Forgotten Malaysian recipes you should know about

Joan Zarsadias is a chirpy little woman, with a broad, bright smile and the good manners of a quintessential hostess. Even as she juggles the demands of looking after her young grandchildren, an intrinsic need to entertain prevails.

“Can I get you a drink or something to eat?” she asks, as her granddaughter wraps her tiny arms around her grandma’s leg and peers shyly at me.

As she goes into the kitchen, I watch her in action from a discreet corner. Zarsadias moves deftly and quickly, her hands reaching for things without even needing to look up, using intuition and instinct rather than calculated precision. This is someone who very clearly knows her way around her kitchen.

What’s ironic is that even though the Portuguese-Eurasian is a good cook now, she didn’t learn how to cook anything until she was 24 and newly married. What’s even more ironic is that her parents ran a catering business, serving traditional Portuguese-Eurasian dishes!

Aside from whipping up Eurasian dishes for her family, Zarsadias also has a small home catering business called Mama J’s Home Cooked Food.

“It was my mother’s fault lah – she never taught us! When I was growing up, I was very pampered and we were never allowed into the kitchen,” she says.

Once she got married, her husband Philip Zarsadias taught her how to cook from scratch. Soon, she developed an interest in cooking and began exploring recipes on her own.

Today, this interest has blossomed into a full-blown passion for Eurasian food. Zarsadias now actively tries to cook dishes that she says many older Portuguese-Eurasians are aware of, but that the younger generation do not seem to have picked up.

She has taught her daughter Odelia how to cook them in the hope that these recipes will continue to play starring roles in the next generation.

“I’d like to bring back all these recipes, so I’ve taught them to my daughter. But what’s sad is that most younger people aren’t bothered to learn how to cook and would rather eat out,” she says.

Zarsadias says while dishes like debal curry (pronounced debil, according to her) and curry kapitan have become extremely popular, others like trufa (a beef and sauce dish), mulur (homemade fish balls in curry) and potugal (a steamed tapioca-­banana-coconut dish) are unlikely to appear in a Eurasian cookbook, much less a Eurasian restaurant.

“Curry kapitan and debal curry – those are commercialised. If a Eurasian lady opened a restaurant, she would probably cook all these things. You won’t really find trufa and other rarer dishes. People just don’t seem to cook it nowadays. And if they do, they cook it for Christmas and special occasions whereas last time, I think they cooked it all the time,” she says.

Zarsadias gets a lot of these forgotten recipes from her octogenarian sister-in-law, and is trying to quickly catalogue the recipes while her sister-in-law still remembers how to make them.

“My sister-in-law has promised to give me the recipes for things that no one even knows anymore, like traditional cakes such as putu mandri (rice that is cooked, dried and mixed with coconut) and abu-abu sago (fried sago),” she says.

The ever-active Zarsadias runs a small home catering business. Mama J’s Home Cooked Food (http://ift.tt/2bWKAHI) serves up traditional Eurasian dishes for small events and parties. “All these Eurasian dishes are unique and easy to do, yet not many people are doing it, so I want to keep doing it for as long as I can,” she says.

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FISH VINEGAR

Serves 4

oil for deep frying
2 cencaru (hardtail mackerel) fish
1 big onion, sliced into rings
2 red chillies, sliced
1½ cups water
3 to 4 tbsp vinegar
salt to taste
1 tsp sugar

To cook

In a frying pan, heat up enough oil to deep-fry fish. Fry the fish until it is crispy, then set aside. In the same frying pan, retain a little bit of the oil and fry the sliced onions and red chillies. Add water, vinegar, salt and sugar and bring to a boil. When boiled, remove the mixture from the pan and pour over the fried fish. Serve immediately.

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TRUFA

Serves 4

500g beef tenderloin
8 shallots, blended
1 tbsp black pepper
2 tbsp thick soy sauce
1 tbsp vinegar
salt to taste
5cm (2”) piece of ginger, sliced into two
3 potatoes, cubed
2 carrots, sliced

To cook

Marinate beef for one hour with blended shallots, black pepper, thick soy sauce, vinegar and salt. After one hour, put the ingredients in a pot and cook on low heat with ginger until meat is 3/4 cooked, about 1 hour. Add in vegetables at this point and cook until vegetables are cooked through and meat is tender. Serve hot.

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MULUR

Serves 4

For the fish balls

1 small tenggiri fish, cooked
salt and pepper to taste

For the curry

4 small brinjals, cut into half lengthwise
pepper to taste
oil for frying
2 onions, blended
3 tbsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp fennel powder
1 tsp cumin powder
coconut milk from one coconut
salt to taste
2 tbsp vinegar
a handful of grated coconut

To make the fish balls

Scrape out the flesh of the fish and put in a bowl. Add salt and pepper to taste and mould the mixture into small balls. Set aside.

To cook the curry

Marinate brinjal with pepper. In a frying pan, heat up some oil and fry brinjals until 3/4 cooked and set aside. In a pot, heat up some oil and fry the onion paste and the coriander, turmeric, fennel and cumin powders until they are absorbed. Then add in coconut milk, fish balls, and fried brinjals. Cook for a few minutes, then add in salt and vinegar to taste. Finally, add in the grated coconut, stirring to coat in the sauce. Remove from heat and serve hot.

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POTUGAL

Serves 4

1.5kg tapioca
8-9 pisang awak (bananas), sliced into discs
grated coconut from half a coconut
4 to 5 tsp sugar
1½ tsp salt

To prepare and cook

Peel tapioca and cut into small pieces and process in a blender. Then, squeeze tapioca water out. Once all the moisture has been removed, flatten tapioca and put on a plate. Layer sliced bananas on top of tapioca and steam for about 20 minutes till cooked. Once cooked, let it cool down. Mix the grated coconut with sugar and salt. Cut the cooled-down tapioca-banana cake into small pieces and roll in coconut mixture, until the coconut evenly coats the tapioca pieces.

Source : Star2.com