I feel as though I have missed out. Born to two food-apathetic Australian parents I’m bereft of a food culture. The food I ate growing up was all about freshness, seasonality and healthfulness, but with no deference to those things that I yearned for: tradition, technique and interest. Maybe this is one reason why I was drawn to Hanoi.
Recently there was some uproar in Australia about our national dish. Admittedly I don’t know the whole story but I do find the whole idea of national dishes slightly silly. Food is either highly important to a nation, or it isn’t. If the latter is true, then why bother summing them up with one dish? If food is the lifeblood of the culture then each region and area in the country has a different speciality, and picking one dish to represent all these disparate meals is terribly constricting and disrespectful to those regions that didn’t make the cut.
Multi-cultural Australia doesn’t have national or regional specialities. Our regions are much smaller than that. We have special representative dishes by the suburb, street, house, apartment or backyard. But this is just the opinion of someone with no representative meal, no cultural food history and no traditions, unless avocado on toast counts.
Maybe this yearning for a food culture is a reason why I’m in Hanoi, but it is definitely why I am fascinated by Italian food safari on SBS. Luckily I was able to see a few episodes and had to stop myself from booking the first flight from Hanoi to Rome. It is the tradition, the focus on ingredients and artisanal products as well as the social nature of eating that draws me in.
In one episode Guy Grossi makes orecchiette, a pasta shaped like a little ear from Puglia in southern Italy. I adore orecchiette, but had only ever eaten the packaged variety, and was interested to see an eggless fresh pasta. So I ignored the lure of fresh coconut cream, rice noodles and limes at the market and bought tomatoes, onions and basil. Later at home I ballsed up the shaping of the dough, but soldiered on and was rewarded with a wonderfully soft yet chewy result. These quasi orecchiette have an altogether different texture and mouth feel to both dried shapes and fresh egg pasta. They are silky with a bite, and take on the flavour of the sauce beautifully: in this case roasted tomato with balsamic and basil.
I do feel left out by being devoid of food traditions and culture, but perhaps really I am the lucky one. By not having any techniques or flavours that are ingrained in me from birth, is it possible that I am more open to new ideas, tastes and methods? I hope so. I may not have grown up surrounded by food, but I am certainly living my life that way now.
