Viscous tawny
liquid bubbles slowly, like primeval mud in a volcanic badland. The
smell that rises from the simmering gloop makes my nose twitch
happily: peanuts, coriander, lemongrass and chillies.
This was my first
experience of satay celup,
the Melaka version of steamboat cooking.
Huge metal vats
of bubbling sauce dominate the centre of each stainless-steel table.
Over-bright fluorescent lights reflect off white tiles and greedy
diners. Along one wall run shelves overflowing with bamboo skewers of
every imaginable ingredient: prawns the size of my thumb,
herb-flecked fish balls gleaming like pale pearls, slippery chicken
livers and lumpy sausages, slender green okra stuffed with salty fish
paste, morning glory leaves tied into small, neat bundles. There are
other things too, strange meaty things I don't recognise.
Seeing I'm alone,
a local teacher invites me to join her table. She gently steers me
away from these stranger foods: “Not for you.” I am a Westerner,
and hence expected to be timid in what I eat. She smiles over the
chatter of languages rising around us like steam from the vats:
bahasa Malay, Cantonese, English.
We help ourselves to skewers while
waitresses, harried and sweating in jeans and t-shirts, scurry from
table to table. They continually top up the vats of sauce and bowls
of diced bread, to soak up the fragrant and spicy liquid; no one ever
leaves unsatisfied.
Skewers are plunged into sauce. It's
communal dinning at its most enjoyable - sharing tasty titbits,
squabbling over tangled bamboo skewers, and laughing over dropped
ingredients, lost forever in the bottom of the vat.
Finally, satisfied and replete, we lean
back in our chairs as the waitress counts the sticky used skewers on
our table to calculate the bill. My host insists on paying for my
dinner, proclaiming me a guest in her city. She smiles, and is
quietly gracious, like Malaysia itself.
I stumble happily back to my
guest-house, both belly and heart full.
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