Taste of Place

Episode 10

A Pepper Party

[00:00:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout the series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The week before the premier of this podcast, I decided to hold a type of Gawai to bless and celebrate the journey we were about to embark on to thank the gods for this opportunity. Gawai comes from the word “gawa”, which means to be busy and to work, and is in reference to ritual and ceremony. Gawai refers to a more complex and prestigious set of rituals,

[00:00:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: of which the main Gawai is in June. Gawais are also about bringing [00:01:00] people, our community together. I decided to host a Gawai batu, a Whetstone blessing. My late father wrote that social and environmental changes caused the disappearance of many Iban rituals and ceremonies, and also they were the very factors that generated new.

[00:01:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Tradition is always evolving. As diaspora, we are often finding ways to recreate rituals from small to complex in new spaces and often without all the ingredients from home. Make sure it's going. You have a chicken, I don't have a chicken, and I don't have a feather. Welcome to Gawai batu, which is Gawai Whetstone.

[00:01:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: So just before you start planting, you've got to clear the jungle, the area inaugurating the clearing of a swidden space. The Whetstone is a really sacred object and looked after with utmost care. We built a mirring, the offering for the gods, and my sibling Emma suggested that we take it to the [00:02:00] four corners of the garden, something they had seen the aunties do at home.

[00:02:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We decided that this was a very majau ceremony, meaning a very typical approach to the festivities by Iban from majau, our heritage. I take this as adapting, being practical and embracing the spirit of the but keeping fun also at the center. We drank tuak. We ate food, a selection of dishes and drinks that everyone had, had a hand in bringing.

[00:02:26] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And I realized that this was going to be the first of many Gawai batus, I will hold re-imagining this forgotten ritual. The Whetstone in this ceremony being of course the Whetstone Radio Collective Podcast about to launch. Before we sow seed, we clear the space for the seed to grow. We take time to value our instruments and tools that let us do this work.

[00:02:49] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There was no better way for me to honor the process and journey that was about to happen. This series is about planting seeds so that we can all grow in many ways. It [00:03:00] is metaphorically growing a little pepper farm, developing our own swidden cultures, building our own farming communities. On this episode, we celebrate all that we've learned.

[00:03:11] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Therefore, for this last moment with Pepper, I wanted to have a party. I wanted to gather dear friends, those who had made this podcast so interesting and family in my chosen home of London. Welcome to the final episode of this season, A Pepper party. It is a Monday evening in the middle of summer when we're recording our final episode, and it is in a heat wave in the UK and I believe this is one of the hottest days ever recorded.

[00:03:43] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was predicted to go up to 40 degrees, but I don't think we've quite got that far. 40 degrees is I think 104 in fahrenheit. We're very lucky to be in Naif's Restaurant in Peckham, south London with a group of my friends and colleagues, as well as people who's featured within [00:04:00] the series. The heat of that evening was intense, but we were lucky to be in Naif's restaurant run by Tomas Heale, who featured in our third episode.

[00:04:11] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There was a slight airflow through the restaurant from the open doors, and we were quenched with cold drinks; a homemade mountain tea, lemon verbena and grapefruit and white wine. It was a potluck dinner where I had asked everyone to bring a dish that had pepper and nostalgia in it. It seemed appropriate to be focusing on pepper and the heat.

[00:04:31] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Easier to think about where the spice is from as the world heats up around us. And it seemed to speak to the very idea of this show, connecting the past with the present so that we could think of the future we wanted to have. My guests included, Vittles, founder and editor, Jonathan Nunn, chef and writer, Chloe Rose-Crabtree, previous guests, Jenny Lau and chefs Pam Brunton and Tomas Heale, novelist, Emma Hughes and special guest, my mom, [00:05:00] Fiona Mowlem.

[00:05:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: First off, let's hear about all the dishes everyone had brought starting with Jonathan. 

[00:05:07] Jonathan Nunn: My name is Jonathan Nun. I'm a food and city writer, and I edit Vittles, a food newsletter. So I brought Xacuti, which is a Goan dish and it fulfills two functions from nostalgia for me. So one is that when I was growing up, we mainly ate Goan dishes actually outside of the home and they would be celebratory dishes.

[00:05:29] Jonathan Nunn: And the main dish would always either be sorpatel, which is a very complicated dish of pork and pork offal, or Xacuti, which is a bit simpler to do, and it would either normally be chicken or lamb, sometimes pork, but mainly chicken or lamb. And I always had a preference for sorpatel when I was younger it was like very, very intense, very vinegary.

[00:05:53] Jonathan Nunn: But then as I've got older, I think I've started to appreciate Xacuti a bit more. The base is basically roasted coconut, [00:06:00] and that's what gives it its flavors, it's much milder. And the second thing is that my mother, when she found out that I was gonna make Xacuti, said that she kept a bag of spices in a jar, and it's actually spices ground by my grandmother to make Xacuti specifically.

[00:06:21] Jonathan Nunn: Now, my grandmother died over 30 years ago, so this bag has been hanging around in a cupboard for quite a long time. I think it's like indicative of two things. One is that my mom is actually unable to throw stuff away and will keep things way beyond the point they should be. But then the other thing is that like ground spices and things which can be preserved, can be a way of communing with people who have been lost.

[00:06:45] Jonathan Nunn: I could have procured all the spices and the pepper to make this myself, but I thought it would be nicer to use my grandmother's mix, even though it was ground so long ago to make the Xacuti. So that's why I brought it. It may just be that there's no [00:07:00] flavor left in them, but I mean, she's kept them very well.

[00:07:02] Jonathan Nunn: It's been kept in an airtight bottle and I've used a mix actually, so it's not entirely hers. I'm quite nervous about it cause it's actually the first time I've cooked it and I want it to be good at least. Yeah, if you put your grandmother's name on something, it has to kind of be a base level of good.

[00:07:23] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: I am Chloe Rose-Crabtree. I am a chef. I'm also Anna's business partner for Sourced. She asked me here today to bring some sweets. I brought a pepper version of my creme brulee cookie that I make at Bake Straight in London. Instead of putting vanilla into the cookie, I put in black pepper and cardamom. The creme brulee cookie was something that kind of took off more than I thought it would.

[00:07:48] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: Now we have people coming to the cafe and getting very upset that we have a two per cookie limit, but they take a really, really long time to make. They're really a labor of love. And so it's really nice to bring [00:08:00] them here today to share with a bunch of people with a variation on the flavor that people know and love.

[00:08:03] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: But I think it's fun to play around with the form of not just creme brulee by putting it in a cookie, but also like changing us away from having just vanilla flavors. I wanna do more infused custards. And actually my boss, his mom, mentioned that I should put cardamom in them. So when you asked just to come and bring something with pepper in it, I thought black pepper and cardamom go quite well together and it'd be a really nice flavor pairing.

[00:08:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I ask Chloe about what pepper means to her. 

[00:08:27] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: I mean, apart from putting it in everything, I don't necessarily have any nostalgic feelings about it, but there is something really nice about the crack of a pepper grinder. When I got my first one, I felt like I was a real adult. 

[00:08:41] Jenny Lau: My name's Jenny. I'm the founder of Celestial Peach, a platform that champions the stories of Chinese food and the people and culture behind it.

[00:08:50] Jenny Lau: I'm very excited to have been featured on episode six of this podcast. Today I have made a vegan version of [00:09:00] Cantonese black pepper beef. Black Pepper is such an essential element of this dish. The dish itself has a wonderful kind of Western Cantonese fusion origin story. It would've originated probably in the Chan Tang, which is a Hong Kong cafe, and it takes a giant steak and sort of smothers it in black pepper sauce.

[00:09:23] Jenny Lau: Eventually, it probably would've evolved into a kind of stir fry dish where the beef would've been chopped up into smaller pieces and served in local Cantonese restaurants. I put two twists in this dish. Firstly, I used Sarawak Pepper to make the sauce from scratch. It calls for a lot of black pepper, so it gives it this really spicy kick.

[00:09:43] Jenny Lau: And it also uses fermented black beans, which gives it a lot of umami and pungency. And I've also added in an extra element, which is fresh black peppercorns that my friend gave me. So I wanted it to reflect actually three elements of my story. One, which [00:10:00] is the Cantonese side. My dad was Hong Kong Chinese. 

[00:10:02] Jenny Lau: Sarawak pepper represents my mother. And the black pepper corns were given to me by a friend called Awan Golding. She brought it or, her mother brought it all the way from her back garden in Assam, which is in Northeast India. It's in that amazing cross border region called Nagaland. She gave me her black peppercorns, which I've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to use. And I think that represents the kind of community I've built here in London and the friends that I choose to be my chosen family.

[00:10:38] Emma Hughes: My name is Emma Hughes. I am a journalist who writes quite a lot about food, and I also write novels. So I bought a dessert today of strawberries with black pepper, basil, and balsamic vinegar. And I bought this because I have a very clear memory of my [00:11:00] Scottish grandmother saying that this was the best way and kind of the most Scottish way to eat strawberries with a bit of black pepper.

[00:11:07] Emma Hughes: But I've sort of asked around friends and family and nobody has any memory of this or any concept of this as a particularly scottish thing. So I thought home was bringing a, you know, a traditional family recipe, but perhaps this is something I've kind of created in my own mind, and I haven't eaten it for a few years.

[00:11:27] Emma Hughes: It was something I used to eat quite regularly, but I just got out the habit. Every time I've made it, there's always a point when I'm adding the pepper and I think, mm, this is a good idea. But then you taste it and it's just like this incredible alchemy. It brings out the sweetness of the strawberries, but also the warmth from the pepper and the whole flavor profile of everything changes through this addition.

[00:11:49] Emma Hughes: And yeah, I just think it's fantastic. It's strawberries sliced fairly robustly then the pepper. Leave it for a minute or so. [00:12:00] Again, I dunno if that's a crucial stage or something I've just, uh, invented. Then the balsamic and then finally some quite softly cut basil, cause you don't want to bruise it and then just stir it together and leave it to create its own syrup.

[00:12:18] Tomas Heale: Hi there. My name's Tom. I'm the chef and owner of Naif's Restaurant and I'm in episode three. So this evening we find ourselves in our restaurant and we're having a very nice wrap party on the whole season. We're enjoying each other's company and talking about pepper a lot. This evening I've brought in a very summery salads, which uses mostly like the star of the salads is Urbinati melon, which is from Lombardi, so a very beautiful type of honeymoon melon.

[00:12:42] Tomas Heale: And then that's with a really nice tomato dressing, tomatoes and cucumbers. I didn't wanna eat anything warm this evening. So basically I thought this would be a really nice canvas for the pepper, for Sarawak pepper. And it's got a really nice synergy with the tomatoes and black pepper, especially one that has a lot of sweet and kind [00:13:00] of herbal notes.

[00:13:01] Tomas Heale: I think that works really well with the tomatoes and the basis of this is melon and tomato, so I think that works really well. The melon works really well with the pepper notes as well, so it's just like big cracks of toasted pepper on the whole thing and it can kind of really take a lot of that kind of heat. 

[00:13:18] Fiona Mowlem: Hi, my name is Fiona and I'm from New Zealand.

[00:13:21] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And you are my mum.

[00:13:22] Fiona Mowlem: Yeah, that's right. I brought a salad, which is a salad that we always had in summer on holiday, and it's just very, very simple. It's onion and tomato with a dressing over it Sort of vinegar.

[00:13:36] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Salads and light dishes were a popular choice at our party, and the dressing of the salad mum brought was chocked full of pepper.

[00:13:44] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I asked her about her experience living in Sarawak and growing pepper. 

[00:13:48] Fiona Mowlem: I remember numerous times we would harvest the pepper and it was all on the stalk, and that was my interaction with Pepper at that time. It was quite an interesting time actually, [00:14:00] because Pepper Vines were actually grown on billion, which is very, very hard wood, and the government would actually provide the billion posts because they can last for years and years.

[00:14:13] Fiona Mowlem: And there was a bit of a to and fro about it because the farmers said that, well, they're just dropping it off at the riverside, and then they had to cart it to their farm and actually take it. And it's very, very hard, heavy wood. And so I remember there was a bit of a political thing going on about the pepper.

[00:14:29] Fiona Mowlem: Then at that time, and I'm talking about 1979. 

[00:14:33] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: My mother is a great storyteller and this time in her life was an interesting period for my parents as well as for Sarawak. It was still difficult to access this area of Sarawak, which is fairly close to the border with a Kalimantan, but a lot of change was happening.

[00:14:48] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Sarawak was only granted south governance independence from the British just under two decades ago. My mother married my dad at 21 and promptly moved to Sarawak and to the [00:15:00] interior, deep in the jungle onto the family farm of Nga Majau as my father was doing his PhD fieldwork. They tapped rubber, farmed and traveled the countryside as my dad interviewed people and translated epic Iban poetry.

[00:15:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Most of my mother's stories from that time involve food, and they paint a great landscape to understand how life was back then, as well as Iban culture, all of which is so relevant to the world that Pepper is grown in. 

[00:15:27] Fiona Mowlem: Do you want me to tell you a funny story? So, grandma of dads, we had a little hut over this river, and we used to go and do some farming and everything.

[00:15:36] Fiona Mowlem: And at night we'd go out, dad would have a machete, and we'd go up in this really, really shallow stream, quite wide, and it was just rippling, rippling, rippling. And then he could see it. I couldn't really see it, but he would have his machete and he'd just, He'd actually knock out a frog. And so then, you know, I was collecting the frogs into a basket and he'd catch another one, and then he'd get, and we'd go back [00:16:00] with a score of frogs.

[00:16:01] Fiona Mowlem: And grandma, she would cook it, but I remember she had a little can that you'd put over the fire and she'd gutted the frogs. And then there was one poor frog with his leg hanging outside the pot. I'll never forget it. It was dark and the fire was going, and here's this poor leg hanging out the pot. It's just an image that stayed in my mind.

[00:16:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: When we all sat down to dinner on a long table, angled perfectly to get any breeze that decided to waft through the door, I welcomed everyone and told them about the research we had done so far for the podcast. As everyone had described their dishes, I also explained what I brought. I brought two dishes, the Sarawak white chicken dish from Mandy Yin’s Sambal Shiok book, which is inspired by an Iban dish called manok pansoh.

[00:16:49] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Mandy had tried this in Sarawak when we went together and it uses white Sarawak pepper. I also cooked a dish which has become a very new but firm favorite, which [00:17:00] I have adapted to my taste, which is with a lot of black pepper. This dish is roasted pumpkin curry from the cookbook Rambutan by Cynthia Shanmuglingam. Mandy's recipe was my childhood world in nostalgia, and Cynthia's was building new routines and dishes of comfort with flavors of home.

[00:17:19] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I explained how this work, all this talk and research of PEPPER has made my memories of pepper dissipate. I can't think what my first memories of pepper are. I have listened and heard so many wonderful pepper stories that I'm unsure where mine begin and others start. I know the memory of the vines in my childhood and I've re-seen the white pepper shakers in the Kapit cafe.

[00:17:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: That has not changed in the last 40 years. But what is memory and what is imagined? Just as we're about to eat though, Pam Brunton, the chef from Inver in Loch Fyne, called because of the ongoing heat wave. Getting to London from Scotland had been an epic journey, especially with the train [00:18:00] lines not coping.

[00:18:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: She was in London and she was trying to get her way to us. We organized a cab to pick her up from the location of Nando's near the station she was at. Nando's. Okay, stay there. I'll get you a cab. Nandos is a global restaurant chain that is particularly well known in the uk, founded in South Africa and fame for its peri-peri style chicken.

[00:18:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Peri-peri is a chili cultivated by Portuguese colonists in Southern Africa. The restaurant's not hot flavoring is lemon pepper sauce. It all seemed a fitting spot for Pam to be standing. As we waited for Pam to arrive, I kicked off our discussion with the question you've heard throughout the series;

[00:18:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: when did you find out how PEPPER was grown and where it's actually from? The answers I received were varied and fascinating. Chloe went first. 

[00:18:51] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: In California, every student has to do a report on a mission and you like build the mission. And it's quite a bit history class when you're like 10 years old. And the mission that I [00:19:00] chose, but I do remember it had a massive pepper tree and that was one of the remarkable things about it.

[00:19:04] Chloe Rose-Crabtree: So I had to make this pepper tree out of clay to put on my diorama and explain about the pepper tree, and it was like a big part of the mission. So that was like my first idea that like, oh, actually pepper isn't something that just comes into a pepper shaker. But yeah, that was the first time I realized it was a plant.

[00:19:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Then Jonathan shared his thoughts. 

[00:19:23] Jonathan Nunn: I think this probably when I went to India on a tea trip. So I was visiting farmers in Kerala. And although I was visiting them for tea, the cooperative was actually a tea and spice cooperative and it turned out that tea generally fluctuate quite a lot like the price and is therefore not necessarily always like a stable product.

[00:19:47] Jonathan Nunn: And pretty much every farmer when given the choice would also grow spices in their gardens and they would get a much more stable price for spices. And predominantly it was pepper. Because a huge amount of pepper comes [00:20:00] from Kerala. Yeah, I think it was honestly then actually seeing it in person was like the first time I really thought about where pepper comes from.

[00:20:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In Sarawak and I think a lot of other places Pepper gets grown with other plants as well as a balancing thing. Cause it's not a stable crop either. Emma. 

[00:20:16] Emma Hughes: I was just thinking that embarrassingly, I think I was sort of quite a way into childhood before I realized that pepper came in peppercorns, that it was a plant because my experience of it had just been ground pepper.

[00:20:29] Emma Hughes: So I think I was probably a teenager before I actually put that together. 

[00:20:36] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Mum, do you remember when you thought pepper was a plant?

[00:20:39] Fiona Mowlem: It was as a powder when we were kids, in a box, cardboard box that was, that pepper was. So it wasn't until in my early twenties, 21 when I saw that pepper was grown and they were corns.

[00:20:52] Fiona Mowlem: And by that time, I guess by a teenager, we had pepper mills. So I realized that as a teenager [00:21:00] and then saw the real thing in life. 

[00:21:02] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: For me, pepper is a really strong scent and therefore can bring a lot of memory. And do people have any particular nostalgic memories around pepper? Are there moments that you remember or when you smell pepper, does it remind you of anything in particular or places?

[00:21:19] Jonathan Nunn: White pepper always makes me think of a caf and being in cafs when I was younger. Oh, because we didn't go to restaurants that much when we were eating out. 

[00:21:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Side note, there are a lot of ways to describe a caf and they mean different things to different people, but I would say that a caf is a British cafe that serves cheap fried breakfast.

[00:21:40] Jonathan Nunn: My first experiences eating out would've probably been in English cafs and just always having white pepper on the table, and I was addicted to egg and bacon toasted sandwiches when I think from the age of like five until 16, and to the point where. Pretty much when I had like the [00:22:00] choice of actually choosing what I wanted to eat outside and had a bit of money, I would just mainline them every single day.

[00:22:07] Jonathan Nunn: Um, and I, I think I've put on a huge amount of weight at secondary cause of this, but I would always make sure to put white pepper on. 

[00:22:15] Jonathan Nunn: Was that something you learned or you just, it was there on the table and you tried? 

[00:22:20] Jonathan Nunn: It was there on the table and I really liked it. There is like spiciness to it as well and it kind of enlivens what is generally quite a bland sandwich.

[00:22:30] Jonathan Nunn: Generally, caf bacon isn't that flavorful. It's like many textural. So yeah, the predominant flavor would be the pepper and then whatever sauce you put on. 

[00:22:40] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: So white pepper is a stronger link for you in terms of kind of Britishness, huh? That's interesting. I don't think I knew about white pepper until quite late.

[00:22:49] Jenny Lau: I think of white pepper in terms of Cantonese cooking, and it's very invisible. You'll either add it as a marinade, actually, so often when you're preparing meats, you'll [00:23:00] marinate it, sort of velvet it. That's called in a bit of salt, white pepper, Shaoxing wine, bit of oil, soy sauce, and then leave that for a few hours.

[00:23:09] Jenny Lau: And then when you're stir frying, you'll add a bit white pepper as well, so you won't tend to put it at the end. 

[00:23:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Chefing in different kitchens, Tom, what was more prevalent? White or black pepper. 

[00:23:20] Tomas Heale: I would say generally black pepper. Like in French, traditional cooking and in brigade systems, there's really weird rules about where you put black and white pepper, which can seem kind of arbitrary sometimes.

[00:23:31] Tomas Heale: I'd be really interested to know why the greasy spoon cafe connection is to white pepper. I presume it's something to do with potatoes or some kind of like,

[00:23:38] Jonathan Nunn: I'm actually not sure, but I think there's this weird link between British institutions and like condiments and like Cantonese cuisine because you get in like a pie mash shop.

[00:23:49] Jonathan Nunn: The condiments on the table would be white pepper, and then chili vinegar. You couldn't get like more pantones. It would be a bland pie mash. Pie mash generally doesn't have that much flavor and you just [00:24:00] spray as much chili vinegar as you can and then put white pepper on the mash. 

[00:24:04] Tomas Heale: Desperately trying to impart some flavor.

[00:24:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: For those who don't know, mash is mash potato pie. 

[00:24:10] Jonathan Nunn: Mash was an Italian institution actually, initially, so it was Italian immigrants. But no, I think it's just one of those weird coincidences that happened. Convergent Eva. Yeah. It also like goes against the very cliched idea of English food always being bland.

[00:24:26] Jonathan Nunn: The food is often bland, but there is this love of condiments and often there is this divide between the food which has grown here, and then the condiments, which have flavor, which has always grown somewhere else. Mm-hmm. . So whether that's pepper, whether. It's mustard. So yeah, I think Pepper is in that kind of second category.

[00:24:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Emma, you obviously born and bred in the UK do you have strong, nostalgic other than the dish you brought, was there anything else that kind of comes to mind that feels very British but is Pepper? 

[00:24:58] Emma Hughes: I've got two that have come up while we've [00:25:00] been talking. The first one is what you were saying about the rules about where white pepper and black pepper can go.

[00:25:05] Emma Hughes: I went to Leed's Culinary School for a little bit, and that was absolutely my experience, that it was like white pepper goes in certain dishes. It felt like it was more driven by an idea of an aesthetics and kind of invisibility rather than flavor. Anything that's white. Yeah, you weren't meant to put black pepper in, and I do remember that.

[00:25:23] Emma Hughes: I think my other, I mean, it isn't my memory, but in the story of how my parents met. My grandma was a cook and she ran a hotel and my dad used to work in the kitchen and on one of his very early dates with my mom, he decided to really push the boat out and cook her dinner. And he said he was gonna do a pepper and crusted steak, which was, you know, at the time was very fancy.

[00:25:42] Emma Hughes: But he encrusted a steak in black, very hot black peppercorns. And I think in my head it was always, Pepper was a kind of sophisticated, peppercorns especially were sophisticated.

[00:25:53] Tomas Heale: In the British psyche, a peppercorn is something which is elevated and verified, whereas pre-ground [00:26:00] pepper is salt of the earth in a greasy spoon caf that seems arbitrary.

[00:26:04] Jonathan Nunn: And then ground pepper to order is like being in a restaurant and being in an Italian restaurant specifically. It's a special occasion kind of stuff to have your pepper ground in front of you. Yeah, the performance. 

[00:26:15] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Emma is speaking about a French tradition of cooking where sources and broths are light, white and clear.

[00:26:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The clarification of a consummate would be ruined if a speck of black peppers fountain it. But it is fascinating how when peppercorns get used and when they're visible, or invisible. For instance, to entrust a steak with peppercorn is something of a symbol of the height of sophistication. Emma explained later that she thinks her dad was supposed to use green peppercorns instead of the enormous amount of very hot black peppercorn.

[00:26:46] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This ties into what Tom says about the aesthetics of pepper. A peppercorn, it feels fancy. Peppercorns get to be part of the performance of a special dinner, especially in a restaurant when they're ground in front of you and you have to be in [00:27:00] the know and understand exactly how much you should have on your dish.

[00:27:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And this relates to the idea of non British condiments, such as in the caf as Tom and Jonathan discussed being utilized to impart new flavors onto a favorite comfort dish. Then Pam arrived and slipped into dinner. Tom poured her a glass of wine and filled her plate, and we started talking about heritage and food and learning to cook.

[00:27:26] Jenny Lau: It was like Taiwanese and Cantonese population where I lived in the States. So we had a lot of really good restaurants we would eat out at. And my family was always like, this is the food of our people, , but we don't cook it at home. Cause no one learned how. And so then when I started cooking it at home, it was kind of like, yeah, you have this taste memory of what it should be, but then it's really hard to figure it out if you don't have someone actually teaching you how to do it.

[00:27:46] Jenny Lau: I mean, you have like the spices as well that you can work with too. 

[00:27:50] Jonathan Nunn: That gives it more of a connection, almost more than the recipe does. Yeah. The recipe is my mother observing my grandmother, so there's still a mediator in between me and my [00:28:00] grandmother. But then the spices are like, even if they're faded, they're directly hers.

[00:28:04] Jonathan Nunn: I think because I haven't seen it firsthand, I'm not so confident in the recipes, whereas I'm always like checking other recipes as well. Whereas I think when people normally talk about family recipes, it's like this is the way, like it has to be. Whereas I'm constantly double checking other things, but trying not to make it too much for model of other people's stuff as well.

[00:28:23] Jenny Lau: I guess every generation they change it. 

[00:28:25] Tomas Heale: The nono culture, which is a mix in every diaspora. Yeah. So like that Italian grandmother being the repository of knowledge and that being the way to do something in that family. But it's like also bigger than that where that's the way that it should be done.

[00:28:39] Tomas Heale: Everyone else that does it differently is doing it wrong. Right? Yeah, exactly. But that's a special thing to have, to have that repository in Souths. Yeah. Taste memories. 

[00:28:46] Pam Brunton: And I guess we were speaking from the perspective of a culture where, uh, pepper itself is a desper, spices themselves. Diaspora from other places, and yet we can cook with them with such confidence and use them with such confidence because they've been around for [00:29:00] hundreds of years.

[00:29:00] Pam Brunton: But it raises massive questions about who we are and who we think we are. If so many dishes that we identify so closely with, rely on things from other places. 

[00:29:10] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: With you, Jenny, in terms of just thinking about this like rep or like the ancestral cooking, cuz you've sort of come to cooking, you've found it in your own way, not via learning it from parental.

[00:29:22] Jenny Lau: Yes. And also my relationship to food is, it's actually not. Very emotional. But I came to cooking because exactly that. I grew up in Hong Kong in a very middle class family where it was very common and still is to have a helper who, I mean, they were sort of mass exported from the Philippines and later from Thailand.

[00:29:41] Jenny Lau: So our helper was Thai, but so often they would do the bulk of cooking and very much frowned upon to kind of be in the kitchen because why would a young girl want to be in the kitchen? She should be studying and you know, so I've come to it later in life, especially the Chinese cooking. I felt it was a really just healing way to get back in touch with my [00:30:00] roots, and I wanted to eat the stuff that I grew up eating until the age of 11 when I moved to London, and I would say completely self-taught.

[00:30:08] Jenny Lau: I can't say that my mother's a great cook. She also left Sarawak walk at the age of 18 and she'd spent a great amount of time here and then a big amount of time in Hong Kong. So she's sort of been on the move and she's also of no fixed identity or abode. So we're like finding my own taste of home, I guess.

[00:30:26] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Yeah. How did you learn to cook? Cause you were a very good cook. 

[00:30:29] Fiona Mowlem: My mum died when I was 10 and my eldest sister had gone nursing and my brother and I were used to cook every night. My father would cook on the weekend. My father was a very good cook actually as well, and we were just told it was time to put on the potatoes or whatever.

[00:30:45] Fiona Mowlem: We had a routine, so I was introduced to cooking meals on a regular basis, and then I guess probably I was 17 or 18, somebody gave me a recipe book and then I loved exploring things. And then I met Anna's [00:31:00] dad and we went to live in Malaysia for a year, and then back to Canberra and then back to Kuching.

[00:31:06] Fiona Mowlem: And so I just learned to use different vegetables and different spices. And then I've had friends from all over the world, so people have taught me different things or given me different ideas or, but I do do a lot of stuff just outta my head. 

[00:31:21] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Emma, you are quite good with recipes, I feel. 

[00:31:23] Emma Hughes: That's right. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I was very lucky to grow up in a house where both my parents liked cooking and enjoyed cooking, kind of encouraged me to cook. I used to keep recipe books by my bed. I always got so much pleasure from the act of reading recipes as texts and then actually cooking from them and the act of getting a book down and following it I find enormously comforting and lovely.

[00:31:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There is a lot of cookbooks out at the moment that are really, really good. Pam, as a chef, what's your relationship with cookbooks? 

[00:31:53] Pam Brunton: Probably not that different to other peoples, to be honest. They're used in in much the same way. I think part of it is simple escapism [00:32:00] and fantasy, inspiration, stimulation, and some of it's a practical resource where you're like, I really need a recipe for something.

[00:32:08] Pam Brunton: I'm going to use that one and replace that with that, or whatever it is, or just a staple out of somebody's cookbook. I think it's just kind of the same way as anybody uses them. 

[00:32:18] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What is the dish that you've brought tonight? 

[00:32:20] Pam Brunton: Yeah, so I brought haggis, leaning into the Scottish typicality there. I brought it because I think the Scottish national dish most recognized across the world is haggis, neeps, and tatties.

[00:32:31] Pam Brunton: But I find it a very interesting thing with which to question Scottish food culture and nationality generally because, well, the, the potatoes obviously come from Peru. The turnips come from Sweden and the spicing and the haggis itself is obviously the pepper and the Old spice. These things don't grow in Scotland or Britain or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

[00:32:52] Pam Brunton: They've come as part of trade relationships and colonialism with India, with Asia, with other parts of the world, but there's [00:33:00] very little of that that's actually questioned when people come to celebrate their Burns night or their New Year's Eve or whatever it is with their haggis, neeps, and tatties, or have their rugby lunch or wherever it is.

[00:33:10] Pam Brunton: There's very little questioning about where any of this came from, and the questioning of where that came from is really a question about where we all came from and what nationhood is. And what the stories that we tell ourselves to bind each other and to exclude people. And if you begin to recognize things like that, how you can then use that storytelling as a power for good.

[00:33:28] Jonathan Nunn: I read a very convincing academic piece recently saying that haggis may have been originally English as well. 

[00:33:34] Pam Brunton: I think the whole point is that the charcuterie like that using every part of the animal is, occurs everywhere. It's not unique to Scotland or England. And even having that debate is a debate itself about nationhood.

[00:33:45] Pam Brunton: And how did this all come? That's a very contextual argument. That's the sort of argument that would only ever come up in Britain. 

[00:33:53] Tomas Heale: I think that's often the case as well, where it's like things have kind of completely widespread over the contiguous by UK [00:34:00] or Great Britain at least, and then it's like whoever keeps that and takes that as part of their culture, it had a reason, like a contextual reason to exist.

[00:34:08] Tomas Heale: And that was everywhere and widespread as you're saying. And then it's just like there's one place that's kind of kept it as and woven that into their personality and their culture. And that's probably the story of a lot of national dishes, as you say, cuz nations are relatively young. 

[00:34:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: For our meal, I also brought little pots of black and white Sarawak pepper for everyone, and a type of white pepper called creamy white, which was something that was new to me that I picked up on my last trip home that June. Creamy white pepper is carefully selected

[00:34:38] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: white peppercorns of the highest quality. The corns then are washed delicately to a very consistent white hue. It is considered premium Sarawak pepper. We ended our main course smelling and examining each of the peppers. Jenny said that the creamy whites had more heat than the normal white pepper and were citrusy, and Pam [00:35:00] said it was almost chlorinated like being in a room with a pool.

[00:35:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Jenny further expanded on this idea. It goes to show that centers something everyone interprets differently. The night ended with us moving to another section of the restaurant where we had set. The dessert station. Emma's strawberries with some ice cream and Chloe's creme brulee cookies, and another bottle of wine.

[00:35:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The play on heat from the pepper with the cool desserts was such a lovely sensation as we spoke about in our fourth episode. Heat is a sensation of touch. It is the spice causing pain. So the cool of the ice cream and the indulgent texture of creme brulee were wonderful companions to pepper. Pepper, and sweets needs to be much more popular.

[00:35:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was a perfect way to end a very hot summer's evening.

[00:35:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Throughout the season, we've traversed time from medieval England to contemporary [00:36:00] London and crisscrossed the globe to Southeast Asia and back again. We have spoken with those that are disrupting our understanding of scent and taste and delved into the mechanics of flavor as we untangle our personal relationship with food, nourishment, and home.

[00:36:17] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We have also encountered many walls and found out that inequitable systems of the past are still tangled in our present, and this has all been done, and the pursuit of discovering our relationship with nostalgia. Nostalgia means something different to everyone. It is looked upon with affection and with weariness.

[00:36:39] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Through my conversations on this podcast, I've taken the time to confront my understanding of what I expect from the spaces of my childhood. See labor in the nostalgia, see creativity in the labor, and realize that authenticity of space and place is not handmade spice paste or traveling up [00:37:00] river by boat,

[00:37:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: but people and relationship. The past shifts as does the idea of home. And all I can conclude is that it is complex. As we weave our stories, we find hidden pasts and we reconcile our memories with knowledge we learn. Almost everyone I spoke to hadn't thought about where pepper was from until they got to adulthood and started researching and learning about food or trade or history or indeed going to places of origin.

[00:37:30] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: They had memories of it as a child, mostly an idea of a flavor that was background to their childhood, something ubiquitous, almost invisible. This is why PEPPER has been such a great tool to examine nostalgia. Just discovering a few small facts about Pepper, puts the past in a whole new light. Through delving into Pepper, we can begin to resee history,

[00:37:54] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: even if just our own. Those scrambled eggs at the calf with your dad takes on [00:38:00] a whole new story. By doing this re-seeing, we can then look at the concept of colonial nostalgia. And question, what is nostalgia doing? What are these stories of the past telling us in the present, we need to be accountable for the stories we tell because they have consequences on our future.

[00:38:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And so how do we start telling new stories? How can we strip away the coloniality of food and food pathways? For those in diaspora, we are here because of the past that was written by empires, creators of systems that we were not active participants in. But we not only exist in these new spaces, we thrive, we flourish in multiplicity.

[00:38:43] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We all build homes, layer by layer coating our worlds with flavors we love and have learnt to love. This podcast has been an invitation to join me on the tanju, for all of us to still be in our own long houses, [00:39:00] even a far from where our stories began.

[00:39:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode 10 of Taste of Place, the final episode to this Odyssey of Pepper. Special thanks to our guests, Jonathan Nunn, Chloe Rose-Crabtree, Jenny Lau, Emma Hughes, Pam Brunton, Tomas Heale, and Fiona Musing. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor, Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi.

[00:39:44] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music Director Catherine Yang, managing producer, [00:40:00] Marvin Yueh, associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, production Coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production Assistant, Maha Sanad and publicist, Melissa Haughton.

[00:40:11] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Theme Music created by Catherine Yang and Cover Art created by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio on TikTok, @WhetstoneMedia, and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content.

[00:40:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMedia.com.