Dearest Reader, what would you say are the most significant dishes of your life? The ones that if given to a stranger, would provide them with a glimpse into who you are, where you’ve come from and what you’ve done in life in the absence of photographs and video. Your food biography if you will.
I came across this wonderful idea to catalogue my life according to food from Johanna’s great blog Green Gourmet Giraffe. She originally found it in Jill Dupleix’s July 2010 column who titled the story “Food Memories”. I thought that the new year was as good a time as any to talk about the 10 most significant food experiences and memories.
As Jill says: “Your list will be different to mine, and different to your nearest and dearest. A stranger could look at them and know so much about you and your life; where you came from, who you became, and everything in between. The places you have lived will be in there, the people you have loved and who have loved you. Every dish tells a story, good or bad.”
1. Bamboo leaf wrapped dumplings or Zongzi
Photo by Flickr user avlxyz via CNN
When I was growing up I’d hurry home from school, after a quick stop at the library where I’d check on the resident albino axylotl (I considered him “my axylotl”) and drop my school bag in my room and enjoy the pleasant half an hour before I had to get started on my homework. After school there would always be a snack waiting for my sister and I and it was usually a bamboo leaf wrapped rice dumpling. My grandmother would snip a triangular dumpling off the line of them and hand it to me and I became expert at peeling the lotus leaves off from them while leaving the rice intact.
Some days, if I had been naughty and hadn’t finished my breakfast I might find the egg stuffed inside the dumpling-my grandmother having gone through the war as a widow with six children was not a fan of wastage and I learned quickly to avoid the awful surprise of a boiled egg and tomato sauce filled dumpling. But mostly they were filled with pork and shiitake mushrooms and were the perfect kid sized snack to eat after school. Sadly my mother never learned the skill of rolling and tying these and after my grandmother passed there was no line of dumplings waiting for us.
2. Chocolate mousse
Clearly I was a foolish child giving away chocolate…
I have what may be considered a sin to confess. I hated chocolate when I was young. There is even photographic evidence of me trying to pass on a chocolate Easter egg to my little sister. Every time I would eat it I would (and sorry for bringing this up) throw it up. But I forced myself to grow to like it as I knew that somewhere within me lay a chocolate lover. And there certainly was…
One of the very first dishes I made was a chocolate mousse. I don’t even remember which recipe I followed but I am certain of two things: I overcooked the chocolate and it separated into little globules and I under beat the egg whites as we only had a hand held rotary beater and I would have gotten tired and thought that that was enough. So the little globules of chocolate has a slimy coating of egg white around them. It’s a wonder I ever cooked again after that.
P.S. My sister is not the estranged daughter of Don King or a pineapple despite her hair 
A more kid friendly and not at all slimy version of the chocolate mousse - instant chocolate mousse
3. Strawberry Charlotte cake
We had a small strawberry patch when we were little. It yielded a few strawberries and they were unimpressive at best. For starters, we picked them when they were underripe in our enthusiasm. They were mostly white but I had a desire to unite them with my strawberry shortcake doll which smelled like how I felt strawberries should taste but never did. And yes I bit Strawberry Shortcake just to see what she tasted like…
My mother wasn’t and still isn’t a huge baker. She is a savoury cook that makes Asian dishes (although she does make a carrot cake and Portuguese custard tarts on request). So cakes were reserved for birthday and celebrations. I remember trying a slice of strawberry cake made by someone who I considered as lofty as Pierre Herme if I even knew who he was at the time. It was a simple sponge cake filled with strawberry mousse and fresh strawberries topped with a strawberry jelly and surrounded by sponge finger biscuits. The strawberries in this cake were not bitter as the ones in our garden and it was exactly how I imagined strawberries to be. To this day I haven’t made a strawberry charlotte cake. But I will this year and I hope that it will taste as good as it did to my eight year old taste buds.
4. Sausage rolls
From Bourke Street Bakery
At school I was allowed one tuck shop order a week. My tuckshop order always consisted of a sausage roll. I would look forward to lunch time these days with great anticipation. Usually my lunch went uneaten as it was a ham sandwich on white bread with a frozen popper which defrosted against it rendering the white bread soggy pap. Fridays however were a special day and when the lunch monitor would hand out the white paper bags with a patch of grease on them and I would take mine which was very hot to the touch I could barely wait to sink my teeth into it.
There was a process of course. Firstly holding the sausage roll vertically I would eat the pastry from around the outside leaving a dubious looking brown tube of sausage meat flopping around. Then still holding the floppy sausage vertically I would squeeze the sauce on the top and it would slowly drip down the sausage. Looking back on it it does sound rather unappealing and dodgy and I now know why my teachers would look at me doing this with some measure of alarm. I still adore sausage rolls but I have learned to eat them in a more appropriate manner (hey I was nine years old, what did I know? );)
5. Roast chicken
). Swept hair across his face, blue blazer, untucked dress shirt, straight pants and white, white, white sneakers. He seems down to earth and immediately I am less overwhelmed and more in awe.
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