‘That was the one thing I gagged at’, she says of the food she ate throughout her year in Ban Koi Noi. As for the rest, ‘It was earthy but it was nutritious and a lot of it was extremely delicious,’ says Brissenden, who was interested in the role of food in village life.
The author of the culinary classic South-East Asian Food was worried about a loss of culinary traditions in Asian cities and wondered whether the situation was the same in the countryside.
What she found was pretty much a subsistence lifestyle. Apart from the pork delivered each morning on a motorcycle, the villagers ate plants gathered from beside paths and in the rice fields, fish from the river, frogs, flying ants, crickets and termites, as well as homegrown chickens and produce from the house garden. Brissenden lived with a local family.
‘I went out into the fields, I watched them cooking, I was just part of the scene. I went [to Thailand] to see what the food situation was like but I became fascinated by the whole village life.’
So fascinated that it will be the subject for her next book. In the meantime, she is promoting her recently revised South-East Asian Food. The authoritative and ground-breaking book has sold steadily since it was first published by Penguin in 1969, at a time when such food was relatively unknown and exotic in this country.
It was the first book of its kind which attempted to discuss and characterise the food of the region, though Brissenden was limited by the political events of that time, covering only Malaysian, Indonesian and Thai food. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were included in a revised edition in 1996.
Martin Boetz, chef at Sydney’s acclaimed Longrain restaurant, called South-East Asian Food his bible, praising it for its ‘phenomenal detail’ and for being ahead of its time. Elizabeth David listed it among the books every serious cook should possess.
High praise indeed for its author, who grew up in the Pacific islands in the 1930s when her father was posted by the Victorian Department of Education to Nauru, and later the Solomon Islands, to help establish their education systems. Some of her earliest memories from that time involve food. She remembers eating a bowl of fragrant steaming noodle soup with seafood and fresh herbs at the age of four, during a family visit to a small Chinese trading settlement.
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