Features

Real Creole

30 Jun 2015 by Clement Huang

That food fad of the 1990s, fusion cooking, earned itself a bad name. Fusion dishes in general, emanating from fancy kitchens and arriving into even fancier dining rooms, presented as the arbitrary juxtaposition of a few diverse ingredients. Fusion cooking thrilled no one. 

The idea of mixing it all up a bit in the (albeit home) kitchen was nothing new, of course, and the over-used term fusion may not be very helpful. Words such as creolisation, hybridisation and even globalisation are more focused when exploring how food and cooking has changed over time. 

Hybridisation is a trajectory that results in habits and traditions changing within a culture. On the other hand, creolisation, says Leo Pang, “is the combining of culinary traditions and eating habits from multiple cultures, resulting in a new cuisine”. Pang, a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London, adds that “it is globlisation that makes possible creolisation”, citing the dual global movement of people and goods for leading to altering eating habits across the world.

The term creole is perhaps first a linguistic term, writes Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food. “Unlike pidgins, creoles develop complex grammars and extensive new vocabularies.” Hong Kong restaurateur Lori Granito is of French, Spanish, Native American and African heritage, and she defines the person who would identify as creole as “anyone who is of African origin heritage ‘mixed’ with something else”. 

So creole can refer to a language and to a person. But the term is most commonly applied to the cooking of the Mississippi Delta, in particular New Orleans, a port city founded in the early 18th century by a French businessman, and subsequently ruled by the Spanish. Mirroring the language and the peoples, the cooking is seen as a bringing together of culinary traditions from West Africa with those of countries including France and Spain, as well as Native American influences. 

New Orleans tends to be described as the birthplace of creole cooking, but in fact transformative food ways go back centuries, some of the most important occurring in the 16th and 17th centuries with the colonising practices of the Spanish and Portuguese across the Americas, Africa and Asia. 

The results have often been spectacular: Mexican and Peruvian cuisines, for example, and Brazilian. The cuisines are rich in history but also rich with meaning. Feijoada, a stew of beans and pork, has long been represented as a product of the slave trade in Brazil, when slaves would use parts of the pig thrown away by their masters, such as ears, to supplement their frugal rice-and-beans diet. Others talk of its hybrid European and Portuguese origins. 

Later, the eating of feijoada became part of a political project to create national unity among diverse populations. The various colours of the dish: black beans, red meat, the white rice with which it was served, were deemed to variously represent the black, white, Asian and native communities – brought together on the plate. 

Other creole cuisines have occurred not because of a colonising power but because of mass migration due to the requirement for labour, be that for sugar plantations in the Caribbean or rubber plantations in Malaysia. For example, Peranakan, or Nonya cooking, emerged as an intra-Asian creole when Chinese immigrants settled in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, and inter-married with the local Malays. 

A blend of Malay and Chinese, Nonya employs balachan (shrimp paste), chillies and coconut milk – ingredients that would be entirely unfamiliar to Chinese from Guangdong; while the eating of pork would be foreign to other Malays. Such cultural changes, says Pang, “run far deeper than those that occur in hybridisation”. Hybridisation gave rise to the hugely popular yuanyang of Hong Kong; a blend of tea and coffee with condensed milk, it is an isolated culinary nod to the British.  

In the mid-16th century, 250 years before the arrival of the British in Hong Kong, the Portuguese had been granted landing rights in Macau (it was never officially a colony), and it was here that the Macanese believe the first creole cooking emerged – before the term had become part of the culinary lexicon. 

The Macanese are descendants of Portuguese sailors and traders who married women from other Portuguese colonies in Asia – Goa, Malacca and Timor. They consider themselves the indigenous peoples of Macau. 

Macanese food is popularly described as a cross between Portuguese and Chinese, but this paints too simple a picture. The bulk of the produce incorporated may be that which is richly available in the south of China, but no Chinese culinary culture existed (unlike the situation when the British took Hong Kong). The only inhabitants when the Portuguese set foot on Macau were a few Fujian fishing families who lived on their boats. 

“Macanese food from my point of view is a legacy from our ancestors, the travellers, the seafarers and their women,” says Luis Machado, head of the Macanese Gastronomic Society. “It is the native food, the indigenous food [of Macau]”. 

Broadly speaking, it is a cuisine with its roots in Portuguese cooking – in terms of core ingredients like potato, onion, garlic, chicken and pork. Resulting flavours are accented with the Asian herbs, spices and other condiments, which were traded off the galleons. 

It is a remarkably diverse cuisine, its repertoire ranging from heavy, salty dishes based on bacalhau (cod), to light noodle soups flavoured with balichao (fermented fish sauce) with chicken curries and saffron-scented fried liver in between. Macau-based lawyer and fourth generation Macanese Miguel de Senna Fernandes takes the view that: “This kind of blending might have occurred by pure chance, or
by the need to replicate delicacies from Portugal”. 

In other words, it might be contested that Macanese cooking emerged because the Portuguese master, back from a long voyage and missing the cooking of home, would go down to the kitchen and try to show the cook how to fashion a particular dish his mother used to make. The cook, lacking access to fresh milk, would substitute coconut milk. Or, judging a dish rather bland, would add ingredients she loved from her own homeland: tamarind, cinnamon, palm sugar. 

In formerly French-ruled Vietnam, locals eat baguettes with their breakfast noodles, or stuff it with a kind of luncheon meat; and are so used to crème caramel that they consider it Vietnamese. 

Nir Avieli, former resident of Hoi An and author of Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town, says that French-Vietnamese fusion is “extremely important”. He contests that “sometimes the fusion is so ‘deep’ that the French roots are hardly recognisable, and sometimes forgotten.” 

A good example might be pho (pronounced “fur”), regarded as the country’s national dish, yet argued to have been “created” in the French colonial era and to be named for pot-au-feu – a French beef stew. 

It must also be noted that influences run in both directions. “For me French-Vietnamese is a style of cooking practised mostly by French chefs who discovered the umami magic of fish sauce, novel Vietnamese fresh herbs and aromatic spices, and applied these ingredients to their cooking,” says Peter Cuong Franklin, who owns two Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong. “But the food retains its French identity and character.” 

In describing his own cooking style: “I straddle between the traditional and the modern and hope to retain the essence of the cuisine.” But at the same time he’s moving the cuisine forward “to make it relevant for the way people eat and live today in a global city such as Hong Kong”. 

It’s a perfect illustration of how cuisines never have and never will stand still, but are organic, dynamic constructs serving a myriad of changing functions over time. Lau Suet-Ming, who trained in classic Chinese cuisine, runs Macanese supper clubs in London. She says that while Macanese recipes work fine as they stand, “most of the recipes could be modified and slightly refined for the better. But any added ingredients should enhance the dish”. 

If we consider that chillies, tomatoes and potatoes were introduced to China and Asia by the Portuguese (and/or Spanish) from the Americas; that chop suey is a “Chinese” dish with American origins; that a creation of the gravy-loving British, chicken tikka masala, has now been exported “back” to India; and that having been introduced by the West to beef, the Japanese now export kobe, perhaps the best beef in the world – it is hard to nominate any cuisine that has splendidly remained in cultural isolation.

Loading comments...

Search Flight

See a whole year of Reward Seat Availability on one page at SeatSpy.com

Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Be up-to-date
Magazine Subscription
To see our latest subscription offers for Business Traveller editions worldwide, click on the Subscribe & Save link below
Polls