[Smen]

Smen in general is clarified butter, but the smelly smen seems to be a peculiarly Magrebi and more specifically Moroccan phenomenon.

According to Paula Wolfert, unclarified butter is referred to as zebda,

in Morocco, while clarified butter is called smen (see Wolfer, Couscous, 36-39). Smen is not always "aged", but Berbers apparently developed the habit of burying it in the ground for safekeeping.

Clarified butter seems to go by a bewildering number of names even in

the middle east, as indicated by this useful page on butter products by the FAO. Note how many different romanized transliterations there are for smen, such as samn, samnah, samneh (can some Arabic speaker tell me if this reflects different Arabic spellings or not?) Interestingly roghan is used in Iran to refer to clarified butter, while I believe in India it typically refers to animal fat (is this so, Suvir?).

[East/Central African cuisine?]

What is East/Central African cuisine like?  I mean that part of  Africa south of the sahara yet north of South Africa.  I've never eaten anything I could call an 'African Dish' that wasn't Moroccan or otherwise from the North.

Any recipes?

Subsaharan Africa has quite a rich cuisine, though that of West and South Africa is generally seen as more varied than that of East and Central Africa.

There is actually a great deal of culinary interchange between subsaharan countries, but one thing that makes tracking the origins of dishes difficult is the bewildering variety of languages and hence varying terms for similar

dishes. For instance, what is called ugali in Kenya is called mealie meal porridge in South Africa, Kenkay in Ghana, Nsima in Zambia, etc.

If any generalizations can be made, they are that West African cuisine is characterized by the use of "the ingredients", i.e. sauted onion, tomato, chilis, and palm oil, as well as, as mentioned already in this thread, peanuts. East African cuisine is heavily influenced by Arab and South Asian cuisines. South Africa is of course heavily influenced by Dutch cuisine, but also by that of South Asia and the East Indies (particularly in the Cape).

There does seem to be a fairly pan-subsaharan liking for sticky stews eaten with pounded starchy tubers (e.g. foofoo).

[Okinawa]

How about: Ashitibichi (Pig's Feet Soup)?

Also, for your amusement, I wanted to provide a long excerpt from the records of the party of Commodore Perry, who visited Okinawa in 1853-4:

. . . A pair of chop-sticks was placed at each corner of every table; in the centre was an earthen pot filled with sakee. (the intoxicating drink made by the Lew Chewans), surrpounded with four acorn cups, four large, coarse China cups, with clumsy spoons of the same material, and four teacups.  On each table were dishes to the number of some twenty, of various sizes and shapes, and the exact basis of some of which no American knoweth to this day; possibly it was pig.  Of the dishes, however, which were familiar to western apprehension there were sliced bolied egges, which had been dyed crimson, fish made into rolls and boiled in fat, pieces of cold baked fish, slices of hog's liver, sugar candy, cucumbers, mustard, slated radish tops, and fragments of lean pork, fried.  Cups of tea were first handed round; these were followed by very small cups of sakee, which had the taste of French liqueur.  Small banboo sticks, sharpened at one end, and which some of the guests mistook for toothpicks, were furnished, to be used as forks in taking balls of meat and dough from the soup, which made the first course.  Soup consisted also the next seven course of the twelve, whereof the repast consisted.  The other four were gingerbread, salad made of bean sprouts and young onion tops, a basket of what appeared to be some dark red fruit, but proved to be artificial balls composed of a thin dough rind covering a sugard pulp, and a deliciou mixture compuded of beaten eggs and a slender white root with an aromatic taste.  .  .

  .  .  . As to the culinary skill that had been employed in preparing the regent's feast, there were certainly dishes of the composition of which the guests were ignorant, but still they were, in general, savory and very good; much more so that those presented by Chinese cookery.

(!)

This was excerpted in the book Okinawan Cookery and Culture by

Hui O Laulima, the Woman's chapter of the United Okinawan Association in Hawai`i. But I think it's excerpted in other places including (?) a collection of

translated Japanese diaries by Donald Keene.

[Korean Ginseng Chicken (Samgyetang)]

There is also a version w/o ginseng called yeonggye baeksuk. The upper-end version is made with "black-bone" chicken which is supposed to multiply the medicinal value greatly!

[Rang Mahal - Is it all that?]

I never went there.

Have you gone to any of the many SOuth Indian places in the little Indian section of town?

What do you think of them?

The most famous manifestation of South Indian food in Singapore seems to be the "Banana Leaf" restaurants which specialize in a Singaporean-South Indian hybrid "Fish Head Curry". The most famous is Banana Leaf Apollo, but there seem to be a lot of others.

Another famous Singaporean-South Indian dish is murtabak, which is unlike the egg-filled Hyderabadi version and is more like a keema-filled paratha

made from maida. A murtabak w/o filling is called "roti canai" in Singapore /

Malaysia / Indonesia.

[The Kimchi Topic]

Kristin, the differences between the Japanese and Korean versions id similiar ingredients is very interesting.

I agree about the shiso kimchee and gohan. Hard to have room for anything else, it's so good.

The garlic stems are tender, very herbaceous, crunchy. Very nice with grilled saba (mackerel).

There was recently a big controversy (in Korea at least) about ownership

over the ISO standard for kimchi. Apparently the Japanese kimchi interests had proposed basing the standard on "kimuchi" (i.e. Japanese-style Kimchi) rather than the South Korean version. As you might expect, there was a huge nationalist uproar in South Korea, as the usual patriots came out to defend their sacred food. I believe that the eventual ajudication was separate standards for "kimchi" and "kimuchi". So the great kimchi war was

averted.

The general stereotype of Japanese kimuchi in Korea is that it has sugar

in it (!) and lacks both garlic and chili. Also that it is only made from baechu

(hakusai) and mu (daikon) while Korean kimchi comes in a lot of varieties.

From what I understand that may have been the case in the past (i.e. 1990s) but is no longer true.

[What does Curry mean?]

Another note on etymology: One of Thailand's five or so standard varieties

of curry paste is something called "gaeng kari". "Gaeng" is typically translated as Thai for "curry", and gaeng kari is apparent a Thai curry in

the Indian-influenced style, defined (as in much of the world outside the subcontinent) by use of ingredients such as turmeric, coriander, and cumin.

The point of this seemingly pointless digression is that is indirectly rebuts the notion that the English "curry" is derived from cury as in "Forme of Cury", as is mentioned as one possibility in the informative menumagazine.co.uk page. Gaeng kari apparently predates the beginning of British influence in Thailand. It furthermore seems unlikely that, being much closer to India, that Thailand could only acquire a taste for "curry" spices via the British. Given the unlikelihood that the term "curry" arose independently in Britain and Thailand from different etymologies but with similar meanings, it seem almost guaranteed that the term must have an Indian source. Hence Hobson-Jobson is vindicated!

[What does Curry mean?]

The remark about curry in Chinese restaurants gets me started on the entire mystery of East Asian "curries" and their origins. Here in Honolulu we have several branches of Coco Ichibanya, Japan's biggest curry fast food chain.

Japan's obsession with curry is nearly as deep, though not as broad, as Britain's. One survey showed that curry was the single most popular food among Japanese children.

Yet Japanese curry makes post-Raj British "bog standard" look like pure Hindustani cuisine. It typically contains soy sauce and beef tallow, and is thicked to the point of pastyness by a wheat flour roux. Its solid chunks are typically stewed beef or "tonkatsu" (breaded pork cutlet), but can also include fried squid, seaweed, quasi-korean "kalbi" (beef ribs), or "natto" (fermented soybeans). Typical sauce additives are chopped apples, plums, and tonkatsu sauce (!). It does contain coriander, cumin, turmeric, etc. whence the appellation presumably comes, but it's not clear how it arrived in Japan. Via the British? Hard to believe given the huge disparity between the British version and the Japanese. Via the Chinese? Then how to explain the much greater popularity in Japan than any part of the greater China?

Anyway, I digressed . . .

[Indian Cuisine: Its history and development]

Any book in the Penguin India series on regional Indian cookery (a lot of them beginning with "The Essential . . .") will have decent historical

background.  Also, if you are at all interested in the amusing topic of

British Raj cookery, you might look at  David Burton's Raj at Table or 

Jennifer Brennan's Curry and Bugles (?)

What do you think of these two books?

Burton's book is very droll and detailed. I haven't had a chance to more than glance through Brennan's book but it won an IACP award for literary food writing.

Many people also recommend Colonel Kenny-Herbert's 1878 cookbook _Culinary Jottings from Madras_ as an amusing historical document. Again, I haven't been able to read more than excerpts from it but I believe it is still available in the archives of a number of libraries.

Also the chapter on Raj cookery in the late Minakshie Das Gupta's first cookbook _Bangla Ranna_ (prior to the _Calcutta Cookbook_) is quite informative and entertaining.

[Indian Cuisine: Its history and development]

Any book in the Penguin India series on regional Indian cookery (a lot of them beginning with "The Essential . . .") will have decent historical

background. Also, if you are at all interested in the amusing topic of

British Raj cookery, you might look at David Burton's Raj at Table or

Jennifer Brennan's Curry and Bugles (?)