From balachaung to curry, my favourite comfort food is always from Myanmar

Jaclyn Bond found a second home in a country she never visited, thanks to her family serving curry and condiments from Myanmar.

Sipyan is one way to bring the flavours of Myanmar to your kitchen. Source: Alan Benson

My family is from Myanmar. My grandparents, Maymay and Grandad, are both 95 now; so old that they still call it Burma. They also still call it home, despite living in Australia for the last 50 years and having no plans to return. They call Melbourne home too, but I think it’s in more of a ‘home base’ way than a 'heart and soul' way.

I’ve never been to Myanmar. My dad always said it was too dangerous, and from the stories he told me about his early life (plus the brutal, never-ending news cycle), that adds up. So it’s a fabled place to me now – home of rubies and temples, home of genocide and cruelty, home of white-pasted brown faces and the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. Little known fact: it’s also home to the best comfort food on the planet.

If you’re lucky enough to have a Burmese person cook for you, htamin lethoke will change your life. It’s a carb party – rice, noodles and potatoes – but still classified as a salad because it’s served at room temperature. Fried garlic, chickpea flour and fresh bean sprouts add inexplicably satisfying texture and you can choose your own adventure with the chillies, prawn powder and fish sauce. It’s like lying in soft, warm sand and getting a massage – comforting and smooth and utterly life-affirming.

Condiments, though, are truly the heroes of Burmese cuisine, and my Maymay is renowned for her mastery in this area.

A vital part of Burmese cuisine: condiments.

From the time a member of our family turns 18, they become old enough to warrant a steady, personal supply of ‘the three’ – eggplant pickle, tomato kasaundi and balachaung. Every birthday, Christmas or random Wednesday is deemed incomplete without a Coles green bag filled with ‘the three’, plus a block of chocolate and a bottle of wine. And yes, many of us have had our gallbladders removed. And no, Maymay does not see any correlation.

For a lot of my early life, I resented these pungent green bags of clanging jars. I palmed them off to siblings, cousins, or gastronomically adventurous friends. Or I ‘accidentally’ left mine under the Christmas tree. I hated the oily kitchen and slight sting in the air with every deep breath.

If you’re lucky enough to have a Burmese person cook for you, htamin lethoke will change your life.

My Maymay’s kitchen is a closed-off room at one end of a small cottage in sunny Broadmeadows – a northern suburb of Melbourne where many migrants settled in the '70s and '80s. There’s a Burmese method of cooking called ‘sipyan’, which describes cooking a curry until the oil returns to the top again, effectively preserving the food beneath. Maymay’s kitchen itself is sipyan, a layer of oil coating its surfaces, keeping everything supple and with a slight turmeric-coloured film. It's the original (and definitely least hygienic) photo filter.

There’s a good reason for this. Maymay (and Grandad as her lifelong sous-chef) spends a good 98 per cent of her waking hours cooking. Curries every day. Rice every second day. But she does a roaring trade in the three – commercial quantities by any legal measure.

The eggplant pickle is pretty self-explanatory – super tangy, slightly sweet diced eggplant with a kick. The kasaundi has more depth, with mustard seeds and garlic. Every time I eat it, I think of Myanmar’s proximity to India. I think of how my Maymay met my Grandad when she was in a P.O.W camp in India, taken from her home in (then) Burma when she was a teenage girl, and how my Grandad, a captain in the Burmese navy, rescued her. They’ve been together ever since. All that lives in her kasaundi.

Burmese balachaung is one of those things that doesn’t look super appetising, but just adds a little crunchy joy to whatever you’ve got going on. Everything is fried to a slightly blackened state. It’s dry but a little sticky – people (mainly non-Asian kids I’d invite over after school when I was young) get a little freaked out by the tiny fried shrimp, but they’re essential for both flavour and texture.

To make the three, Maymay dons more PPE than any pandemic would call for. Gloves, goggles, masks – the chilli hangs so thick in the air as she cooks that passers-by on the footpath wince and cross the road, pawing at their eyes as if they’ve been maced.

At any given time, you can walk into Maymay’s kitchen and find curry in the fridge, rice in the rice cooker, and about eight years’ supply of eggplant pickle, tomato kasaundi and balachaung in what’s called ‘the family cupboard’. It wasn’t until I was a fully fledged adult that I understood it’s not just a cupboard, it’s a portal.

Family food, cultural cuisine, is sipyan. Eventually it’ll rise to the top, and one day you’ll find yourself with a fridge full of ‘the three’, adding eggplant pickle to your scrambled eggs, serving balachaung at a dinner party or carb-loading htamin lethoke after a big night out and you realise, without ever having travelled further than Broadmeadows, Myanmar will always feel a bit like home.

This story was 'highly commended' in the SBS and Diversity In Food Media 'Journey Through Food' competition. You can find more shortlisted and winning entries and details about the competition here.