spaghetti instead of round rice noodles, a combination of green veg and rhubarb to evoke the sourness of roselle leaves (ချဉ်ပေါင်) and suggesting tinned mackerel and sardines instead of river catfish for mohinga (မုန့်ဟင်းခါ). In Mandalay she even suggests artichoke hearts could, in a pinch, substitute for the tea leaves in lahpet, which I find fascinating.

Spring onions, garlic and ginger whirr away in a mini blender before being fried with the chicken. “If I wanted to wear a hair shirt I’d pound this for half an hour in a pestle and mortar!” She adds a gram flour and water paste to the fried base to thicken the resulting broth.

MiMi didn’t learn to cook as a child as her mum is very protective both of her kitchen and of her getting injured, which MiMi can now relate to as a parent. Instead, she would sit on a little stool and watch her intently, occasionally being given small, safe tasks like top and tailing beansprouts. The first place she ever cooked was actually in Burma, on a trip to visit family, and she recalls very clearly being allowed to make an omelette over a small wood burning stove at her aunt’s house: “I was like, yay! Someone’s letting me cook because I’ve always wanted to cook and my mum never lets me cook!” When she went to university she was, as she puts it, ‘let loose’. She credits this as the time when she really started cooking, doing what she could with her limited kitchen facilities and a specifically forbidden rice cooker that had to be heavily concealed during room inspections. She’d managed to learn enough to manage on her own just from closely watching her mum all those years, although she did occasionally make a phone call to confirm a recipe. “I had a much better memory in those days!” she laughs.

The final stage of the dish preparation is the garnishes. MiMi had explained how important these are in Burmese food and I was excited about watching her get everything ready.. She slices shallots as thinly as she possibly can then soaks in water to take away pungency. Explaining this in the book took time to figure out but ended up being the slightly unromantic instruction “slice as thinly as possible, preferably with a mandolin”. She boils eggs, slices lime quarters for us to squeeze at the table, and for a final entertaining flourish deep fries flat rice noodles for an added crunch. The strands instantly puff and curl on contact with the hot oil, almost like prawn crackers. Mimi likes to eat these as a quick snack as well. I’m mesmerised by them, it’s like magic.

The final step is adding coconut milk to the broth to heat through. And then we sit down to eat, adding chilli oil and extra garnishes as desired.

You can find the recipe for Coconut Chicken Noodles here, taken from Mandalay with kind permission from MiMi Aye.

Listen to the full episode here. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you usually listen.

MiMi can be found on her website, on Twitter, and on Instagram.

You can buy a copy of Mandalay from Amazon or from your preferred online or IRL bookseller (I like Hive).


Lucy Dearlove