Burmese Cuisine
Mangos for sale, Downtown Yangon, Myanmar
Although influenced by the culinary traditions of neighbouring India and China, Burmese dishes retain a character as distinctive and flamboyant as the country’s Buddhist architecture.
The basics
Wherever you travel in Burma, meals tend to share common element: rice – the country’s staple and main cash crop. Accompanying dishes are served to provide contrast and flavour. You’ll usually be offered a thin soup (hingo), often slightly sour and with leafy greens floating in it. Along with this will come at least one curry of either meat, poultry, fish or egg – you can tell by the colour whether it’s going to be a firey affair (red) or milder concoction of coconut gravy and turmeric (yellow). And there’s usually a bowl of vegetables of some kind as well as, most important of all, balachaung, a mix of pounded dried prawns, deep fried garlic and onions, vinegar and chilli powder, which tastes sour, hot, salty and deliciously crunchy.
Mohinga: the Burmese breakfast
Burma’s morning chorus is the sound of slurping, as its national dish –mohinga – is devoured at food stalls and tea houses across the country. It’s basically a pungeant fish broth seasoned with spoonfulls of dried shrimp paste, lemongrass, ginger, onion and garlic. To this is added a helping of vermicelli noodles, topped off with the “small accompaniments” Burmese love so much: crunchy wafers of dried soybean cake, chilli powder, fried garlic, coriander leaf, sliced fish cake, ground roasted chickpeas, egg and spring onions. Small wonder, then, that rolls and coffee have been slow to catch on . . .
Salads
The creativity of Burmese cooks is most noticeable when it comes to salads, or thoke. Raw vegetables are first dressed in salty fish or soy sauce, and smothered in dried shrimp paste. Sourness is added with tamarind, creating a juice that’s soaked up by a blend of spicy peanuts, roasted chickpea powder, sesame seeds and soya beans, and enriched with one or more oils. The final garnish comes in the form of crisp fried onions and garlic, roasted chilli and herbs such as mint, kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass and coriander.
Noodles
Burmese noodle dishes can be no less complex and flavoursome. Take for example mishee from Mandalay, one of the standards served in the country’s countless sidewalk cafés. It’s based on rice noodles, into which are stirred shreds of deep-fried pork and beancurd puffs, a pickle made from fermented mustard greens and some crunchy beansprouts. Finally, a dollop or two of garlic and chilli sauce is added, along with a sprinkle of chopped spring onions for texture.
A more simple but no less tempting noddle dish (cribbed from the Thais) is kyauk shwe, which consists of chicken simmered in a spicy coconut milk gravy made from onion, garlic, ginger and chilli. This fragrant mixture is poured over egg noodles, and garnished with slices of boiled egg, crisp-fried onions, chilli flakes, fresh coriander and a wedge of eye-wateringly sour lime.
The king of fruits
Burma offers all kind of luscious tropical fruits, but the king is undoubtedly the durian, whose foul-smelling, spiky exterior encloses large seeds covered with a buttery flesh that tastes, to the initiated at least, like heaven. Sir James George Scott, author of The Burman, His Life and Notions, famously remarked that “(some) Englishmen will tell you that the flavour and the odour of the fruit may be realised by eating a “garlic custard” over a London sewer.”
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