Recipe: Bah Kut Teh (meat bone tea)

After effects: Oh joy! oh rapture! Savoury, robust, satiating. And so simple to make!

Wikipedia has some background about this traditional soup.

There are many variations.

• www.indobase.com
• www.101cookingrecipes.com
• rasamalaysia.com
• www.malaysianfood.net

And Yeoh's Bah Kut Teh is a business dedicated to this dish. I'm salivating...

The core ingredients are: meaty ribs (pork for preference) separated, black peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon bark, garlic, water, dark soy sauce. Stew it all for approximately 1.5-2 hours, until it is fragrant and you just want to lift the lid and ladle it into your bowl.

The variations to the dish involve the proportion of ingredients, and the additional flavourings to the ingredients. Just like soup really - add whatever leftover dried flavourings you may have in the home: dried shitake mushrooms, ginsing root, shallots, red dates, goji berries, preserved mandarin peel, white peppercorns, sugar, salt. Whatever flavours you want to slurp down and which will match the essential dark savouriness.

Verse: Pacific jewel

There once was a beaut Pacific jewel,
With assets to make corporates drool;
We would often be told
"Your assets must be sold!"
And then there was nothing left - we're fools.

Verse: Ergonomics 101

Limerick:
There once was a weird human science
Which decried scales of subjective reliance;
Yet test and re-test
Showed proof for the best,
For now skepticism is in abeyance.

Review: Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale

Brief summary: It's interesting to see all the different versions of LRRH stories. Fairy tales are not for little kiddies.

Middling summary: It is a very good collection of the variations on the LRRH theme ranging from old wives tales, Louis IV's court, the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl, to "The Company of Wolves" movie (1984) (notable actors: Angela Lansbury, David Warner) (incidentally this video is available in The University of Auckland Library: Audio Visual Library) and "Freeway" movie (1996) (starring Reese Witherspoon, Bokeem Woodbine, Kiefer Sutherland and Brooke Shields) . The images included in the book is also quite fascinating. There's quite a lot of write up about sex.

Upshot: I found this collection of LRRH stories a very interesting read. All the analysis about the sexuality of the tale throughout the ages was tedious to me. However, humanity is all about sex so I guess it is the only natural conclusion.


Book:
Orenstein, C. (2002). Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked. NY: Basic Books.