From Saveur, September-October 1999

“Noooooo, don’t do it like that!” my 72-year-old Aunt Eadie hisses, yanking my mallet away. “Don’t crush it!” We’re at Bo Brooks, a northeastern Baltimore crab house, and I’m about to bash a fire engine-red, seven-inch jimmy when my aunt springs into action. She reaches over, cradles the crab (underside up), and begins to demonstrate the true-and-only method for consuming it—a set of actions quite possibly as codified, if not as ancient, as those of a Japanese tea ceremony. “Now, first you grab hold of what’s called the apron—start from this pointy little thing here—then you rip back until you’ve got the guts exposed. You see all that golden-yellow gooey stuff? That’s the mustard. It’s the fat, the best part. Eat it or I’ll hit you.”

And then we eat, just eat—rip, dig, crack, puncture, slurp, right to the top of our skulls—succumbing to the near-narcotic rush that comes from devouring vinegar-and-beer-steamed alabaster nuggets of good, pure Chesapeake Bay blue-crab meat, mixed with the pow!-right-in-the-kisser pungency of rock salt and Maryland seafood seasoning. Few words pass our lips. We’re in crab nirvana. “Welcome to Bawlmer, hon,” Aunt Eadie says as she flings me another crab.

It never fails. Regardless of how much time I have spent here, I am an outsider—an alien from out west whose parents broke free from Baltimore after World War II and raised me in California on Bergman movies and avocados and grilled lamb, not Orioles games and sour beef and scrapple. Aunt Eadie is my bridge to sacred back-east traditions long ignored or forgotten by my immediate family—and whenever I visit, I am a foreigner who must be taught how to eat, how to interpret the local dialect (“oil” is url; “pocketbook” becomes pockybook), how to appreciate this city all over again—and appreciation has not come easy.

The summer vacations I spent in Charm City—the name dreamed up by some public-relations whizzes to promote the town in the 1970s—as a kid were wondrous, but disorienting, too: Here was a place that was green all summer long, not brown and brittle like home. Here was a place where important Historical Monuments lurked around every corner (“Fort McHenry is my favorite hysterical place in Baltimore,” Aunt Eadie would tell me, tongue only somewhat in cheek), as did social traditions that were every bit as fixed in the past. The city remained, and remains, unfamiliar to me. Why, then, do I know its savory, sweaty, sour, exaggerated tastes as well as I know the dream I had last night? Why, when I eat spice-encrusted steamed crabs and toothache-sweet, chocolate-frosted Berger’s cookies—the antithesis of the California food I grew up with—do I feel that I am, in some primal way, eating the food I know best?

And so, in search of Baltimore’s gastronomic essence, Aunt Eadie and I set out one morning, with “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” blaring on our car radio. “Look!” says Aunt Eadie, slowing down in front of a tiny sliver of clapboard house. “That’s where we lived when we were so poor, one year all I asked for was a can of asparagus for my birthday.” We’re near our first destination, Hollins Market, in a gradually gentrifying neighborhood of quietly regal, upright row houses that H. L. Mencken once called home. Hollins is a remnant of Baltimore’s city-subsidized market system, established in 1763. Once there were hundreds of such permanent, indoor markets nationwide. Now they only number in the teens, and Baltimore has six—Hollins, Cross Street, Broadway, and Northeast, all still city-sponsored, and the now privately owned Lexington and Avenue markets.

These places echo a time when everyday food-shopping meant bustling stalls and giant piles of staples like cabbages and carrots and potatoes—an experience considerably more engaging than a trip to the supermarket. At Dominic’s Produce in Hollins Market, for instance, crowds of customers positively descend on four-foot-high mounds of assorted loose-leafed greens—collards, curly kale, mustard, turnip, and rough-and-ready clumps of field cress, roots attached—all destined for quick-frying with bacon or for long stewing with salt pork. Nearby, Bernie’s butcher shop sells these and other “seasoning meats”—thick sheets of salt-crusted fatback, knobs of hickory-smoked ham hock from North Carolina, and rose-colored slabs of westphalian ham. I catch Aunt Eadie, trying to conceal a tear, paused at the poignant intersection of food and memory: “It’s just whenever I see ham like that, I think of Mama,” she says. “She used to stew everything with a hunk of that in it.”

Elsewhere in the market, at Chuckie’s Fried Chicken, a queue some twenty people long leads the way to the juiciest, most delectable fried chicken north of Kentucky (its deliciously crackly skin is spiked with a mild seafood seasoning). It’s lunchtime by now, and we happily crunch our way through a few thighs and drumsticks. “Now we need some dessert,” Aunt Eadie announces. She suggests we stop at the bakery inside Eddie’s, a market a short drive away. Here, Aunt Eadie and the counterwoman converse in reverent tones about their favorite Baltimore desserts: fresh peach cake, snickerdoodle cookies, and that queen of local confections, a real ladies’-circle kind of thing called lady baltimore cake—three dreamy layers of white cake with a mixture of chopped pecans, dried fruits, and boiled frosting sandwiched in between. After a slice apiece and some coffee, we’re on our way.

Our next stop is Cross Street Market in Federal Hill, one of Baltimore’s oldest neighborhoods and the recent site of much enthusiastic urban renewal. We pay a visit to Tommy Chagouris, proprietor of Nick’s Inner Harbor Seafood—where, from outward appearances, all of Baltimore must come to slug down National Bohemian beer, tell crass jokes, and eat the best crab cakes in town. Chagouris, a sharp, energetic guy in his early forties, has been working full-time at this wildly successful fish market and raw bar (previously owned by his father) since the moment he finished high school. “The day I graduated,” he recalls with a shudder, “my dad set the alarm for 3:30 the next morning and said, ‘Son, you’re going to work.’” As we walk around his small seafood empire, I pose a question: How does Baltimore’s market culture stay so alive and kicking? “Everyone gets along with everyone,” he says simply, and adds, “There are lots of people in this city who wouldn’t have anything to live for if our markets didn’t exist.”

Aunt Eadie and I can’t resist ordering a few crab cakes before we go. We pull up a stool in front of Nick’s executive chef, Bill Thomas, a 21-year veteran who could make crab cakes with his eyes closed. What’s his secret? Nothing much—literally. Only the faintest trace of binding (eggs, cracker meal, and a dab of mayonnaise) holds Thomas’s cakes together, allowing the spectacular sweetness of his jumbo-lump local crabmeat to take center stage. “Don’t let anyone tell you that crab from Florida or the Gulf is the same as ours—and don’t even talk about crab from South America,” Thomas says, scowling. I bite into a golden-crusted morsel. Oh, yes, there’s a difference, all right—this crab is a pure taste of sea spray that just about plunges me right into the Chesapeake Bay.

If I had the unenviable task of identifying what Charm City, USA, tastes like, what would I say? That it is defined by Maryland seafood seasoning—the spice blend that shows up in (or on) virtually everything but dessert in Baltimore? That it tastes of the impressive harvest of the Chesapeake Bay? That it is all about the sweet-and-sour flavors that the city’s German immigrants tossed into the stew pot to produce dishes like sour beef (Baltimorese for sauerbraten) and sauerkraut? Or that it tastes of the North as well as the South? Baltimore is, after all, equidistant from Virginia and Pennsylvania, and you’ll find fried chicken alongside scrapple on menus all over town—as well as pit beef, a specialty that unites both sides of the Mason-Dixon.

Nancy Longo, chef-owner at Pierpoint Restaurant & Bar in the harborfront neighborhood of Fell’s Point, has been concerned with these kinds of questions about the city’s culinary identity for the better part of her food-obsessed life. This lovably tough Baltimore native (picture Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, all grown up) has fashioned a menu that ranges from Maryland to the Mediterranean to Asia, with fabulous-tasting updates of typical Baltimore dishes—like crab cakes made with unorthodox smoked crabmeat, and sublime crisp-fried oysters stacked atop fried red tomatoes and sprinkled with kernels of grilled Silver Queen corn.

One sunny Sunday, Longo and I sit in her restaurant leafing through vintage Baltimore menus. Looking at those from a trio of the city’s greats, we marvel at how little the food has changed since the 1940s and ‘50s—except, of course, for the prices: There’s Maison Marconi, an elegant 79-year-old Baltimore institution that calls to mind Galatoire’s in New Orleans, where you can still order the chicken à la king, sole florentine, and lobster cardinale (diced lobster in a mushroom-sherry cream sauce, served in the shell) that are listed on the 1947 menu—classy dishes that disclose rich sauces and gentle seasonings and leave you yearning for a manhattan and some sparkling conversation. There’s Haussner’s, maybe the most flamboyantly decorated restaurant in the history of the world. (I’m not joking: More than 500 paintings and dozens of sculptures adorn its interior. It’s an acid-trip version of the Metropolitan Museum.) On its yellowed 1952 menu is the same Smithfield ham and crab “sauté” (actually broiled) that is pleasing diners today. And there’s the Woman’s Industrial Exchange tearoom, whose delicate offerings for the ladies-who-lunch set have barely changed a lick in 45 years—chicken salad and tomato aspic are standards—and a staff that hasn’t changed much, either. (Phyllis Sanders, the tearoom cashier, just celebrated her 60th year working at the restaurant.)

“You think you can leave this place,” Aunt Eadie tells me, “but you can’t, no matter how hard you try. I’ve tried before. But I keep on coming back.” My aunt and I are scrambling for seats at that mother of all Baltimore food traditions: a backyard crab feast, held during the peak crab season of deep summer. The cast of characters at our event—25 in all—has altered somewhat from those in the snapshots in Aunt Eadie’s battered family-photo album, but the food is identical: There’s corn on the cob, corn pudding, cole-slaw, crab soup, cucumber salad, sliced tomatoes, and, of course, great, freshly steamed stacks of crabs that we bought live earlier from one of the roadside vendors that stud Baltimore’s landscape, especially in summer. There’s loud conversation and even louder boasts about the prodigious number of crustaceans Uncle Pete consumed in one Roman-style crab orgy back in 1955. Here at this meal memories are always guests of honor.

Deep in the throes of the feast, I turn to my aunt. She is teaching an old friend, a steamed-crab virgin down from New York, her crab-eating protocol: “Nooooo, Darrell, don’t do it like that—don’t crush!” she scolds. He blushes. I smile. The spices burn my lips like someone’s set flame to them. But no matter: I stuff my face as if I’d been fasting for days. In just a few weeks, crab season will be over. In the meantime, I have Baltimore coursing through my veins.

Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.

From Saveur, December 2000

It’s Christmas Eve in rural Quebec, and festive appetites soar. And so, despite the subzero Canadian cold and the five-foot-high snowdrifts obscuring the curves in the road ahead, Claire Morissette, a 39-year-old social worker; her husband, Serge Bélanger, a furniture designer; and their children, Véronique, 5, and Geneviève, 9, are in their Ford station wagon driving as fast as they dare to the home of Claire’s mother, Cyprienne Morissette, with visions of dishes to come dancing in their heads. Claire dreams of the warm, fragrant, classic pork pie called tourtière, which she’ll devour as if it were going out of style. Serge imagines slow-roasted pork, a seductive hunk of flesh so defiantly, deliciously fatty that its juices drip recklessly down chins. And as for Véronique and Geneviève, Grandma’s triflelike bagatelle—a splurge of whipped cream, white cake, Jell-O, and strawberry preserves—beckons them on.

All 24 members of the extended Morissette family are assembling tonight at the clan’s stately patrimonial home in St-Georges, about 55 miles south of Quebec City, for Le Réveillon, the Christmas Eve whizbang, pull-out-all-the-stops French-Canadian holiday celebration that makes other holiday observances look like chance encounters. They are coming to escape the weather (tonight it’s 10 below), to attend midnight mass, and to bask in sentimental old family stories and create raucous new ones. But most of all they are coming to eat till they nearly burst and to marvel at the energy of 73-year-old Grandma Morissette as she moves—scratch that: flings herself—through the kitchen, doting over every bubbling, hissing pot like a mama cat dispensing equal licks to all her newborn kittens.

“She has only two speeds at this time of year: asleep and 78 rpm,” Claire says, as her turbopowered mother—just call her Mother Christmas—ladles melted butter over a roasting turkey, then swiftly spins to pepper a steaming cauldron of pea soup. “Sometimes we have to tie her to a chair to keep her from moving.”

Christmas blasts in like a big brass band in St-Georges, the unofficial southern capital of the farming region of La Beauce. No wonder. Good times came late to the French settlers who, for nearly three centuries, have harvested this harsh yet fertile land of spruce trees, chilly rivers, boulder-strewn hills, and maple groves—at just under a hundred thousand acres, the world’s largest concentration of maples. Lured from Normandy, Île-de-France, Poitou-Charentes, and Brittany to work as tenant farmers on huge tracts owned by seigneurs (aristocrats who oversaw the area for the French monarchy), these original immigrants were devout Catholics who sought milk and honey but instead encountered floods, isolation, and winters so long and brutal that many froze to death. La Beauce, with its brooding vistas of the northernmost reaches of the Appalachian chain, was not—is not—green, gentle France.

But, thanks to God’s grace and pure Gallic ingenuity, a hardy handful of these pioneers survived. And for their descendants, life’s rhythm isn’t very different. Many can still be found raising dairy cattle and harvesting the sugar-rich maple sap that flows during spring thaw, the products of which find their way into many local dishes, including soups, stews, and desserts. Most still speak the same rough-and-tumble French dialect, as different from Parisian French as Brooklynese is from the queen’s English. And most still cope with winter’s icy howl with a relaxed shrug and a simple “Ah, c’est l’hiver”—only now, of course, there’s central heating. As Roger Carette, the mayor of St-Georges, sees it, “Beaucerons have long overcome great odds. We know we can survive on our own. It’s been our habit for centuries.”

Another long-standing habit has been to embrace food as a hallowed member of the family. Yes, life can be bitter, but it tastes so much sweeter when there is rich fare to be consumed. And what rich fare it is: the region’s winterproofing stews, roasts, and casseroles are meant to provide nourishment for the entire day. But mealtimes in La Beauce aren’t just about delivering fuel—about work and no play. There are whimsical flourishes that brighten the table, such as fruit preserves and the homemade wines served by Gisèle Bolduc, a retired home-economics teacher from St-Georges, especially during the holidays. Crafted from produce abundant in the warm months (beets, blueberries, chokecherries, currants, and dandelion flowers), such meadlike bottlings were once a regional staple; these days, only a few people still bother with them. Bolduc’s wines, made from recipes handed down for generations, add a sweet rush of history to the Christmas season—and summon up summer, too: the dandelion bursts with the warm sunshine of morning; the chokecherry is a brambly afternoon stroll; the beet, a crimson sunset.

“We make a feast of everything here,” says Carette. “When the river overflows, we eat. When someone’s barn burns down, we eat. And when Christmas comes, we really, really eat.” Noella Vachon, president of a Ste-Marie farm women’s group and something of a patron saint of local cooking, agrees. “During the holidays, everything is white and quiet,” she says. “It makes us feel special—and like feasting a whole lot.”

North along the Chaudière River, which winds through La Beauce like a lazy gray snake, on the fringes of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village called Vallée-Jonction, the Nadeau family, dairy farmers for two generations, is also deep in Réveillon ritual. A lunch for a large family gathering is being served in the cozy farmhouse kitchen—picture a 1945 Frigidaire ad—of Paul-Émile Nadeau and his wife of 50 years, Thérèse.

The meal begins with a quick, whispered prayer and warming bowls of soupe au pois, made of dried yellow peas that have been allowed to retain their pearly shape and enlivened with herbes salées, a salt-preserved herb-and-vegetable mixture that gives a green kick to Quebecois soups and stews all winter long. Then Madame Nadeau, with her elegantly farm-worn hands, bears to the table a golden roast turkey; a simple salade de choux (a quick coleslaw lightly dressed in sugar, vinegar, and oil); and a spate of pint-size pâtés à la viande (meat pies similar to tourtières) that have been deeply seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. So fork tender are their light, lard-based crusts that each pie—accompanied by pickled beets and thick, sweet dabs of homemade red and green ketchups (the red made from ripe tomatoes; the green, from unripe ones)—is as easy to eat as candy.

The desserts that follow are a celebration of milk: an eggy white cake served with strawberry preserves and whipped cream, and another local favorite, beurrée de crème avec sucre d’érable—thick slices of yeasty white bread drenched till soaking in heavy cream, then topped with crisp shards of freshly grated maple sugar. Zen-like in its simplicity, this lovely confection, a perfect counterpoint of bland and sweet, moist and crunchy, moves Monsieur Nadeau, a man of famously few outbursts, to a fit of giggles.

These dishes, both the sweet and the savory, are the backbone of Madame Nadeau’s Christmas kitchen—the rich, fortifying foods of the cold months. They owe their character to France, the mother country, and also to Britain, which established a presence in Quebec as early as 1760. Desserts—sugar pie (typically made with maple sugar) and the trifle—and sweet-and-sour condiments like the ketchups all hail from England. Cretons (a poor man’s pâté of spiced pork and veal) is similar to France’s rillettes; tourtière and soupe au pois are of French origin, too. But Madame Nadeau is quick to clarify that she considers France a distant relation, the source from which Quebec’s culture trickled before it became a thriving independent river. “We speak French, but we are not French,” she says with a sniff, and sinks her teeth into another spoonful of beurrée de crème.

Like rosy cheeks and caroling, snow on Christmas Eve is a given in La Beauce. And sure enough, at 7:42 p.m. it begins—lightly at first, with tiny, glittering flakes, and then, about an hour later, more heavily, with big, puffy ones like meringues.

Inside the Morissette home, winter might as well be breathing down someone else’s neck. Dining-table details are being fine-tuned by Serge and Cyprienne’s husband, Marcel: old family flat-ware is placed beside cheery holly-rimmed china; napkins are folded into crisp diamonds. In the wood-paneled rec room, one group of kids is glued to a rousing round of marbles, another to Pokémon. An uncle takes a long-overdue snooze in an out-of-the-way armchair. And in the kitchen, Grandma Morissette’s movement continues, unflagging. In addition to the roast pork, the bagatelle, the pork-stuffed roast turkey, the pea soup, and the tourtière, she has made ten other dishes, including fèves au lard (a baked bean dish, all but sacred in La Beauce); a platter of grillades (fried bacon, liver, and crisp chips of salt pork); ramekins of cretons; and luscious, oozy maple-sugar pie—a caramel lover’s path to nirvana.

“Oh, God, please stop. Not more food!” is a common cry (a whimper, really) around the table. But this is not a negotiable menu, with dishes decided by caprice. It is a fixed artifact of Morissette tradition, as essential to the family’s life as air. Grandma Morissette’s great-great-grandmother served this menu, as will Claire’s great-great-grandchildren, even though they must assemble it without the original handwritten recipes: family legend has it that, many years back, Claire’s long-deceased grandfather inadvertently donated all the heirloom family recipes to the village dump (Claire managed to reconstruct some of them by watching her grandmother cook). “My grandmother was packing up for a move and put the recipes in a plastic bag to protect them,” Claire explains. “And poor Grandfather, thinking it was trash, made a very, very big mistake.”

Everything that follows this evening is just as it should be. From the countless hugs to the sumptuous spread to the bottles of home-brewed maple liqueur that are cracked open at meal’s end, nearly every snug, secure thing in the world seems to have convened here. Later, long after all have toasted Grandma Morissette on a job extraordinarily well done, the entire clan will crunch and fumble through knee-high snow to midnight mass at the nearby St-Georges cathedral, insulated from winter’s deep chill by the timeless warmth of family.

From Saveur, September-October 2001

On the sultry southwest coast of peninsular Malaysia, traditions linger like tropical heat. So at five in the morning, in the luminous neon-blue of the equatorial sunrise, Mohammad Ali bin Tengah, a Malay fisherman in his 50s with sea-worn skin and sunburned eyes, steps into his small boat, pushes it out of the mangrove swamp where he docks it, and casts his homemade net in the Strait of Malacca, as he does every day—and as his family has done for centuries. It is a timeless scene, this not-so-old man and the sea: bin Tengah, known by his nickname Mad Zan (Mad is short for Mohammad), afloat near his village of Kampung Kuala Linggi in the state of Malacca, patiently awaiting his share of the ocean’s bounty. I watch as he lights a cigarette—Mad Zan favors clove-flavored Indonesian kreteks—and begins to sing a folk song. Perhaps his tune will help summon the morning’s harvest. Perhaps it will just help pass the time.

When I first came to Malaysia in 1982, young and broke and toting an army-navy backpack, I’d been in Indonesian Kalimantan for three months and was visiting Malaysia mostly because I’d found myself longing for modern conveniences that Kalimantan lacked—things like paved roads and electricity that didn’t fizzle out every hour. But over the course of a few weeks, traveling from peninsular Malaysia’s fertile lowland south to its hilly, jungled north, I discovered something far more satisfying about the country: its food. In my travels, I devoured Indian-influenced coconut milk curries; vegetable-stuffed Chinese spring rolls drizzled with peanut-chile sauce; and Malay laksa, a noodle soup that tasted of chiles, salt fish, and kaffir lime leaves. My palate came alive. Malaysia was my France.

In the 19 years since that trip, I’ve been back numerous times to this nation of 23 million residents, happy to see the Malaysian friends I’ve made and happier yet to eat their emphatic, colorful food. Peninsular Malaysia’s fare is a rare confluence of flavors and cooking styles, the creation of a population consisting of Malays (ethnically and linguistically related to Indonesian Sumatrans, they predate everyone else on the peninsula apart from the indigenous Orang Asli), Chinese, Indians, and intermarriages of all these groups with one another—and with the descendents of European colonialists.

Last year I visited once again, this time focusing on the cradle of the country’s history, the southwestern state of Malacca. Respected as model of racial concord within Malaysia, Malacca is also admired for the vitality of its individual cuisines and for the way those cuisines have mingled over the centuries, along with the cultures that produced them.

It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m about 20 miles down the coast from Mad Zan’s village, working my way through the pasar besar, or central market, in Malacca’s capital city, which is also called Malacca. My companion is Jo Chua—a serene woman in her early 40s who has been recommended to me by a friend in Kuala Lumpur as a gifted local cook. Treading through slick, inch-deep muck, Chua and I squeeze past Portuguese-Malay housewives exchanging cooking secrets with Chinese spice vendors, while Malay women, hair covered by Islamic tudung, bargain with Indian merchants for bundles of wild fiddlehead ferns (probably eaten here since hunting-and-gathering days) and tofu (which Chinese traders likely introduced only a few hundred years back).

Business is conducted here in a crazy quilt of languages, including Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia’s national tongue), English, Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, and an archaic Portuguese-Malay hybrid spoken nowhere else, Cristang. But never mind. Food, glorious food, is the market’s lingua franca. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. Here are seductive aromas of cumin and just-grilled fish, of sweet, ripe tropical fruit and freshly grated coconuts—delicious smells that require no translation whatsoever.

Chua prowls the slippery aisles, prodding heaps of green and red chiles that glisten like emeralds and rubies (“Too mild”), picking through overripe tamarind pods (“Too sweet”), and finally scooping up some thumb-siz, purple-black eggplants and, as a gift she’ll drop by later to the aunty who taught her how to cook, a bunch of just-picked baby kai lan (Chinese broccoli), dark green and rich with the smell of the soil.

Chua’s Malaccan heritage—and her abiding respect for the food and customs of her ancestors—runs deep. She can trace her family’s lineage in this city, its cramped streets perpetually bustling with commerce, back to 1765, when one of her forebears arrived here from China. Others in her community can track their families back even farther, to the early 1400s, when merchants from China first courted local Malay women, creating the region’s Peranakan (also known as Straits Chinese) culture—in which the man were called Babas and the women, Nyonyas. The Peranakans were famous throughout Asia, especially in the 19th century, their halcyon days, for their fantastic wealth and their culinary prowess. Nyonya dishes, including spirited stir-fries and bright curries, were a marriage of Chinese and Southeast Asian aesthetics, a boisterous anthology of taste. Today Peranakan sulture is an important presence in Penang and Singapore as well as in Malacca, and Nyonya cuisine is known worldwide (restaurants offering loose interpretations of Nyonya food can be found from New York to Sydney). Yet in Malacca, it shares the table with traditional Malay fare—similar to Nyonya but bolder and more dependent on coconut milk, chiles, and belacan, a dried, salted shrimp paste—as well as with Indian-Malay and Portuguese-Malay cooking, which diverge subtly from mainstream Malay food by making use of ingredients like cumin and vinegar, respectively.

Seven hundred years ago, Malacca was a simple Malay fishing hamlet not unlike Mad Zan’s village of Kampung Kuala Linggi, barely known or spoken of beyond its tiny confines. With the arrival, at the end of the 14th century, of Parameswara, a fugitive prince from Sumatra, all that changed. Parameswara began transforming the hamlet into a city, and the strategic location of its port, which attracted trading ships en route to China, India, and the Spice Islands, aided him enormously. It wasn’t long before Cheng Ho, a Chinese admiral, brought gifts to Parameswara from the Ming emperor, along with an imperial promise to protect Malacca from its enemies—namely, the Siamese, to the north, who coveted the city’s burgeoning wealth. The visit sparked a long-term friendship with the Chinese and ultimately, spawned the Baba-Nyonyas.

Malacca grew far beyond city size to claim a large portion of what is now Malaysia, becoming the richest and most cosmopolitan region of early-16th-century Southeast Asia; its capital became known as “the city where the winds meet.” But there was trouble brewing to the west. Hungry for control of the spice route, the Portuguese arrived in 1511 and sacked Malacca. They remained for 130 years, bringing both Christianity and European “finesse” (read: colonialist greed) to the state. The Portuguese were followed by other Europeans who wanted a piece of Malacca’s pie—the Dutch, who were already governing the nearby islands that came to be known as the Dutch East Indies (and, later, Indonesia) and who ruled Malacca for almost two centuries, and the British, who stuck around until Malaysia’s long-overdue independence in 1957.

After Jo Chua and I reach her home and rid ourselves of the market mud we’ve accumulated, she invites me to watch as she goes about making a Nyonya meal that incorporates all the region’s key ingredients. The menu consists of ayam pong teh, a delicate sweet-salty chicken stew with taucheo, Malaysia’s answer to miso; nasi kemuli, a clove- and cinnamon-scented rice dish; terong pachlis, the little eggplants from the market simmered in dried-shrimp stock; udang asam, stir-fried, tamarind-marinated prawns; sambal belacan, an essential Malaysian condiment made from chiles and belacan; acar, a crunchy fresh pickle of cucumbers, dried shrimp, pineapple, shallots, and slivered chiles; and mounds of steamed jasmine rice.

Chua’s modesty prevents her from proclaiming herself the excellent cook that she is, but she moves through the kitchen with the kind of ease and grace that comes only from experience and confidence, chopping ingredients and grinding spices into paste. Spice pastes, or rempah, are the spine of Malaysian cooking. Typically concocted of chiles, garlic, onions, fresh turmeric, and belacan, rempah are gently fried as the first step in the preparing of many dishes, a techniques that lends flavorful depth to innumerable foods.

Cooking is not the only way Chua honors her predecessors. As a member of the Malacca Historical Research Society, she has spent much of the past few years helping to preserve the architectural integrity of Malacca’s development-threatened Chinatown. Along with her husband and her parents, she has also overseen the restoration of Malaysia’s oldest place of worship, the Cheng Hoon Teng Taoist-Buddhist temple, constructed in the early 17th century.

Still, it’s cooking that offers Chua her most immediate connection to the past. “It allows me to communicate directly with my ancestors—to see what they were thinking, to know what they were about,” she says as she smashes a palmful of chiles in a mortar. “My family has few recorded recipes, so we must protect our food for tomorrow, before McDonald’s wins the war and my son has no idea what it tastes like. If I don’t take the time to do this, who will?” With that, Chua serves her meal, a testament to the past and a prayer for the future, to seven of her closest family members and me. From the spicy yet comforting nasi kemuli to the tart-hot-sweet acar, these dishes produce a pungent harmony of tastes.

Later that day, I pay a visit to an acquaintance of Chua’s from the research society, Sundaram Palani Padiachee, a Hindu in his 40s of Indian-Malay descent. Padiachee is the unofficial but fervent spokesperson for the Chetti Settlement, a section of Malacca city. “Chetties, like myself, are the descendents of Indian traders from Orissa and are probably the first outsiders who came to the rural villages of the Malayan peninsula,” he says, his brow wet in the heat, as we stroll through Chetti Settlement. “But because we intermarried and assimilated with the Malays, Chinese, and Baba-Nyonyas so quickly, our culture, which is like not other in Malaysia, has never been given the historical attention that other groups have received. Now we number only in the hundreds.”

Padiachee’s corner of the city is not the Malacca of noisy scooters and mercantile crush. It is the capital’s gentle face, a maze of winding, quiet, leafy streets that sometimes lead to Hindu temples thick with the smoke of joss sticks or to grassy lots filled with groups of kids flying paper kites. Padiachee wants to make sure it stays this way, he tells me, so he is attempting to help his neighborhood acquire protected status—recognition that may bring about cultural-preservation funding. But right now, his appetite piqued by the noonday sun, Padiachee confesses that he is thinking in more prosaic terms: he is thinking of lunch.

At Padiachee’s home, where a walkway lined with bonsai leads to the front door, his wife, Prema, a soft-spoken Malaccan-born Chinese woman, has prepared a simple, classic Chetti meal: lauk haram jadah (the name means bastard mix in Malay and makes Padiachee blush like a schoolboy), a coconut milk curry of long beans, okra, eggplant, daikon, and ikan bilis (crisp-dried, mildly salty anchovies). Eaten with rice and cautious dabs of sambal belacan, the dish is a celebration of tender-to-the-tooth produce. “Taste this,” Padiachee intones, “because soon it may be gone.” And soon it is, in a rush of joyful eating.

That night, in nearby Kampung Portugis, a well-kept neighborhood of modest cement houses on the edge of the sea, I call on Gerard Fernandis, a noted Portuguese-Malay historian (and also a member of the research society). The Portuguese-Malays, Fernandis, explains, are yet another dwindling Malaccan culture. “We are not many, but we are proud,” he tells me as we walk to his house from the Saturday night mass we’ve just attended.

Centuries ago, back when the area was ruled by the Portuguese, overlords concerned about security risks among their ranks encouraged settlers to take local wives. The plan was successful—so successful, in fact, that thousands married Malays and a new people was born. At present only a few thousand Portuguese-Malays, most of whom adhere to Roman Catholicism, remain in the state, but their traditions live on through their rich, soul-satisfying cuisine, which includes emblematic dishes like curry diabo (literally, devil curry), a chicken dish with chiles, and semur, a European-style beef and vegetable stew Asianized with star anise and cinnamon.

But in Fernandis’s kitchen, his ancestral fare is taking the night off. I watch as Fernandis and his Hokkien-descended wife, Jenny, together make two of their favorite dishes: wheat noodles stir-fried with shrimp, chicken, and choy sum greens; and tofu topped with minced pork and plenty of finely chopped garlic. The food couldn’t be any less Portuguese-Malay—in fact, it’s more southern Chinese, in keeping with Jenny’s family origins—but the meal is delicious and exemplifies the relaxed way in which Malaccans share their culinary traditions with one another; a fine local cook can comfortably dip into any of the region’s culinary styles. After all, when food tastes this good, who cares who cooked it first?

On an unusually stifling afternoon a few days later, back in Kampung Kuala Linggi, I am enjoying lunch with Mad Zan—whom I first met when I knocked on his door, looking for directions to the local dock—and his family. It is a colorful, nourishing repast built around his morning’s catch, and not so different from the meals I’ve had with Chua, Padiachee, and Fernandis: sambal undang, a fiery shrimp-and-chile dish; asam pedas, an equally blistering fish curry, fragrant with lemongrass; a chile-spiked omelette; and sayur sawi, wok-fried Chinese greens with minced shrimp, garlic, onions, and yet more tasty, jabbingly hot chiles. The fresh, vigorous flavors both cool me down and perk me up, and I realize that these dishes are probably the same ones that graced Mad Zan’s ancestors’ tables before anyone else showed up on these shores, the same foods that taste of sea spray and spice and, most important, of Malacca and its long past. “You see, old spirits don’t die here,” says the fisherman. “They just end up at the table waiting to be fed.”

Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.

From Saveur, January-February 2002

One scorching afternoon last spring, Xiagen Yang and Andy Lam, two American chemists from Ohio, were on a farm near Go Cong, in southern Vietnam, picking acerola, a fragrant, red New World fruit now cherished in much of Southeast Asia. Harvesting acerola is never easy—the plant has unforgivably prickly leaves—but it was especially hard work for Yang and Lam, whose every move was being scrutinized by a group of villagers who squatted nearby, staring at the chemists as though they’d just fallen from the sky

“Man, these people are tripping,” said Lam, a native of Vietnam, who had not been in the country since shortly after the fall of Saigon. (Yang was born in China.) “But this fruit is worth it—fresh and sweet. Do you know how many years it’s been since I last tasted it?”

Gathering rare fruits in hot places is all in a day’s work for Yang and Lam. They were in Vietnam on a trip sponsored by their employer, Givaudan Flavors Corporation, a $1.5 billion per year Switzerland-based company with offices and labs in 40 countries. Along with devising fragrances that end up enhancing products such as lotions, room sprays, and perfumes, Givaudan creates flavors for many of the world’s best-known food manufacturers—flavors that make, for example, chicken bouillon cubes taste more like chicken and bottled roasted-garlic salad dressing taste more like roasted garlic.

The chemists’ mission: to sample some of Vietnam’s favorite ingredients and dishes—including acerola, purple mint, and bun bo hue, a pungent beef noodle soup prized in the central part of Vietnam—and to extract, in vapor form, the aromatic essences of each. After returning to America, they would analyze the chemical structures of the essences and replicate them in the laboratory, producing flavors that would mirror those of the original foods—a travel snapshot you could taste. Soon, fruit lovers all over the world might be able to experience the sugary succulence of Go Cong’s acerola in a globally-marketed acerola-flavored syrup.

Later, on a veranda belonging to one of the villagers, I watched as Yang and Lam began capturing the taste of the fruit, a process known as “collecting headspace.” The term has nothing to do with clearing one’s mind. Instead, it refers to gathering, usually with the aid of a funnel or a tube, the aroma molecules that exist in the space immediately surrounding a particular dish or ingredient, or inside the ingredient itself. As Lam mashed up a beaker full of acerola—an action that simulates chewing (which itself releases aromas into our own private olfactory systems)—Yang attached a sleek vacuum-pump device that would suck up the fruits aromatic compounds and contain them. The two worked rapidly to trap the aromas before they could dissipate or be corrupted by heat or humidity, among countless other potential environmental interferences. Although the collecting of headspace is urgent initially, the whole process can take quite a long time—up to six hours, in fact.

“Raw ingredients, such as fruits and herbs, tend to take longer, while hot cooked foods part with their essences more quickly,” Yang explained. “Think of the way a steaming bowl of soup smells as opposed to a cold one and you’ll see what I mean.”

Twenty-five minutes into the extraction process, Lam had a thought that caused the color to drain from his face. “The tissue that we used to clean the fruit—it wasn’t scented, was it?” he said frantically to Yang. Keeping his cool, Yang quickly located the suspect tissue pack and confirmed that its contents were unscented. A moment passed; then Lam, sponging his brow with a handkerchief, said, “Imagine—that could’ve contaminated the whole headspace.”

The first time I encountered the peculiar world of Givaudan’s flavor researchers—in a sunny Manila cooking-school classroom tangled with plastic tubes, a few days prior to my arrival in Vietnam—I thought I’d stumbled into The Matrix, not a kitchen. I’d been invited by Givaudan to follow some of its best chemists as they traveled through the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand to gather aromas. The trip, dubbed TasteTrek Asia by the company’s public relations department, was to be a modern version of a 16th-century spice-seeking voyage—but instead of returning with a cargo of nutmeg or black pepper, Givaudan’s scientists would be toting back test tubes filled with the flavors of foods like lemongrass and tom yum soup.

“What happens inside a kitchen is almost the same thing as what happens inside a lab,” said Max Hotz, a senior flavorist (as Givaudan calls its flavor creators), looking like Avedon in a lab coat as he photographed a plate of fried shrimp. “Every chemist is a cook, and every cook is a chemist. It all has to do with manipulating molecules.” As someone who considers eating corn in April an act of treason, I was unsettled by all of this—and by the sight of Hotz and his associate Willi Grab, the director of flavor science at Givaudan’s Singapore office, attending to pots with the kind of grim, tight-lipped focus usually reserved for a crime scene. (“Max, please pass the solvent” was just one of the bothersome things I heard that particular day.)

As the hours passed, though, I saw that what Hotz and grab were doing had less in common with creating the harsh artificial flavors that went into our TV dinners in the 1960s—when grape flavor was something called methyl anthranilate, a staple flavor of my childhood—than I’d thought. Grab asked me to consider the taste of a strawberry. Although a fresh-picked berry, warm and tangy and wet with dew, might have great sensual allure, the molecular construction of the berry’s aromatic essence is no different whether it comes from the fruit itself or a test tube—given that the scientist has created an exact molecular replica. In a blind taste test (one that also ignores the textural properties of the food), the flavor of that food is just as appealing as its lab-created counterpart because the molecules are the same.

But for the average person who simply loves food—those of us who find, say, earthly perfection in the way an in-season peach sweetly explodes in our mouths—a question persists: Why not just stick with the real thing? For Grab, the answer could be found in the pot of adobo, a homey Philippine pork stew, before us. “Take this dish,” he said. “The convenience-food industry can’t mass produce it. It would take too long, and it would be too expensive. So we will use this sample and make adobo seasoning from it. It will be the next-best thing.” I must’ve looked as if I’d swallowed something bad because he added, “Remember, flavor is just a physiological perception—nothing more, nothing less.”

“It’s not only adobo-flavored products we will use this in,” he went on. “Maybe—just maybe—we will identify a new molecule from this sample, a molecule that is not yet known, not yet identified in a natural product.” Grab himself recently made such a breakthrough: he discovered a previously unknown molecule contained in the headspace of a citrus fruit native to Indonesia—a substance he described as having a slightly roasted flavor. “It will be an interesting new molecule for the industry,” he said. “We can use it in all sorts of ways.” The many ways in which such molecules can be used are surprising, if not vaguely alarming: that molecule from Indonesia might, for instance, end up as a secret ingredient in the next scrumptious new Swiss chocolate bar.

“You can modify the perceptions of the consumer by teasing them with a flavor,” grab said. Grab, and many of the chemists I met on TasteTrek Asia, seemed to savor the fact that Givaudan’s flavorists function the way that mom did when we were in love with her beef stroganoff and only her beef stroganoff. Companies like Givaudan tell our palates how particular food should taste—what, for instance, the flavor of ketchup is and should always be—in the same way that our first encounters with food shaped us. Givaudan makes food taste comforting—and even nourishing. But can we trust the cook?

A few days after leaving Manila, inside a swanky Ho Chi Minh City hotel room, Yang brought out a lab-replicated version of Chinese hot pot. A good Chinese hot pot is not easy to come by: Yang had to travel all the way to his birthplace, in China’s Sichuan Province, to collect superior hot pot headspace. Nor is it easy to make. It is famously complex, its many parts—including oysters, pork, bok choy, and Sichuan peppercorns—gradually merging into a resonant whole as diners plunge their favorite ingredients, fondue style, into a simmering stock, consuming them before slurping down the enriched broth.

I placed on my tongue a drop of Yang’s hot pot flavor, a substance he had toiled over for months. It tasted amazing. But what was so amazing about its taste wasn’t only its deliciousness; it was also its elegant distillation. One drop told the story of that evening’s hot pot, from the meal’s beginning to its sated, communal end. It was like a two-hour movie viewed in two seconds. Yang smiled like a proud father. He had achieved a phenomenal feat: he had built a better hot pot—though admittedly with none of the nutritional or cultural value of the original. Later that night, as I pondered this while trying to fall asleep, my headspace wouldn’t collect.

Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.

From Saveur, April 2002

I’d always known what my dream food would taste like. It wouldn’t be squishy and insipid, like the pot roast and canned fruit cocktail I grew up on in the California suburbs. Instead, it would be loud and bright and confident—a fire truck roaring through the night.

I found my fire truck in 1982, while I was in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta visiting Tanya Alwi, a friend from college. Trolling the city’s dusty streets in search of lunch one sweltering afternoon, we ended up at Rumah Makan Simpang Raya, a celebrated nasi Padang restaurant. As we sat down, Tanya explained that Padang was the capital of West Sumatra, home of the Minangkabau, a Muslim ethnic group famous for its fiery chile-laced cuisine. Nasi Padang literally means Padang rice, but the term refers to Minangkabau cooking in general—not just to the rice but to all its accompaniments, too. People love nasi Padang not only for its complex and vivid flavors, Tanya said, but also because of the way it’s served. As many as two dozen dishes are brought to the table at the same time, with rice as the centerpiece. Diners then help themselves to as much or as little—or as many or as few—of the dishes as they wish.

“It’s the real rijsttafel [rice table] of Indonesia, not some colonialist invention,” she added with a sniff, referring to the well-known though ersatz Indonesian-inspired multicourse meal dreamed up by the Dutch, who began establishing control over much of the archipelago in 1602 (and continued their rule until 1942).

In minutes, our own table was layered with an exotic jigsaw puzzle of 15 or so small bowls containing gulai cumi-cumi, a butter yellow coconut milk squid curry; rendang, the cuisine’s most renowned dish, made of long-stewed beef fragrant with kaffir lime leaves, ginger, and turmeric; dendeng balado, lacelike wisps of dried beef splattered with red chiles; gulai rabung, a luscious burnt-orange-hued bamboo shoot curry; and other equally colorful and diverse offerings.

In the few months I’d been traveling in Indonesia, I’d sampled many of the country’s most famous regional foods, from the lime-sour stews of the Spice Islands to the tiny deep-fried burung dara birds in South Kalimantan to the delicate stir-fries of West Java. But they were as different from nasi Padang as German food is from Italian. Minangkabau cuisine, which Tanya said could be found at restaurants throughout Southeast Asia, was a kind of Asian cucina rustica—earthy and wild, lush and vibrant. This is it, I thought after I’d gorged myself—a baptism by ginger, kaffir lime leaves, coconut milk, lemongrass, and ruby red chiles.

In the years following my initiation—and long after I’d lost touch with Tanya—I ate Padang-style food more times than I can remember, in Singapore, in Kuala Lumpur, in Los Angeles, in my own New York City kitchen—but never at the source. What was I missing? Was the lemongrass grown in West Sumatra capable of causing a seismic shift in the flavor of a particular dish? Could the wise, weathered hands of a Minangkabau ibu (mother, in both Bahasa Indonesia and Minang, the Minangkabau dialect) light up a rendang in a way a restaurant cook overseas never could?

My quest to find the answers lands me, one overcast day, on the original bus ride from hell: a 20-hour trip from Dumai—a port village in east-central Sumatra, where I disembarked after an uneventful two-hour ferry ride from Melaka, Malaysia—to Padang. The distance is only about 250 miles as the crow flies. But crows don’t have to negotiate precarious switchbacks over narrow mountain roads. The landscape of central Sumatra is a study in exaggeration: craggy green peaks randomly shoot up from dark thickets of jungle as if God had made it this way so that no one could plop down an interstate and a Denny’s.

It’s 5 a.m. when, numb and spent, I finally get my first glimpse of Padang off in the distance, beckoning like a candlelit pool in the surrounding mountains. Dawn is breaking gray and pink as the bus enters the sprawling town. Finally liberated from those treacherous roads, we shoot past slightly ominous-looking houses with swaybacked roofs meant to resemble buffalo horns-a symbol sacred to the Minangkabau—and the occasional horse-drawn carriage taxi (in Padang there are none of the annoying motorized pedicabs found in the rest of Indonesia). As I exit the bus at the station, loudspeakers on the surrounding tin-roofed mosques crackle and hiss with the day’s first call to prayer—or, in my case, to breakfast, a bowl of delicious chile-and-shallot nasi goreng (fried rice), which I scarf down at a nearby stall as though I haven’t eaten in years.

To taste nasi Padang is to taste the essence of the Minangkabau, an ancient culture whose fundamental tenets include egalitarianism, self-discipline, respect for nature, matrilineal inheritance (women, not men, own most of the property), and, perhaps above all, concern for outsiders. This last is one reason why Minangkabau meals are so lavish: to allow a stranger to leave the table hungry is considered a terrible sin. Although the Minangkabau didn’t construct the elaborate temples of Cambodia’s Khmer kingdoms or compose the masterly gamelan music of central Java, they did make a name for themselves throughout Southeast Asia as spice growers and traders. And they got rich doing so.

At least a thousand years ago, East Indian seamen were probably the first foreigners to arrive in the province en masse. They sought locally grown pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon and bartered with savvy Minangkabau merchants. The Indians were followed by Arab and Chinese spice traders and, later, by the Dutch. All these visitors bestowed on the area aspects of their own cultures. The Indians brought both Hinduism and Islam to Sumatra. The former fell out of favor after several centuries, making Islam the predominant religion, which it remains today. The Chinese brought their love of commerce, while the Dutch brought their love of all things orderly, constructing immense flood-control canals that continue to keep Padang (relatively) puddle-free during monsoon season, which generally runs from October through March. However, agriculture, particularly rice cultivation, is still the province’s economic mainstay, and the legacy of spice lives on in the food (nutmeg and cinnamon provide background notes for many Minangkabau curries) and outside the low-slung warehouses that line Padang’s port canal. There, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, anise, coriander, cardamom, and pepper can be seen drying in the sun on large rattan mats-aromatic quilts that keep the city forever fragrant.

“People all over the world celebrate special occasions with a feast,” says Hassanudin (one-word names are commonplace in Indonesia). “We celebrate every day with one.” I’ve hooked up with Hassanudin—a dashing lifelong Padang resident in his 40s who teaches geography at a local college-through the local tourism office, and after a millisecond of arm-twisting, he’s agreed to introduce me to his favorite eating places over the next several days.

Our first stop: Rumah Makan Pagi Sore, a wood-trimmed restaurant whose windows display the day’s offerings in large enamel bowls—a technique employed by most restaurants in West Sumatra to seduce passersby. When we arrive, the lunch rush is loudly under way, but it’s not long before an emperor’s feast in miniature is automatically placed in front of us, with a huge bowl of rice set in the center of the table.

The dizzying spread, more elaborate than any other I’ve ever encountered, includes gulai kambing (goat curry with coriander and cinnamon), ayam panggang (chicken cooked in a coconut milk curry, then quick-grilled), gulai hati sapi (beef heart curry), keripik kentang balado (crispy slices of fried potato with chiles), gulai tahu telur (tofu and hard-boiled-egg curry), daun singkong (boiled bitter cassava greens)—an antidote to all the pungent dishes, selada (cucumber and egg salad), gulai paku (wild fern curry), and gulai tempe (tempeh and long bean curry). Where to start may be one of the hardest decisions I’ll ever make.

“Don’t think for a moment that this is undisciplined food,” Hassanudin says, sensing my bewilderment. “It is as refined as anything in France. You must craft your lunch with restraint.” I watch as he carefully composes his meal, the goal being to create a balanced narrative of both taste and texture.

First he spoons a portion of rice on his plate, following it with small helpings of the incendiary stewed goat, the mellow grilled chicken, the velvety tofu curry, and the cooling cassava greens. Then he deftly plunges his right hand—the utensil of choice in Padang—into the curry and rice, bringing the mixture to his mouth without losing a morsel. Moving on to the greens, Hassanudin tells me about the three basic components of Minangkabau food, which is always served at room temperature.

First there are the dishes called gulai, a catch-all term for quick-simmered stews made with coconut milk. While gulai dishes can appear indistinguishable from one another, they all have their idiosyncrasies and thus offer a broad range of tastes. Next are the dishes referred to as balado, which basically means anything that has been slathered with crushed red or green chiles. Although the Minangkabau are among the world’s most unabashed chile lovers, balado dishes invariably emphasize the main ingredient—be it a hard-boiled egg or slices of fried potato—not the heat.

Then there are the panggang, or barbecued dishes, which usually involve fish or pieces of chicken that have been partially cooked in ginger, chiles, and thick coconut milk before being grilled over coconut shells. (In West Sumatra, cooking fires are always fueled with coconut shells, which impart a vaguely herbal quality.)

After we finish our meal, a waitress in a Marlboro T-shirt tabulates our bill-about two dollars!—charging us only for the dishes we’ve consumed. Here, as in the other nasi Padang restaurants where I’ve dined, you’re allowed to help yourself to the sauce in a dish free of charge.

Later that night Hassanudin and I find ourselves sunk in a booth at Rumah Makan Semalam Suntuk, a raucous, neon-lit restaurant where waiters race about while balancing mind-bending numbers of plates on their skinny arms. We have come not to eat a proper Minangkabau meal but to slurp down cool glasses of es pokat, a sweet avocado and crushed-ice shake doused with thick chocolate syrup and sweetened condensed milk. Who knew that avocado and sugar could make such an exquisite elixir? I belch my approval—a natural act actively encouraged in this part of the world. “I have never, ever seen a foreigner eat our food with such enjoyment,” Hassanudin says with a grin.

My most memorable eating experience in Padang, it turns out, does not take place in a restaurant. Early one morning, Hassanudin and I are at the city’s huge, mazelike central market, where everything from shirt buttons to a kilo of miniature limes can be purchased. “Today I have something special planned,” he says as we attempt to trace the route back to the car. “We’re visiting Ibu Rohati, the cousin of my friend Arzein. She’s quite a good cook.”

If the amazing aroma that greets us when we enter Ibu Rohati’s kitchen is any indication, Hassanudin is dead-on. For the rest of the morning I watch as this casually elegant woman quietly tends to the day’s culinary duties: peeling knobs of fresh turmeric, bruising stalks of lemongrass, massaging grated coconut in water to extract its snow-white milk. Ibu Rohati is preparing, among other things, gulai masin ikan, a fish gulai whose star ingredient, a rosy pink red snapper, was just hours earlier swimming in the Indian Ocean.

Despite her hospitality (“More tea?” “More sugar?” “More TV?”), I feel self-conscious. Not only are men, let alone food writers from New York, strangers in Padang’s home kitchens, but matriarchs traditionally guard their old recipes as if they were the family jewels. Ibu Rohati, however, doesn’t seem to mind my frantically trying to jot down everything I am observing: never let spice pastes (bumbu-bumbu) burn; tie whole lemongrass stalks into knots so that they won’t fray during cooking; always add the thicker pressing of coconut milk just before a dish is to be served—it will curdle if boiled.

A few hours later, cooking completed, Ibu Rohati disappears, but she returns shortly, transformed from a housewife in jeans into an Asian princess in a fuchsia kebaya, hair piled high in snaky black coils. She drifts by, bearing to the table the fruits of her labors: selada, rendang, ayam panggang, the gulai, and, of course, rice.

Just before sitting down, Ibu Rohati leans over and whispers to me in broken English. “There is no secret here. Only love,” she says. I put my notepad down and eat, reveling in the flavors of a dream come true.

Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.

From Saveur, April/May 2003

It is not yet seven a.m. on this first day of Myanmar’s New Year, but the streets of Yangon, the capital, are already bustling with activity. Buddhist monks in maroon robes offer blessings outside a monastery. A vendor sets out lei-like chains of dewy jasmine. A rosy-cheeked aunty at a bus stop clutches a big enamel bowl of fragrant curry.

I’m in a fast-moving taxi with my friend Irene Khin Wong, a 40-year plus native of Myanmar, whose family left for Manhattan when she was ten. (Myanmar was called Burma until 1989; the change was made to conform to Burmese usage.) We whiz past Shwedagon Paya, the immense golden pagoda that towers over Yangon (formerly Rangoon) like a skyscraper from Mars, and head toward Hledan market to buy flowers and mangoes for a soon-kyway (prayer ritual) that Irene will undertake later this morning at a nearby monastery. Myanmar’s New Year, Thingyan (pronounced THIN-jan)—known in English as the water festival—is an auspicious time for such observances. The mid-April celebration, which lasts for several days, marks the celestial passage of Pisces into Aries, when Thagyamin, king of the celestials, visits the human world to judge each person’s actions during the past year. It is also a time when families and friends come together to spread good cheer and eat festive banquets.

Soon, we’re walking in a maze of stands covered with tropical gourds, lettuces, and curry leaves so luminously green they look as if they were picked moments ago. We stop for a quick bowl of Yangon’s requisite on-the-go morning meal, mohinga—rice noodles in a peppery fish-based broth. Irene has hers topped with hard-boiled eggs and shrimp fritters, but I opt for just some chopped cilantro. Sated, we press on. As Irene bargains for a bunch of pink roses, I spy a few kids who I think—no, I swear—have been following us. “We’ve got company,” I whisper to Irene. Before she can respond, we’re surrounded. A tense moment passes. Then, as if taking a cue from a higher power, the kids simultaneously reach behind their backs and hurl buckets of icy water at us, laughing hysterically.

I’d been warned about the more literal aspect of the water festival: dousing people in an attempt to purify them for the year ahead. One guidebook I read even recommended wearing denim clothes during Thingyan “to take the sting away from the splashes”. This mass soaking, which is also part of Thailand’s New Year, Songkran, is engaged in by everyone in Myanmar, except for the very old, the very young, Buddhist monks and nuns, postmen (who are exempt by government decree), and, I had hoped, those wearing Kenneth Cole sandals. “Didn’t your book tell you?” asks Irene, as she wrings out her blouse. “You’re supposed to leave your designer footwear at home.”

My knowledge of Myanmar was fairly impersonal. I knew, for instance, that the country was flanked by China, India, and Thailand. I knew that it boasted a complex cultural heritage (more than 100 ethnic groups, including the Bamar, the Shan, and people of Indian and Chinese origin, figure among the approximately 50 million residents) and had a history of self-rule before it was colonized by Britain starting in 1826, a reign that ended in 1947. I also knew that its post-British years were marked by dictatorial governments, international embargoes, and the long imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize–winning pro-democracy activist who was recently released from house arrest in Yangon.

But Myanmar began to take on a more accessible face one chilly fall afternoon in Manhattan. Irene, whom I had met through a mutual friend in 2000, and I had just finished eating lunch when she started to reminisce about her childhood. “When I was a girl back in Burma,” she said, “the water festival was my favorite holiday. My family would eat pork and fish curries and sweet, sticky rice balls mixed with fresh coconut, a traditional New Year food, and we’d get so, so wet.” She paused; then her voice dropped a notch. “In Myanmar my life was about celebrations. Here my life is about work.”

I had previously known only the cell phone–wielding, city girl side of Irene. That day she revealed a lot more. Irene’s father, Ping Kwee Wong, who is of Chinese descent, was the owner of a logging company. In 1972, frustrated with the policies of General Ne Win—who all but closed the country off from the rest of the world when he came to power in 1962—and seeking better educational opportunities for his children, Wong moved his family to America. After a rocky start—the only job Wong could find was that of a dishwasher, and their apartment was a two-room, six-floor walk-up—things improved. Following college and a stint on Wall Street, Irene combined her interests in business and food, opening Road to Mandalay, a restaurant specializing in Burmese cuisine. It was a critical and financial success, and, perhaps more important, it provided her with a connection to her heritage. In 1994 she sold the eatery and two years later founded Saffron 59, a catering company offering pan-Asian food, including many Burmese dishes.

At her apartment after lunch that October afternoon, Irene took out a stack of snapshots of trips she had made to Myanmar over the past decade. Flipping through them, she said, “In Yangon, despite all its problems, I feel home.” As a heavy rain started to fall outside, we made plans to go there together for the next Thingyan.

Leaving Hledan market, we take another taxi toward the monastery—and promptly get caught in a traffic jam. “Only a New Yorker would be late for a soul-cleansing ceremony,” says Irene. The traffic clears, though, and we arrive still wet but on time. Irene places the mangoes and flowers on the altar, then kneels before the abbot, a smiling fellow in wire-rim glasses, and softly repeats a series of ritual stanzas. “I didn’t recognize many of the words,” she tells me when it’s over. “It felt like a test—one I wasn’t going to pass.” After the ceremony, the 60 or so monks who live at the monastery silently fill the temple hall for a meal that Irene is sponsoring—an attempt to gain merit for the year ahead.

The bill of fare, chosen by Irene and the monks, was prepared by a staff of women who shop and cook for the men. It is classic Bamar (the Bamar being the primary ethnic group of Yangon and central Myanmar), consisting of a balanced combination of light and rich dishes, with steamed rice as the main component: wet thar thayet thee, a pork curry spiked with green mango; ywet son kyaw, a vegetable stir-fry with garlic; myin khwa ywet thoke, a salad of peppery pennywort leaves and shallots; balachaung, a pungent condiment made of dried shrimp, fried garlic, and toasted chiles; and a side dish of raw vegetables and herbs. After the monks eat, it’s our turn, and Irene, her friend Ma Thanegi, a columnist for the Myanmar Times, and I devour the meal Burmese style—voraciously, and with the fingers of our right hands.

Along with that of China, the cuisines of India and Thailand, which are popular throughout the country, are generally considered to have had significant influence on Myanmar’s food. But for me, the main characteristics, especially of Bamar and Shan cooking, are freshness and simplicity, not spice. Chiles are used sparingly, usually in the form of nga yoke thee hmont, a mild chile powder that tastes like sweet paprika. Other staples are lemongrass, onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and fish sauce. Shan cooking borrows several ingredients and cooking techniques, such as sesame oil and superquick stir-frying, from Yunnan, the Chinese province with which the Shan people share a border. But none of the food I’ve tasted in Myanmar bears more than a passing resemblance to other Asian fare. “It’s the food that a Jewish grandmother might cook if someone had taught her about lemongrass and cilantro,” notes Irene.

The next day, Irene and I visit the area where she grew up, in Yangon’s colonial core, most of whose buildings are stately structures dating back at least 150 years. We have come to visit the Lwin Oo family, the Wongs’ former next-door neighbors. Everything here is attached to a memory: the shop around the corner where Irene’s mom used to buy Indian nan bread; the street where Irene played soccer with her brothers. The Lwin Oos now run a television repair business out of their modest apartment. While we drink iced Chinese tea, Irene asks to see a Wong family heirloom the Lwin Oos were entrusted with—a large, lacquered antique offering box that she would like to ship back to New York. “It would be a miracle if it made it,” Mr. Lwin says. (It is illegal to take many items, including antiques, out of Myanmar.) Irene nods, trying to conceal her disappointment. She’s clearly grown tired of leaving things behind. Later Irene takes me to Shwe Pezun Ice Cream Parlour, a crowded Yangon temple to all that is sweet. Drinking a faluda, an Indian-inspired shake with chewy sago pearls, she stares off into space. “Maybe I’ll move back in a few years,” she says. “I think I might be ready.”

Irene and I take refuge from the splashing in the streets the following morning in the immaculate kitchen of Daw Lay Lay, an aunt of Irene’s by marriage. Daw Lay Lay, an easygoing woman who smokes stubby, hand-rolled cigars while she cooks, comes from Mogok, a city in Myanmar’s north where the Bamar and Shan cooking styles converge. She is a talented cook, and Irene studiously watches her prepare our lunch: a simple fish and tomato curry; tofu thoke (thoke means salad), slices of Shan tofu, made of mashed yellow lentils, in a sesame-oil dressing; jin thoke, a pickled ginger salad with fried garlic; and hmo-kazun ywet kyaw, stir-fried water spinach with straw mushrooms. Each dish is a testament to the Burmese obsession with freshness. As we serve ourselves yet another helping of everything, Daw Lay Lay lets out a hearty laugh. But we can’t linger. Irene and I are expected at a New Year’s party hosted by Ma Ohmar and her husband, U Moe Myint, the owner of Myanmar Petroleum Resources.

Ma Thanegi promised us the event would be a grand affair, with bands and tents and as many as a thousand guests, and it’s all true. But even though we’ve just eaten, it is the buffet that most captivates us. The extensive spread includes boo thee kyaw, strips of fried calabash gourd, and Thingyan htamin, a strange but delicious New Year’s specialty from the southern city of Moulmein, Ma Ohmar’s birthplace, consisting of steamed rice served with salted fish, pickled mango, and sandalwood-and-wax-scented water. We fill our plates and sit at a table with Ma Thanegi and Ma Ohmar, the latter an aristocratic-looking woman in a sky blue silk dress, her hair in a bun. “She’s the Burmese Jackie O,” I whisper to Irene.

While we eat, I learn that Ma Thanegi was once Aung San Suu Kyi’s assistant. But after serving a three-year prison sentence for her involvement with Suu Kyi, she changed her views about how best to achieve democracy. Sensing that I am about to start asking some unfestive questions, Ma Ohmar gently interrupts. “Oh, let’s not talk about politics,” she says. “Let’s get wet.” With that, the four of us make our way to the edge of Ma Ohmar’s property. I toss my sandals aside and jump down into the action on the street below. Within seconds, I am soaked to the core, laughing as I’ve never laughed before. I try to find Irene and finally locate her in the distance, being swept away by a bunch of rowdy girls with bazooka-size water guns. Right now there are no military governments or house arrests, no Yangon or New York; only all this water and the ecstasy of letting go while we can.

From Saveur, June/July 2003

It’s 100 degrees in Bangkok tonight, but I’m too preoccupied to care. I’m on Soi Rangnam, a side street known for hawker stalls and restaurants specializing in the dishes of Isan, Thailand’s rural northeastern region, on a mission of great importance. I’ve come in search of what I’ve been told is the city’s best som tum, or green papaya salad. The tip, which I received yesterday from Nid, a Bangkok friend, sounded like a snippet of dialogue from an espionage novel. “I don’t know the name of the place,” he said. “I don’t think it even has one. But it’s a stall just past the entrance to a park, and the woman who makes the som tum wears a red apron with orange trim.”

My love affair with som tum began years ago in Los Angeles, where I lived for a decade when I was an impoverished young screenwriter and where eating out almost always meant East Hollywood’s Thai Town, right near my home, with its 24-hour neon-bright promise of exotic curries, noodle soups, and, best of all, green papaya salad. Typically made of (but not limited to) shredded unripe papaya, garlic, cherry tomatoes, Asian yard-long beans, lime juice, and enough chiles to bring me to my knees, som tum was my favorite Southern California food: sunny, crisp, and always within my budget. Tonight, however, it’s not East Hollywood som tum I’m after. I’m looking for som tum from Isan, which, Nid tells me, is where the dish probably originated, later making its way to Bangkok with Isan immigrants. Som tum lao, as it’s known, is seasoned with pla ra (an unrefined fish sauce) or whole small salted crabs, and Nid assures me that it is significantly different from the central Thai version of som tum, which uses peanuts, dried shrimp, lots of sugar, and a more refined, clear fish sauce and tends to surface everywhere outside Isan, including the United States (and at McDonald’s in Thailand, where it’s known—no lie—as McSomtam).

After scrutinizing practically every vendor on Soi Rangnam, I locate the one in the orange-trimmed apron and place my order. What arrives in front of me a few minutes later—a small mound of papaya matchsticks partly submerged in murky, dark brown pla ra, spiked with more chiles and cloves of raw garlic than I dare count, and served with sticky rice—looks intimidating enough to make me want to catch the next plane home. Cautiously I dig in. I’m rewarded by a mesmerizing rush of hot, sour, salty flavors, the oral equivalent of an air raid siren.

I’m dumbstruck. Was the som tum I loved for all those years in LA a bland impostor? Are there other Isan dishes that might be just as eye-opening? I call Nid, hoping for further illumination. He picks up the phone quickly, as if half expecting my call, and offers a simple suggestion. “Why don’t you go to Isan and find out?” he asks.

A few days later, I’m on a flight into Khon Kaen, central Isan’s largest city. Below me lies a vast chessboard of arid rice paddies crosshatched with red dirt roads. Despite Isan’s six-month-long, virtually rainless dry season, when temperatures often soar over the 100-degree mark, agriculture—especially the growing of sticky (glutinous) rice, Isan’s favorite variety—is the fulcrum of life here. Evidently it’s been this way for quite some time: 5,000-year-old remnants of what may be the world’s oldest agricultural society have been discovered in the area, prompting archaeologists to speculate that Isan was a place of early human habitation on a par with that of the Tigris-Euphrates valley.

But time has not been kind to Isan. Today the region, which accounts for a third of Thailand’s territory, is the country’s poorest, least developed area. Numerous factors have contributed to this reality, foremost among them prolonged droughts that have for decades forced many of Isan’s farmers to seek work elsewhere, especially in Bangkok, where they commonly find jobs as construction workers, taxi drivers, and servants. Perhaps a greater problem is that Isan was once part of the ancient Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos, not the kingdom of the Thai. This separateness still resonates: ruins of Khmer religious monuments dot the Isan landscape; Isan natives generally have what are considered the physical features of Laotians (dark skin, stout builds), not those of the central Thai (fairer skin, lankier physiques); their music twangs to a unique, calliope beat; they speak a dialect almost indistinguishable from Lao; and Isan’s cuisine, considered by many to be the soul food of Thailand, is a direct extension of southern Laotian food, and is as different from the fragrant coconut milk curries of central Thai cooking as night is from day.

Upon my arrival at Khon Kaen airport, I meet my companions for the next few days: translator Chalarine Phuengnoi and our soft-spoken driver, Ban Toeng, an Isan native who is based in Bangkok but is frequently called for jobs in his home region. An hour later I’m introduced to Saowanit Borriboon, a cooking teacher with a beauty-parlor hairdo and a sweet smile, in her classroom at Khon Kaen Vocational College, where she has offered to make lunch for us. As Borriboon pounds a huge handful of dried red chiles in a stone mortar, she describes the fundamentals of Isan’s cuisine: raw salads and clear soups and stews, all of which are usually seasoned with pla ra and an astronomical number of bird’s-eye chiles. “Our cooking is closely linked with our environment,” she continues. “We are a poor place, with poor soil, and we’ve been trained to eat what we can, when we can. We eat wild shoots and green papayas gathered from the forest, crabs gathered from the streams, and pla ra, preserved in salt and rice flour so it will last all year long.”

Borriboon also informs me that the Isan diet often depends on such insects as queen ants and water beetles for protein. Lest I walk away with the impression that food here has more in common with Fear Factor than with the Food Network, Borriboon quickly clarifies that the culinary customs of Isan serve another vital purpose. “Our cooking is meant to function as medicine,” she says. “Most Isan dishes are designed to cool the body and clean toxins from it. That’s why we use almost no fat and so much chile, lemongrass, and garlic.” Borriboon’s lunch—laab pla duk, a grilled catfish salad fortified with ground, toasted raw rice and eaten with sticky rice and raw vegetables (including yard-long beans and small eggplants); gaeng om gai, a hearty chicken and vegetable soup with handfuls of fresh herbs; and mook kai mod daeng, a grilled banana leaf parcel filled with lemongrass, chiles, and ivory-colored ant eggs (similar in size and texture to caviar and surprisingly unscary to eat)—conjures a cool breeze on a stifling summer day. “Aroy?” Borriboon asks, using the Thai word for delicious. “Aroy,” I confirm with a smile.

For som tum lao, though, Borriboon recommends that we pay a visit to Riam Rimbueng Restaurant, owned by Ream Somrub, a friend of hers, and known for its particularly good rendition of the dish. Phuengnoi, Ban Toeng, and I stop there, and Somrub leads me out back to the open-air kitchen. In Thailand, she tells me, the practice with som tum lao is to customize it. “Go ahead, be picky,” she insists. So, for my order I specify six chiles, four sliced yard-long beans, three cloves of garlic (which are left unpeeled), one lime, and only a smidgen of pla ra and watch as one of her cooks lightly pounds it all with shredded green papaya in a large wooden mortar. It tastes even cleaner and fresher than the one I had in Bangkok, and I know I’m eating the real thing at last.

The next morning Phuengnoi, Toeng, and I are driving up the Friendship Highway, a charmless four-lane road financed by the U.S. government and used during the Vietnam War as a supply route to American bases located in Isan and at the Laotian border. Of late, though, the highway’s name has become less disingenuous. Also called Mittapap Road, it now serves as the northeast’s own unofficial (and very long) Restaurant Row, with various towns along its trajectory offering a range of Isan culinary specialties. Nakhon Ratchasima in the south is famous for its laab, the Isan salad of minced meat, poultry, or fish, like the one Borriboon made for us with catfish. The night market in Khon Kaen is considered the best place to sample saikrok Isan, a mild pork sausage grilled and eaten with chiles, peanuts, galangal, and ginger. And north of Khon Kaen, the village of Khao Suan Kwang, where we’re now headed, is praised far and wide for its gai yahng, Isan-style grilled chicken.

We approach Khao Suan Kwang, a ramshackle place of cinderblock buildings and countless gas stations, and within seconds a mob of hawkers descends, offering the take-away variety of gai yahng-whole butterflied grilled chickens splayed on long bamboo skewers. However, we have our sights set on what is reputed to be the king of Khao Suan Kwang’s gai yahng joints: the 29-year-old Gai Yahng Wanna, which boasts an air-conditioned room. I’ve tasted more gai yahng than I can recall (it’s a standard at nearly every Thai restaurant in the United States), most of which has been irritatingly sweet. But Gai Yahng Wanna’s version—marinated in white pepper, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and coriander root, then grilled and served with a fiery lime-mint dipping sauce—is a study in the eloquence of meat cooked over open flame. I top it off with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice from a friendly pushcart vendor out in front.

Our next stop is the night market in Nong Khon Kwan, a suburb of Udon Thani and 30 miles up the Friendship Highway, so we can pay our respects to its many som tum lao vendors. As Phuengnoi and I stroll through the market—which opens at dusk to bypass the furnace-like heat of afternoon—we admire the artfully displayed produce, including green papayas, three kinds of garlic, and voluptuous heaps of herbs. The last, Phuengnoi explains, include various basils, mint, cilantro, and, surprisingly, dill. “Dill is used in many Isan dishes, like soups and steamed savories,” she explains. Of the ten or so som tum hawkers we’ve spotted, a mother-and-daughter team surrounded by a crowd of customers catches our fancy. We order a double-size som tum lao, with extra yard-long beans, limes, and garlic, and from a neighboring stall purchase another local specialty, pla chon paow, whole freshwater tilapia stuffed with basil and lemongrass, crusted with salt, and grilled. The food, which we eat with our fingers in our air-conditioned car along with freshly steamed sticky rice, is primal and delicious. The som tum lao is even more vibrant and intense than the one I ate in Khon Kaen, with large chunks of lime and both green chiles and red ones. I have reached som tum nirvana.

When I was a little kid, I used to fantasize about being able to eat everything in my suburban backyard, every edible weed and leaf I could get my hands on. It seemed to me the simplest and purest way to get nourishment. It’s a memory that comes back to me as I stand in the outdoor kitchen of our driver Toeng’s family home, in the rice-farming village of Kham Muang, 125 miles southeast of Nong Khon Kwan, where we’ve been invited to have lunch. As I gaze at the just-gathered wild ingredients—bamboo shoots, a heap of fragrant forest mushrooms, shiny, dark-green kaffir lime leaves, ant eggs—that will go into our meal, it also strikes me that the people of Isan may have eaten in just such a fashion thousands of years ago, when they were first giving life a go in this harsh but soulful land. Toeng, now 33, has lived in Bangkok since his early 20s, first for school and then to help support his family. It isn’t often that he is able to make it back home. And returning is always bittersweet: sweet because when he comes here it feels so good, and bitter because his time in Isan is always too short. “Bangkok is a difficult place to live,” says Toeng, as we watch his aunt, Aree Doakkaem, and his father, Sukun Saengbuthra, prepare our meal. “I stay there for work, not pleasure.”

In Kham Muang there are evidently countless pleasures, especially relaxed, quiet afternoons like this one, with eight members of Ban Toeng’s family lounging on an elevated bamboo mat in the shade of an old mango tree, eating lunch—which today is laab kai mod daeng, a laab made of ant eggs, mint, and lime juice; gaeng om hed, a wild-mushroom curry; sup naw mai, a deliciously tart bamboo shoot salad; two different chile and pla ra dipping sauces; a platter of raw and blanched vegetables; and a large basket of chewy, glossy sticky rice, which we gather into bite-size balls and plunge directly into the food, as there are no plates (only soup bowls) in this communal style of eating.

“I’m going to come back someday,” Toeng says between bites. “When I have enough money, I want to open a shop here.” We savor the thought over this lunch, which is hot and bright, cool and raw, pragmatic and rustic, abundant and gracious. It is the essence of Isan.

Copyright © James Oseland, 2011. All rights reserved.

From Saveur, June/July 2006

All day, the water has been as smooth as glass. Occasionally I’ve seen lonely clouds move by overhead and small green islands appear in the hazy distance. Otherwise the landscape has been featureless, a clean slate of blue sky and sea. I’ve been sailing on the Banda Sea for the past three days from the city of Makassar aboard the Ciremai, a large passenger liner, bound for Indonesia’s Banda Islands, a 23-square-mile archipelago of nine dots of land in the Moluccas (formerly called the Spice Islands). Though sparsely populated and remote—Java, Indonesia’s main island, is some 1,000 miles to the west—the Banda Islands figure prominently in history. For at least 1,500 years, traders and fortune seekers from as far away as China and Arabia and, later, Europe journeyed there for native Bandanese nutmeg and mace—commodities that were once nearly as precious as gold—and wrote romantic accounts of the archipelago’s turquoise waters, white-sand beaches, and spice-laden jungles.

I first heard about Banda in 1982. (The entire archipelago is colloquially known as Banda; the word means port in Indonesian. Banda Aceh, devastated in the 2004 tsunami, is a city on the distant Indonesian island of Sumatra.) At the time, I was a college student in San Francisco, eager to see the rest of the world. By chance, I befriended Tanya Alwi, an Indonesian classmate from a powerful Bandanese Muslim family of nutmeg and pearl traders. Perhaps sensing my wanderlust, Tanya invited me to stay with her and her family during summer break at their home in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city, on Java. During my visit, Tanya and her father, Des, a businessman widely known as “the raja of Banda”, captivated me with tales about Banda’s history and its physical beauty. They also introduced me to its deliciously hot-sweet-sour-spicy cuisine. The curries, stir-fries, and grilled dishes that I ate, all lavishly seasoned with nutmeg, cloves, and cassia, were like no other Indonesian foods I’d known. Although I traveled extensively throughout the country on that trip (and many subsequent ones) and always intended to visit Banda, I never made it. Years later, I’m finally getting my chance.

From the deck of the Ciremai, in the orange glow of twilight, most of Banda finally comes into view. I pull a map out of my back pocket for reference. Up ahead I spot Banda Besar, “Big Banda”, with a craggy spine of mountains running down its center. To my right is cone-shaped Gunung Api, an active volcano that looks like Mount Fuji in miniature. To my left lies Neira Island, the location of Banda’s largest settlement, Bandaneira, my destination.

As the ship pulls in to the town’s small dock, I see a large crowd of people down below. All of Bandaneira’s approximately 6,000 residents, it seems, have come to greet the Ciremai. I grab my suitcase and am heaved along with everyone else exiting toward the narrow gangway. Once on land, I feel someone tugging at my bag.

“Mr. James!” says a tall man in a bright red shirt. “I am Abdul Kadir! Welcome to my home!” Kadir explains that he is the manager of Banda’s sole hotel, the 25-room Maulana Inn, where I’ll be staying. When I ask him how he’s recognized me, he laughs: “Mr. James, you are the only white man for a thousand miles!”

The next morning I awake to the sound of laughter and the sweet aroma of garlic being cooked. I throw on some clothes and venture downstairs to the Maulana’s brightly lit kitchen. Inside, six women are seated around a table, at which they are variously bruising and pulverizing the spices and aromatics (called bumbu-bumbu in Indonesian, as well as in the Bandanese dialect) to be used in that day’s lunch. “Selamat pagi [Good morning],” says one of the women in a singsong voice. She introduces herself: her name is Aca (pronounced AH-cha) Magrib, and she, along with Siti Mohammad and Ajeng Hamzah, are the hotel’s main cooks. I ask whether I may watch them work.

“Of course you can—just no snacking,” says Magrib in Bahasa Indonesia, a language I picked up on my visits to the country. She hands me a glass of teh halia, a room-temperature breakfast beverage made of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and palm sugar. As I sip my drink, which is intensely spicy and sweet and reminds me of pumpkin pie, Hamzah tells me of the local specialties they’re about to prepare. First, there’s ikan bumbu rujak, a dish the Alwis introduced me to: tuna (Banda’s staple protein) braised in kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) and tamarind extract and seasoned with ginger, galangal, chiles, lemongrass, cassia, cloves, and cracked whole nutmeg (which infuses the dish with its sultry flavor but isn’t intended to be eaten). Then there’s sasatay, which is, as Mohammad describes it, a sort of tuna-based take on falafel, made with toasted ground cumin, fresh mint, poached tuna, and kenari, a variety of local almond. Nasi kuning, a fragrant, turmeric yellow coconut rice, completes the menu.

I’m curious about the kenari, and Mohammad offers me one to sample. It tastes exactly like the skinless blanched almonds I know from the States—that is, sweet and somewhat earthy. “Kenari is what keeps our nutmeg trees growing,” she says. “They’re tall trees, as big as your buildings in New York, and they were planted to protect the nutmeg from the sun. Nutmeg trees don’t like to get hot.”

About an hour and a half later, the dishes are ready. Since no one is staying at the hotel except me, I invite the staff to join me for lunch on the patio. With the sound of the Banda Sea lapping at the shore just a few feet away, we eat.

The next day I take a trip to Banda Besar, where most of Banda’s nutmeg is grown, a 15-minute water taxi ride away. Once there, I follow Kadir’s instructions and ask the first person I see to direct me to Pongki van den Broeke, Banda’s “nutmeg king”. (“Everyone knows him,” Kadir said.) Within minutes, I am being led by a sarong-clad villager to van den Broeke’s crumbling 19th-century Dutch-built estate (van den Broeke himself has Dutch ancestors), a small, colonnaded home around a grassy area used for drying nutmeg seeds.

As Kadir promised, van den Broeke, a slim 50-year-old whose face seems to wear a perpetual grin, is happy to tell me anything I want to know about Banda’s nutmeg. He invites me to join him on a stroll through his nutmeg groves. Soon we are walking down a dirt path that snakes through his property, a jungly thicket that seems more wild than cultivated. Yes, there are nutmeg trees here—identifiable by the hundreds of ripening yellow fruits that hang from their branches—but they grow randomly among other native specimens like kenari and nonnative ones like mango.

Years ago I learned a lot about Banda’s history from the books that lined the shelves of Tanya’s father’s library. I’ve since forgotten many of the details, but van den Broeke helps refresh my memory. One of only a few places to which nutmeg is native (the nearby islands of Ceram and New Guinea are others), Banda came to the outside world’s attention by way of Chinese sailors who operated extensive trade networks in the Spice Islands starting in approximately A.D. 500. The first Europeans to “discover” Banda came from Venice, in 1505. They were followed, in short order, by other spice seekers from Portugal, England, and Holland. The Dutch ultimately beat out the rest of Europe and gained control of the islands in 1621, establishing an outpost of the much feared Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Company). Holland ruled all of Banda except for a two-mile-long island called Run, which the British governed in the early 1600s; they eventually traded it to the Dutch in exchange for another small island—Manhattan.

By the late 17th century, Banda was virtually the only place on the globe where nutmeg grew. The spice, believed to be a prophylactic against the black plague, was sold in Europe by the Dutch at a 60,000 percent markup. So fiercely did the Dutch monitor its growth and sale that they made any attempt to smuggle nutmeg trees out of Banda a crime punishable by death. But during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1810 to 1817, the Dutch lost control of the islands, and the British were finally able to get their hands on some seedlings, which they began growing with great success in Sumatra and Grenada, among other places. Thereafter, Banda began a two-centuries-long descent into obscurity.

Van den Broeke stops at a tall, leafy nutmeg tree. “They say my father’s grandfather planted this tree,” he says, looking up. “She’s over 100 years old.” With that, he shimmies up the tree’s thick trunk, Spider-Man style, using his hands and knees to propel himself. Almost as quickly as he went up, he’s back down, handing me three nutmeg fruits warm from the sun. Until now, I’ve been familiar with only the dried seedpod, not nutmeg in the raw. About the size and color of a large apricot, each firm fruit has a narrow slit running down one side that reveals a flash of crimson within. This thin, red covering, or bunga pala, which surrounds the seed shell, is actually itself a spice—mace.

“When a nutmeg is ripe,” van den Broeke explains, “it begins to open, like a doorway.” Using a knife, he splits a fruit in two, cracks the shell open, and shows me the fresh nutmeg inside, more pliant and lighter in color than the dried version. I smell it. It’s like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one, with sharp hints of licorice, lemon, and menthol.

“Here in Banda,” he continues, “we say that nutmeg is a gift from Allah.”

One unusually hot afternoon a few days later comes a knock on my hotel room door; it’s Kadir. “Mr. James, you’re very lucky! You’ve been invited to Ibu Lila’s house!” he says with the same thrilled-to-be-alive enthusiasm that he reserves for, well, apparently everything. “She and her daughters are the best cooks in Banda!” In her 60s, Ibu Lila Adjis (ibu means mother and is used as a term of respect) comes from a long line of gifted cooks and still makes many of the time-consuming dishes that younger cooks tend not to bother with anymore.

That afternoon I am met at Ibu Lila’s home by her daughter, Sapri Adjis, and her daughter-in-law, Liza (pronounced LEE-za) Ba’adilah. They walk me to the open-air kitchen at the back of the house, where Ibu Lila, a smiling woman in a kebaya (a traditional batik blouse), is grating nutmeg on a tin spice grater. She’s making spekkuk bumbu, she tells me; it’s a layered Dutch-Indonesian butter cake flavored with, in adddition to nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Since she doesn’t own a gas or electric oven, Ibu Lila says, she’ll bake it in an old-fashioned tin “oven”—basically a two-foot-tall container whose top she heats with burning coconut husks (the bottom is heated with a kerosene flame).

Meanwhile, Sapri and Ba’adilah help prepare the rest of our supper. Among the dishes are kacang panjang kecap, a stir-fry of long beans and tomatoes with kecap manis; kare ikan, a coconut milk curry with mackerel and potatoes; and rice. With the aid of a large stone mortar, Ba’adilah begins to hand-grind the aromatics that will go into the curry, including shallots and fresh turmeric. Next, she gently sautés the paste, along with some additional, unground spices and aromatics—including daun pandan, an herb with a vanilla-like taste—in a small aluminum wok. In good time, a deeply layered aroma drifts sleepily through the kitchen. In it, I can make out cumin, nutmeg, and cinnamon—a spice market’s worth of smells.

Soon the four of us head to the table. The meal is delicious: the long beans are crunchy and sweet; the curry demonstrates a careful interplay of warm spices and cooling coconut milk. After enjoying the spice cake—subtly perfumed with the smoke of the fire that helped cook it—we go for an after-dinner stroll. As we walk through the quiet streets of Bandaneira, the night air fragrant with nutmeg blossoms, I’m reminded of something Tanya told me many years ago: “I don’t feel at peace until I’m in Banda,” she said. “For me, it’s like paradise.” Boy, did she have that right.

From Saveur, June/July 2007

The cook at the Big Boom street food stall—a woman in her 40s whose straight, black hair was artfully tucked underneath her hairnet—was studying me from behind the counter. Thwacking a lemongrass stalk with the flat side of a cleaver, she asked, in English, “You want to look?”

I was in Thale Noi, a sunbaked fishing village in the province of Phatthalung in southern Thailand, and I had just placed an order for tom yum goong, a soup under whose spell I had fallen in a San Francisco Thai restaurant as a teenager. A good rendition of it—whole shrimp or prawns in a sweet-sour-hot-citrusy broth—is like liquid joy.

But that was not the only reason I had ordered it. Tom yum goong, which is eaten throughout Thailand, expresses the culinary temperament of the place where it was cooked better than any other Thai dish I can think of. The versions I’ve tasted in the central part of the country, which includes Bangkok, have usually been made with lots of nam tan, a golden, semimoist variety of sugar derived from a local genus of sugar palm—a clear reflection of the region’s love for sweet-tasting foods. Conversely, the tom yum goong I’ve had in Isan, as northeastern Thailand is known, was intensely pungent, as the cooks there use chiles with reckless abandon. The cuisine of the southern part of the country was mostly a mystery to me; I was eager to find out what its tom yum goong would taste like.

I joined the cook on her side of the counter and watched as she pared away the bright pink shoots emerging from a piece of galangal (a knobby, firm-fleshed rhizome closely related to ginger) and then sliced the ingredient into thin rounds that gave off a bracing, piney scent. As she worked, she told me that her name was Pornpitlum Pattcha and that she and her husband had opened up the stall a few years earlier.

“Usually we just have one or two curries, a noodle dish, and rice, always rice,” she explained. “You want peht?”

“Peht,” I said under my breath. It was not one of the Thai words my jetlag-addled brain could recall. Pattcha held up a handful of small red chiles and smiled.

“Yes—peht. Peht!” I said, my memory jogged. “I do want it hot. Very hot!”

Pattcha stemmed the chiles and slit them in two and then did the same with the lemongrass stalk that she’d smashed just a few minutes earlier. She placed the galangal and lemongrass, along with eight crumpled kaffir lime leaves and two garlic cloves, into a pot half filled with water. After briefly simmering these ingredients (“I know it is finished because the smell is good,” she said), Pattcha added the chiles and five prawns, which she had also halved lengthwise. When the prawns had begun to turn opaque, she added a few spoonfuls of nam tan, several quartered plum tomatoes, a spurt of fish sauce, and fresh lime juice. She stirred everything together for a moment, tasted it, and then, with a quick nod, pronounced the soup done. She handed me a spoon.

Though the tom yum goong had been simple to prepare, it tasted miraculously complex. The subtle broth allowed the warm flavors of the chile, lemongrass, and galangal to come through like rays of sunshine on a cloudy day, and the prawns were as sweet as candy. Within minutes, I had slurped down an entire bowl. Sweat pouring from my brow, I asked Pattcha for another.

I decided to visit Thailand’s southern provinces to satisfy a curiosity that I’ve harbored since 1983, when I first passed through the region on an overnight train traveling from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I still remember looking out the window at daybreak and beholding a countryside that was green and alive. Rice paddies stretched into the distance like squares on a chessboard, their flatness broken only by limestone formations that jutted up at random. It was a postcard vision of Southeast Asia. The train chugged along, stopping in towns with exotic-sounding names: Surat Thani, Ban Na Sam, Thung Song.

I was famished by the time we arrived in Phatthalung, the small capital city of the province of the same name (in which Thale Noi is also located). I asked the conductor how long it would be before the train pulled out of the station; at least 20 minutes, he told me. I could make out the edges of an open-air market, so I walked toward it, hoping to find something good to eat.

Soon I encountered a compact maze of at least 50 vendors offering prepared food. It was hard to know where to begin. I saw pots full of luscious-looking curries, noodle soups seasoned with ginger and pork bones, and alluring rice dishes that looked only distantly related to the Thai food I had previously known. I stopped at a stall operated by an elderly woman and ordered a rice salad, which she said was called kao yum, and something that resembled chicken biriyani.

“It is kao mok gai,” she told me, “spicy chicken rice. You will like it.”

She was right. Back on the train, I devoured both dishes. The kao yum was flavored with toasted, grated coconut and finely julienned lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves; it was a riot of fragrance and texture. The kao mok gai contained cumin and coriander, and it was served with a few cooling slices of cucumber; though its roots were probably Indian or Middle Eastern, its gracefulness was utterly Thai.

I reached the Malaysian border later that afternoon, but my brief exposure to Thailand’s south had given me a taste of how radically different that area is from other parts of the country.

Pahk tai, as the southern region is called in Thai, is a narrow peninsula connected to the country’s mainland by the Isthmus of Kra, a finger of land that borders Myanmar. To the west of pahk tai is the Indian Ocean, and to the east is the South China Sea. As the sea is a pervasive presence—the region’s cities all lie within an hour’s drive of the coasts—fishing and maritime trade have defined its economy since ancient times. And, like many of the world’s maritime locales, it became a repository of the cuisines and traditions of the different cultures that called at its ports and wielded influence over the years.

Early in southern Thailand’s recorded history, starting in the seventh century, the Hindu trading empire of Srivijaya, based in southern Sumatra (part of present-day Indonesia), controlled its waters; both Indian and Chinese ships sailed through them. After the decline of Srivijaya’s influence, in the 13th century, Muslim sultanates, many of which were based in what is now Malaysia, rose to power. Their authority was shared with the Buddhist city-state of Nakhon Si Thammarat, located on the eastern coast, which developed around the same time. Today, most of the residents of the southernmost provinces—Narathiwat, Pattani, Songkhla, and Yala—are Muslim, and many of them, citing discrimination born of centuries of political and cultural domination by northern Thais, have separatist leanings. The politically charged atmosphere has frequently led to violence. However, in the provinces just to the north—including Phatthalung, Trang, and the popular beach resort destinations of Krabi and Phuket—the population is mostly Buddhist, and the area has remained largely peaceful.

Regardless of political and religious allegiances, one thing binds all khon thai—as southerners are collectively called—together: the sense that they are not only physically separate but also culturally distinct from their northern neighbors. They speak Pasah Dai, a Thai dialect, and Yawi, an ancient Malay language. The methods they use to build their houses traditionally have been more similar to those used in Malaysia than to those used in the other regions of Thailand. And the vibrant foods they cook convey a subtle multiculturalism that sets them apart from the rest of country.

For instance, gaeng mussamun (Muslim curry), a popular coconut milk–based curry, uses an abundance of dried spices (including cumin, coriander, and black pepper) more commonly found in the cuisines of India and Indonesia than in that of Thailand. Gaeng som, a currylike dish with fish, pineapple, fresh turmeric, and gapi (Thai shrimp paste), has a sweet-sour interplay that immediately calls to mind the foods of Malaysia and of Singapore’s Peranakans, a Malay-Chinese cultural group celebrated for its cuisine.

Although southern Thailand’s dishes run the gamut from refreshing salads to slow-cooked stews, one overarching rule seems to define them: they always exhibit a refined balance of hot, sour, and sweet, with no single element overwhelming the others.

A few days after I had eaten Pattcha’s tom yum goong, I was strolling through Phatthalung, happy to be back two decades later in this sleepy city for longer than a whistle-stop. It was dusk, and the neon pink sky reflected onto Khao Ok Thalu, the immense limestone outcropping that rises in the center of town like an otherworldly skyscraper. My companion that day was Apai Kongmanon, a soft-spoken radio journalist in his 60s whom I had met by way of the local tourism office. I had been told that Kongmanon, who grew up in this city, considers himself an arbiter of old-guard southern Thai culture and could explain its foodways better than anyone else around. As we walked, he talked about a southern Thai style of classical dance called manohra buchayan, one of his passions.

“It is from the days of Srivijaya—and from when Indian spice merchants were in our ports,” he said. “It is from the past, but it is fundamentally Thai!” For dramatic emphasis, he came to a standstill and arched his left hand above his head in a classical-dance pose. At that moment, two women passed by and gave Kongmanon the respectful Thai greeting known as a wai (head bowed, hands brought to a prayer position at the forehead). He returned the wai and then whispered to me, “Everyone here is familiar with my eccentricities.”

I explained that I wanted to revisit the market near the train station—the one that I had known from my previous visit. Kongmanon said that wouldn’t be possible; it had already closed for the day. But he had something even better in mind. “I will show you where we eat at night,” he said.

Soon, we were on Yud Tee Tam Road, a ten-minute walk away. On both sides of a two-block-long stretch of the street were merchants who had set up wooden food stalls. Kongmanon grabbed my elbow and guided me into the crowd. “We have only a few restaurants in Phatthalung,” he said. “People come to this night market to get their dinner.”

I was familiar with the concept of outdoor night markets from my years of traveling in Southeast Asia; they allow people the pleasure of food shopping in the evening hours, when the heat of the day has eased. But I had never encountered one that was so focused on prepared foods rather than raw ingredients. We stopped at a stall whose display was particularly appealing. Kongmanon pointed out a few highlights.

“That is yum pak grood,” he said, indicating a large enamel tureen brimming with a deep green–colored curry made of young, wild ferns and whole, peeled shrimp. Next to it were a few grilled mackerel, naked except for salt, and an arrangement of uncooked leaves and herbs, including cashew and tamarind leaves, that had been tied into pretty bundles. The latter—called, collectively, pak naem, Kongmanon told me—were meant to be nibbled on judiciously at meals to contribute extra exuberance, bitterness, or sourness, depending on the leaf.

We departed from the night market and drove out of town for a few miles, stopping at a no-name food stall on the side of a little-traveled road. It was empty save for the cook who was manning it, a young man named Pom, an acquaintance of Kongmanon’s. As we chatted, Pom prepared another local dish that Kongmanon wanted me to taste, this one called yum takrai—a salad of finely sliced lemongrass, shallots, and dried shrimp—to go with our fern curry with shrimp. Soon the three of us were eating, accompanied only by the hum of the fluorescent light that hung overhead. After a while, Kongmanon broke the silence. “In this food,” he said, “you can taste my home.”

Though the next stop on my journey was just an hour away by car, it seemed to be a world apart. Trang, a city of 68,000 people, was a bustling regional center of wide boulevards and traffic lights that actually worked (an uncommon state of affairs, I’d found, in Phatthalung). There was even a large, comfy hotel—the kind of anonymous, “international class” establishment that felt as if it could be in suburban Chicago or, just as easily, near the Cairo international airport. I checked in and sank into the first plush bed I’d seen in a week. After waking up from a long nap, I made my way outside into the afternoon heat to find out more about Trang.

Everywhere I looked there was evidence of the city’s vibrancy, a dividend of its centuries-old history as a trading center. Jewelry shops and banks competed for space with cafés selling snacks and ko-pi boran—strong black coffee enriched with sweetened condensed milk. Much of the signage was in Chinese, evidence of Trang’s sizable population of Hokkien, a southern Chinese ethnic group long settled in Southeast Asia. I ducked into a nondescript restaurant along a busy street. When the non-English-speaking waiter inquired what I wanted to order, I hesitated, uncertain as to what the local specialties were. Then, remembering a lesson from my travels, I took a gamble and pointed to the table next to me.

A few minutes later, my meal—a steaming platter of stir-fried rice vermicelli with chinese chives—was placed in front of me. At first glance it seemed more like a subtle Chinese dish than a bold southern Thai one. Then I tasted it. Lip-curlingly pungent and delicious, it had been seasoned with garlic and an eye-popping amount of finely ground black pepper. It was southern Thai, through and through.

Written with Todd Coleman

By late June, we—that is, Todd Coleman, Saveur’s food editor, and James Oseland, the editor-in-chief—had been planning our trip for months and were finally ready to hit the road. The plan? To drive from Chicago to New York in a wide-ranging arc, stopping at restaurants, diners, taverns, and inns that had been featured in a famous series of culinary guidebooks from the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s and had managed to stay in operation ever since. The books—remarkable compendiums of American eats published annually from 1936 until 1962—belonged to the once famous but now largely forgotten Adventures in Good Eating series published by the pioneering travel guide writer and cake mix mogul Duncan Hines. We knew that Hines and the editors of the guidebook series he founded had helped revolutionize the way Americans ate on the road before the age of the interstate, and we were seized with the urge to follow in Hines’s tire treads. What better way to connect with a fast-fading America, with that part of our culinary landscape that has resisted mass-scale homogenization? And what a great excuse to eat a lot of honest, good food. The idea (all due credit to Todd, who came up with it) appealed both to our sense of nostalgia and to our wanderlust; it also proved difficult to execute: even after narrowing the field by selecting just a single volume from each of the four decades the series was published, we had a list of hundreds of tantalizing possibilities, from the Beaumont Inn, an elegant-sounding country-ham-and-biscuits restaurant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky (from the 1938 edition), to a Lebanon, Ohio, stalwart called the Golden Lamb, which, the 1957 edition noted, once fed such illustrious guests as John Quincy Adams and Charles Dickens. But, as we set about researching these establishments, we were disappointed to find that nearly all had long since closed. And the majority of those that were still in business seemed to have retained little of their original character aside from the business’s name. Felicitously, that left us with a pretty manageable selection of restaurants: about a half dozen of them, lying along a route that zigzagged across Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and New York. Here is the true and unvarnished account of our journey.

Sunday (Day 1) We fly into Chicago’s O’Hare airport in the afternoon and rent a car. The airport rental agency offers a veritable playground of choices. Standing before the massive, gleaming fleet, we pick a gray minivan, which, we concluded after much deliberation, was the modern-day descendant of the wood-paneled station wagon.

Our first stop is the 86-year-old Klas Restaurant in Cicero, the town, just outside Chicago, that was Al Capone’s gangland fiefdom during Prohibition. The 1962 edition of Adventures in Good Eating describes Klas as having “colorful European architecture and interior design”. When you’re driving down Cermak Road, you can’t miss it; it’s a real-life gingerbread house. An ornate sign posted on the exterior reads HOUSE OF HAPPINESS. We go inside and are met by Bob Biddle, one of the owners. He is earnest and friendly, with a big Midwestern smile. (He’s from Reno, Nevada, we later learn.) Cicero was once home to a thriving Czech community, he tells us. Looking around, we notice that the dining room is all but vacant. “We’re trying to get the Czech immigrants to come back,” says Biddle. “We do a lot of funeral banquets.”

Biddle leads us to our table. The menu includes a mix of Bohemian and American specialties, such as beef goulash and barbecued chicken. The kids’ section reads, “For the Beginners of Fine Dining.” We order the liver dumpling soup and a host of other dishes. The soup is as beautiful as it is delicious: a tangle of thin noodles in a deeply flavored broth, with liver dumplings as big as a kid’s fist. Later, Biddle takes us on a tour. The place has a decidedly eerie feel. Antler chandeliers cast a yellowish glow over dusty bric-a-brac and painted wooden European folk art. Biddle hands us some old slot machine coins that he found hidden behind a wall in a pouch. This place has its secrets. “The upstairs is haunted,” he says.

Monday (Day 2) In the early morning, we leave Chicago and head east, to Indiana. We exit Interstate 80 onto southbound U.S. Highway 421. Farmland rolls away from us on both sides of the road. We come to a crossroads and take a right onto U.S. Highway 30, entering the city of Valparaiso and landing smack-dab in a jungle of box stores and chain restaurants. We’re looking for a place called Strongbow Inn. According to the address we have, it’s supposed to be right here. We see a Burger King. There’s a Bob Evans. Across the street is a Wal-Mart. Finally, we spot the place—right in front of us, dwarfed by the towering signage of its neighbors.

At the front of the restaurant we are confronted with a large cement turkey. “Chicken is a bad word around here,” says the manager, Barb Raschke, when we walk inside. She’s worked here for 33 years; when she started, the restaurant was called the Strongbow Turkey Inn. Prior to that it was a turkey farm. “We raised our last batch of turkeys in 1981,” says Raschke. As we look over the menu, turkey does seem to be the name of the game. We order pretty much everything turkey-related on offer. The turkey noodle soup has thick, light-as-air house-made noodles. The turkey pie arrives under a fancy metal cloche, beneath which lies a crisp round of pastry splashed with gravy and adorned with a single, diamond-shaped piece of diced red pepper. There are also fried turkey livers smothered with caramelized onions and framed with a triangular formation of crisp bacon. “Enjoy!” says Angela, our waitress.

Later that afternoon, we get back on U.S. Highway 30 and head east and then south, past windswept corn and soybean fields, grain silos, and the detritus of old farms. We stay the night in Lafayette, Indiana.

Tuesday (Day 3) The chatter of more than 60 white-haired women fills the room, drowning out the Muzak playing softly in the background. Waitresses in baby blue smocks rush by cradling armloads of fried chicken. The lady to Todd’s right introduces herself as Anna Schneider. “We’re the Lilly Lunch Bunch,” she says, explaining that she and her friends are retirees from the Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals company, based nearby. “We’ve been having lunch here together for years.”

We’re on the north side of Indianapolis, at Hollyhock Hill, a family-style chicken dinner restaurant that has been around for 80 years. The dining room is under the direction of Jay Snyder, a kindly, middle-aged gentleman. “The original dining room used to be a summer cottage,” says Snyder. “I started here, cleaning up the yard, when I was 16.” The kitchen’s windows have flowery curtains, and the countertops are pink Formica. Tom Sheron, a goateed man in his 30s, has been frying the chicken here for 15 years. James declares it some of the best he’s had; he asks what the secret is. “Lard,” says Sheron. “That’s the only way to fry chicken.” The dinner comes with a relish tray, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, biscuits, cottage cheese, pickled beets, apple butter, green beans, and corn. “When this place started it was on a dirt road; it was way out in the country,” says Snyder.

After lunch, Todd announces that he needs a haircut. Jay Snyder directs us to a friend of his who has a barbershop down the road. Todd asks the barber whether she’s heard of the Nashville House in Nashville, Indiana, our next, and much anticipated, stop. The owners had mailed us their menu before we left, and, to our great pleasure, it was handwritten. We’ve been looking forward to its Hoosier ham and sassafras tea. “It’s so nice there,” the barber tells Todd. “You’re going to love it.”

The restaurant proves easy to spot: it’s a faux log cabin sitting at a busy intersection; it’s flanked by a Carmel Corn Cottage and a Colonial Craft Shop, and it looks about as authentic as a Cracker Barrel. Looks can be deceiving, but we decide not to go in. That night we stay at an Econo Lodge next to another Wal-Mart.

Wednesday (Day 4) Todd is wearing thin white cotton gloves and carrying a tray of old, empty Duncan Hines cake mix boxes. We’re at the library and museum of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. Duncan Hines was born and raised in this town, and we felt compelled to pay a visit. The university is in the midst of installing a permanent exhibit dedicated to Hines’s life and times called “Recommended by Duncan Hines”, which will feature a life-size mannequin of the man and his actual home test kitchen. We’re sifting through the boxes of ephemera—matchbooks, postcards, ice cream containers, advertisements—that are to be displayed. With us is Cora JaneSpiller, Duncan Hines’s great-niece, who is now 80 years old.

Spiller takes us out to dinner along with a few other Duncan Hines experts and enthusiasts. She tells us she is wearing a dress that once belonged to Clara Hines, Duncan’s wife. “If they can’t be here to drink and toast with us,” Spiller says, referring to Duncan and Clara, “they can be here in clothing.” As Bowling Green no longer harbors a restaurant that was officially recommended by “Uncle Duncan”, we dine instead at the Smokey Pig Bar-B-Q, where we sample sweet and smoky thin-cut pork shoulder and wash it down with Nehi orange soda. Later, Spiller takes us to Duncan Hines’s former home, now a funeral parlor.

Thursday (Day 5) We’re rolling across central Kentucky now. We drive down U.S. Highway 127 to State Highway 78 and then over to State Highway 52, on our way to the town of Berea, home to Boone Tavern. Situated on the campus of Berea College (a tuition-free Christian school), the 99-year-old tavern and hotel earned some degree of national fame under the management of Richard T. Hougen, who managed the establishment from 1940 to 1976. During his tenure, he perfected such dishes as Pork Chops the Tricky Way, Chicken Flakes in a Bird’s Nest, Kentucky Chess Pie, and Yeasty Dinner Rolls. The cavernous kitchen is bright and airy and straight out of the 1940s. As with every place we’ve visited so far, many of the employees have been here for a long time. Two of them, Bruce Alcorn and Rawleigh Johnson, have worked in the kitchen for more than 30 years. “I’m just part of the fixtures,” says Alcorn. Alcorn and Johnson remember that back when U.S. 25 was the main thoroughfare—before the nearby interstate was put through—they served 200 to 300 people a day. “Now it’s tweaked down,” says Alcorn. “I’ve seen a lot of changes, competition coming in.” One thing that hasn’t changed is the spoonbread, a creamy corn bread soufflé served before every meal. It appears to be the most popular item served. “People say that the spoonbread isn’t the same as it was way back when,” says Alcorn. “But me and Rawleigh made it back then; nothing’s changed.” We got here just in time; the tavern and hotel are scheduled to undergo an extensive renovation in a couple of months.

Friday (Day 6) We’ve exited the street into pitch darkness. Once our eyes adjust to the dim light, we are able to make out an elegantly appointed wood-paneled room. The center of the room is occupied by a huge, rectangular bar. This is the Pine Club in Dayton, Ohio, a cool, windowless supper club. Dan Nooe, the general manager, greets us. “Sorry that we’re not that busy,” he says. Every booth is full. “Unless we’re double around the bar, we’re not busy.” The tables are loaded with classic steak house food: plump strip steaks and rib eyes, sweet-and-sour stewed tomatoes with a topping of buttered croutons, herring slathered in sour cream, creamed spinach, and shredded iceberg lettuce topped with thick blue cheese dressing.

Following our dinner of calf’s liver with sautéed onions and chopped steak, we decide to stay at a bed-and-breakfast not far from downtown Dayton. The rooms are stuffed with every doodad imaginable. Inside Todd’s, there’s a Howdy Doody doll in a baby carriage. Interminable layers of lace curtains keep the outside world out. A floor-to-ceiling stuffed rabbit guards James’s room, at the end of the hall.

Saturday (Day 7) We didn’t sleep well at the B&B. We spend the morning and early afternoon driving in silence through Ohio. Several hours later we are sitting at the bar of Figaretti’s, a spaghetti house in the West Virginia town of Wheeling. “We have a lot of loyal customers,” says the bartender, Jorge Shavedra. “People who have been following Figaretti’s for 50 years—they come from all over.” Tony Figaretti Sr., the owner, who also happens to be the boxing commissioner of West Virginia, is greeting customers at the door; he’s clad in loafers and wearing a loose gold bracelet. “Hey you! How ya doing?” he bellows to a smartly dressed man coming through the door. “This guy always shows me up. His shirt. His shoes.”

Five brothers started Figaretti’s back in 1948. It used to be called Figaretti’s Cricket Club. We sit below a gilded, framed portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Figaretti. Todd has a manhattan and nibbles on some garlic bread. Then we dig into the Godfather II, a delicious dish of linguine tossed with shrimp, mussels, peppers, onions, and tomatoes in a white wine and garlic sauce, sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese.

We decide to drive several miles south, to Moundsville. Halfway into town, in front of an abandoned bowling alley beneath a darkening early-evening sky, we spot the Reilley’s Arms Motel. We pull over and check in to our rooms. We seem to be the only guests. James settles down in front of a Charlton Heston movie. Todd pops a quarter into the coin slot affixed to his bed’s headboard, but the magic fingers don’t work. He falls asleep anyway.

Sunday (Day Homeward bound. Running behind schedule, and feeling the weight of the coming workweek, we resign ourselves to Interstate 80. We speed eastward, stopping for dinner at an overly air-conditioned Denny’s somewhere in Pennsylvania. We get stuck in traffic as we approach the George Washington Bridge, giving ourselves plenty of time to peer across the Hudson River at the lights of New York City, the end of the road.