I'm ill, I have one of those colds I seem to pick up every week or so from all the filthy commuters on the Tube every morning. I'm ill and nobody cares! I still have to go to stupid work because it's really busy at the moment, I can't stay in bed are read comic books, nobody feels sorry for me and brings me cups of tea! It's so unfair!!!!!!!
The conventional way to treat a cold is with lots of rest, warm liquids, vitamin C, etc. Instead I'm going to try a slightly more novel approach and try and sweat it out by eating as much chilli as possible - ah novelty, maybe if I wasn't so easily bored and on the lookout for the next new thing my life would be a lot easier... Or maybe I'd be dead.
Anyway, that was just the fever talking, from the look of the ingredients here one of the options might be to revolt and scare the illness away - this soup contains, besides tapioca, pork mince, crab meat, chicken stock and fish sauce. Eeeeew! We'll see. (Also, pork and crab, this is the most un-kosher thing ever - if only there was some milk in it as well!)
I bought this book when I spent a week in Swanage on the coast this summer. We were staying with my friend's aunt and uncle and I made sure I popped into all of the charity shops in town for, you know, the novelty of out-of-London castoffs. Rosemary Brissenden is an Australian who spent some time researching a thesis in Asia and wrote this book in 1969 after she fell in love with the food. There is a new edition of South East Asian Food out which is supposed to be really good, and which includes Laos,Cambodia and Vietnam in addition to Thailand, Malaysia Indonesia and Singapore (she couldn't go to those places the first time because of the wars). I'm always doubtful as to how authentic early foreign cookbooks could be because of the scarcity of necessary exotic ingredients at the time, but Brissenden is pretty thorough - to the point of calling for things that would be difficult to find in London even today, like jelly mushroom (sounds cute, but is probably gross).
Anyway, here's the loot, (yes, that is Cock brand fish sauce, hahahahahaha, get it out of your system, children)The first step is to put the mince in a sieve over the pot, with half of the boiling stock in it, and to pour the other half of the the stock over it to seal the meat and prevent it from sticking in big lumps. A noble goal, and I thought it was a good idea until I realised that it just makes all the meat stick to the sieve, uff. Anyway, other stuff goes in the pot, blah blah blah, cook cook cook and voila!
Result: The tapioca is like frog spawn, or fish eyes or something, especially the grains that still have a tiny white dot in the middle. The pork seems to have entirely disintegrated and the crab looks pretty uninteresting - like the eggwhites in a chinese soup (or snot). At this point my money was on this soup making me feel worse, a lot worse. But the saving grace might have come in the form of the garnishes Brissenden suggests. Mine are chillies and coriander in white vinegar, carrot chunks in fish sauce, and chopped up peanuts (Brissenden says to fry up some flakes of garlic, but I didn't have the energy) I sprinkled the garnishes over my bowl (lots of chillies!) and dug in.This is the nicest thing I have ever made for myself. As I was stuffing it down I thought about how I would love this isn a restaurant, how easy it was, and how much of a mark up I could expect.
All the different kins of meat flavours don't jarr with eachother, but blend into some kind of generous umami unity. Then you bite into a carrot or chilli and you get sweet, hot, sour, saltiness as well, mmmm.
I'm now wondering if this would work as a breakfast dish. Lunch, definitely. Snack, maybe...
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