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Heavenly fragrance of great recipes

Heavenly Fragrances includes some delicious recipes and the different aromas that come with it. JAMES HIPKISS is impressed.

Pineapple lime salsa with mint.

Not the most neatly folded package in banana leaf.

Coconut and green mango fish parcels.

COOKING with aromatic Asian herbs, fruits, spices and seasonings is the sub heading of Carol Selva Rajah’s new book Heavenly Fragrances. But this is more than just a series of recipes, more than your average cook book.

Carol is an award winning chef and writer of 10 cook books, as well as being a food consultant and educator often seen at food festivals and on television in her adopted home Australia. Her origins though are definitely Asian, born in Malaysia and growing up in Malaysia and Singapore.

She enjoyed the breadth of cuisine from her father’s Sri Lankan influences, her mother’s Hokkien and Nyonya, her amah’s Cantonese and more, in the culinary diversity that is Malaysia and Singapore. Clearly she also took a very keen interest in cooking from a very early age, helping with the marketing, and spending hours in the home kitchen closely observing all that went on.

And from this early age, fragrances and aromas seem to have been perhaps her greatest fascination, hence the title of her latest book.

The book itself is filled with recipes using Asian herbs, spices, fruits and seasonings, though not necessarily all Asian recipes in themselves. An example is pineapple lime salsa with mint, or lemongrass and coconut crème caramel.

The vast majority of recipes are of course Asian though, such as aromatic ginger soy chicken with rice wine, beef noodle soup with fragrant herbs, or shrimp with tropical coconut laksa gravy, just to name a few.

The introduction, gives an insight into how the author came to appreciate the importance of fragrance in cooking. The book is divided into four sections, cooking with aromatic Asian herbs, fruits, spices, and seasonings. And at the beginning of each section is very detailed information about the various ingredients used in the particular recipe.

Carol devotes a page to each ingredient, for example curry leaf or ginger flower (herbs), pomelo or mango (fruits), galangal or saffron (spices) and fish sauce or rice wine (seasonings). This to me is the crucial part of the book.

There is also information on how to purchase these ingredients, to prepare them, to store them and substitutes if they are unavailable.

Heavenly Fragrance could be called a cooking text book, rather than a recipe book, something of a source book or encyclopaedia even of Asian herbs spices and seasonings.

As for the recipes themselves, as mentioned there is a huge variety, including some drinks. Some dishes are simple with eight or less ingredients and prepared in a few minutes; others are rather more involved with 20 or more ingredients, an hour or so of preparation, perhaps including making fresh paste from several ingredients, marinating, then more than an hour of cooking time.

Methods are clearly explained, and the more simple recipes are not beyond the beginner in the kitchen. The pineapple lime salsa with mint had 10 basic ingredients, took me a few minutes to make, and tasted delicious, sharp, sweet and a little chilli hot, a great side dish.

The more ambitious coconut and green mango fish parcels I tried were also excellent, aromatic, light and fresh tasting. Though with 17 ingredients and 45 minutes preparation time a little more involved, and not without a problem, the banana leaves I used to wrap the fish before cooking split open, and I ended up wrapping half the fish pieces in foil instead.

Carol Selva Rajah has produced a great book for anyone with an interest in cooking with Asian ingredients. It has a good variety of recipes and importantly examines and discusses the raw materials too.

The book is also complimented by some beautiful photography from Masano Kawana, the award winning Japanese photographer. Heavenly Fragrance is published by Periplus and available in bookshops throughout Malaysia.

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