Shining a Light on Myanmar’s Comfort Food
在缅甸，真正的慰藉来自食物

EACH time the Canadian photographer and writer Naomi Duguid traveled to Myanmar from 2008 to 2011, researching the country’s food traditions, she knew she had to cram in as much eating and learning as possible.

从2008年到2011年，加拿大摄影师兼作家内奥米·杜吉德(Naomi Duguid)每次到缅甸调查该国的美食传统时，都知道她得尽量多吃一点食物，多了解一点知识。

“I had to assume that every trip might be the last,” she said, alluding to the country’s long epoch of military rule, during which contact between ordinary citizens and outsiders was risky. If she had been caught in her usual research mode — lingering for days in outdoor markets, photographing street food and ingredients, learning from home cooks — she could have been branded a journalist and barred from the country. But having documented the food of Thailand, China, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Tibet, Malaysia and Singapore, she was determined to “complete the journey” in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

“我必须得假设每次旅行都是最后一次，”她这番话暗指该国漫长的军事统治时期，那时候普通百姓跟外国人之间的接触，是很冒险的。如果她在进行常规调查时——连续多日在露天市场徘徊，拍摄街上的食物和食材，讨教私家厨师——被发现，她可能被当成记者，驱逐出境。但是她已经整理了泰国、中国、老挝、柬埔寨、印度、巴基斯坦、西藏、马来西亚和新加坡的食物，她下定决心要“完成缅甸之旅”。
 

缅甸克伦邦首府帕安的市场。

“The country had become a black hole” since the first time she visited, in 1980, she said. “But food is the last refuge for people under siege.”

她说，从她1980年第一次到这里以来，“这个国家已经变成了一个黑洞”，“但是食物是被围困的人们最后的慰藉”。

She could not have assumed, or even imagined, that by the time her new book, “Burma: Rivers of Flavor,” was finally published last month, a democratically elected government would rule the country, the activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would be freed from house arrest and elected to Parliament or the country’s longstanding barriers against outside influence (there are few Internet connections and no McDonald’s or Starbucks in Myanmar) would begin to soften. To her surprise, the book is now a timely, as well as absorbing and gorgeous, guide to a cuisine that has remained relatively unknown and untouched.

她从来没有假设过，甚至幻想过，在她的新书《缅甸：味道之河》(Burma: Rivers of Flavor)（上个月）最终出版的时候，一个民主选举的政府会统治这个国家，社会活动家昂山素季女士(Daw Aung San Suu Kyi)会被解除软禁并选入议会，长期以来该国与世隔绝的状态（缅甸几乎没有互联网，也没有麦当劳或者星巴克）会开始放松。让她惊喜的是，这本书现在出版正合时宜；它精彩纷呈，引人入胜，介绍了缅甸几乎不为人所知的美食。

For fans of Southeast Asian cuisines like Thai and Vietnamese, discovering Burmese food is the adult equivalent of finding a new playground, right in your neighborhood. The familiar profile of hot, sour, sweet and salty is there, but in new combinations and with new cornerstones: crisp-fried garlic and shallots, Indian spices, edible tea leaves, sweet-hot red chile powders and dark, smoky palm sugar.

对于喜爱东南亚美食（比如泰国菜和越南菜）的人来说，发现缅甸食物，就像是在自家附近找到了一个新游乐场。辣、酸、甜、咸，这些熟悉的味道还在，不过，是用新的方式组合在一起的，而且还加了一些新的关键调味品：脆煎大蒜和圆葱，印度香料，可以食用的茶叶，甜辣的红辣椒粉，以及深色的熏制棕榈糖。

“Our food is not as famous in the world as Thai or Indian,” said Thataw Tabun, one of the organizers of an annual Burmese food fair in Queens that is avidly tracked by New Yorkers who love Southeast Asian food. “But our aunties are just as good cooks.”

“我们的食物在世界上不如泰国菜和印度菜那么出名，”沙托塔邦(Thataw Tabun)说；他是皇后区一年一度的缅甸食物展销会的组织者之一，喜爱东南亚美食的纽约人蜂拥而至。“但是我们的主妇们也一样很会做菜。”

For the festival, strings are pulled and heaven and earth moved to bring in ingredients like preserved tea leaves, baby ginger and fresh roselle, a tangy relative of the hibiscus, with green leaves that are steamed or fried with chile powder. Mr. Tabun, who is in his 30s, lived in Yangon until he was a teenager, and like most of the community here, uses “Burma” and “Burmese” when referring to his native country and culture. The name comes from the largest ethnic group in the country, the Bamar, but there are many others, including the Kachin, Shan, Chin and Rakhine, all with distinct cultures and cooking styles that reflect the mixed topography of the land.

为了这个展销会，他们大费周折，千里迢迢，带来了原料，比如腌制的茶叶，嫩姜和新鲜的洛神花，后者是木槿的近亲，气味浓烈，它的绿色叶子可以用来蒸食或者用辣椒粉煎食。塔邦先生30多岁，十三岁之前住在仰光，就像这个社区的大多数人那样，提到他的祖国和文化时，用的是Burma和Burmese。这个名字来自于该国最大的民族——巴玛族(Bamar)，该国还有其他一些民族，包括克钦族(Kachin)、掸族(Shan)、钦族(Chin)和若开族(Rakhine)。每个民族都有独特的文化和烹饪方法，反映出这片土地复杂的地势。

Myanmar sits on the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean, streaked top to bottom with wide river valleys — the Irrawaddy, the Sittaung, the Salween — where most of the population lives. Its long coastline stretches up from Thailand and curves back to Bangladesh.

缅甸位于印度洋的东部，宽阔的河谷从上而下给该国画上了很多条纹——伊洛瓦底江、锡当河和萨尔温江——大部分的人都住在这里。漫长的海岸线从泰国向上蜿蜒至孟加拉。

But its bulk is in the north, wedged between India and China. Many Burmese dishes carry the scents and flavors of both. In a stew, you might find the okra and turmeric of Bengal; in a salad, the tart vegetables and dried shrimp of Yunnan, the part of China that borders Myanmar. Everywhere, crisped shallots and garlic, bracing turmeric, tangy lime, crunchy roasted peanuts and chile pastes infuse the most basic dishes with wild contrast and crunch.

但是它的主体在北部，夹在印度和中国之间。很多缅甸菜同时具有这两国菜肴的味道和调料。在炖菜中，你可能会找到孟加拉的秋葵和姜黄；在沙拉中，会发现与缅甸接壤的中国云南省的蔬菜挞和干虾。脆生生的圆葱和大蒜，清爽的姜黄，气味浓烈的酸橙，嚼起来嘎嘣作响的烤花生，以及辣椒酱，都融合在最基本的菜肴中，对比鲜明，很有嚼头。

“Thoke — you could call them salads — are the dishes that leap out to me in Burma,” said Ms. Duguid, 62, as we sliced round, deep-purple Asian shallots during a recent cooking session. Since she has produced authoritative books on Southeast Asia, western China and the entire world’s ways of cooking rice and flatbreads, when she finds something distinctive, it is likely to be very interesting indeed.

“Thoke——你可以称之为沙拉——是引起我特别注意的一种缅甸菜肴，”前不久我们在烹饪课上切那种深紫色的亚洲圆葱时，62岁的杜吉德女士对我这样说。她出版过关于东南亚、中国西部以及全世界做米饭和大饼的各种方法的权威书籍，所以如果她觉得什么东西很独特，那东西一定非常有趣。

“Salad” turns out to be an accurate but inadequate translation of thoke, just as “sauce” is inadequate for “salsa” when it comes to Mexican food. Thoke are lavishly seasoned combinations of raw and cooked vegetables, fresh herbs, chopped nuts, toasted seeds and often a single rich ingredient like pork cracklings or dried shrimp. “The Burmese want a little bit of everything in each bite,” she said, explaining why thoke ingredients are cut small and always tossed together with the hands.

把thoke翻译成“沙拉”，比较准确，但是不够充分；就像用sauce（调味汁）指代墨西哥食物里的salsa一样，总觉得不全面。Thoke味道浓郁，里面包括很多生的或者煮过的蔬菜，新鲜的香草，捣碎的坚果和烤制的种子，通常只包括一种油腻的配料，比如猪油渣或者干虾。“缅甸人希望每一口里面，什么都有一点，”她这样解释为什么thoke的配料都切得很细，而且都是用手拌匀的。

Fruits are used in thoke in their sweet-sour state: often pomelo, the cousin of grapefruit, or tomatoes, which as in most of Southeast Asia are used when still small and streaked with pale green.

Thoke里用的水果都是酸甜味的：通常是柚子（跟葡萄柚接近）或者番茄——像大多数东南亚国家那样，使用那种还没长大、带着淡绿色条纹的番茄。

Our cooking session ended up completely dedicated to gyin thoke, a lively ginger salad that can have as many as 20 ingredients, each contributing an element of contrast and surprise. In Myanmar, it would be made with shavings of young ginger; Ms. Duguid has come up with an excellent workaround with shreds of sushi-style pickled ginger.

我们的烹饪课最后完全就是在做gyin thoke，那是一种爽口的姜制沙拉，有多达20种配料，每一种都增加一份对比和惊喜。在缅甸，它是用嫩姜末做的；杜吉德女士想出了一种绝妙的变通方法：用寿司风味的腌制姜末代替嫩姜末。

“Obsessing about authenticity has become this competitive sport,” she said. “Cooks in Burma, or anywhere, will always use what they can get their hands on and what tastes good.”

“过分追求正宗，会适得其反，”她说。“缅甸的厨师，以及其他任何地方的厨师，总会采用他们手边现有的、美味的原料。”

Ms. Duguid’s work, both in her new book and in six previous books with her former husband, Jeffrey Alford, has more in common with anthropology than with usual notions of food and travel writing. In “Flatbreads and Flavors,” they reached around the world to find kinships among pita and pizza, tortillas and tandoor breads. In “Seductions of Rice,” they managed to explore all of Asia (with a few detours to the Mediterranean) by diving deeply into every place and every way that rice is grown, polished, processed and eaten.

杜吉德的著作，包括她的新作以及和她的前夫杰弗瑞·奥尔福德(Jeffrey Alford)合著的前6本书，与人类学更有相通之处，而不是通常意义上的美食和旅游图书。在《大饼和风味》(Flatbreads and Flavors)一书中，他们走遍全世界，寻找阿拉伯皮塔饼、意大利披萨饼、墨西哥玉米粉圆饼和印度圆炉烤饼之间的联系。在《大米的诱惑》(Seductions of Rice)一书里，他们探访整个亚洲（还几次绕道地中海），深入每一个地方，探究大米种植、磨光、加工和食用的各种方法。

“When I look at her books, I despair that I am just dancing over the surface of these cuisines that I am trying to explore,” said Dave Cook, who writes the Eating in Translation blog and has traveled extensively in Asia. “She goes deep.” Her books always include thorough discussions of geography, ethnography, religion, history and agriculture, along with descriptions of spices and aromatics and recipes so alluring that you can almost smell them on the page.

“我看她的书的时候，会觉得自己对那些菜式的了解是多么肤浅，”戴夫·库克(Dave Cook)说；他在自己的Eating in Translation网站上撰写饮食方面的文章，曾在亚洲广泛游历。“她很深入。”她的书总是包括对地理、人种、宗教、历史和农业的深入讨论，还描述了各种调味料、香料和菜谱，写得十分诱人，你好像都能从书上闻得见香味。

The photography is just as evocative. Her images of Myanmar’s ancient Buddhist temples, its monks and markets, and especially its women, who do most of the selling and cooking of food, connect the written word to real people and real food. In her books, a rusted tin can of glowing fresh chiles or a pile of shallots, carefully arranged by a teenage girl with a saucy grin, can tell you as much about a curry as the recipe.

书中的照片也很动人。她拍摄的缅甸古代寺庙、和尚和市场，特别是妇女——食物销售和烹饪主要就是靠她们，把书中的文字跟真实的人物和食物联系了起来。在她的书里，一个生锈的锡罐中盛放的明艳的鲜辣椒，或者笑容俏丽的大姑娘精心码放的一堆圆葱，就像菜肴中的咖喱那样意涵丰富。

But, she said, she has always been careful to keep a safe distance between herself and the people she photographed or interviewed. “Wherever we went, our mantra was first, do no harm,” she said, referring to the many places she had worked where, simply by asking questions or taking pictures, Westerners could bring trouble. “And the second was, keep the generals out of the kitchen,” she said, meaning: keep the work focused on food, even when politics, ethnic clashes and boundary disputes threatened to enter the picture.

但是她说，她总是很小心地让自己和她拍摄或者采访的人物之间保持一个安全的距离。“不管去哪儿，我们的第一个原则都是：不要伤害别人，”她说；在她工作的很多地方，哪怕只是提问题或者拍照，西方人都会惹出麻烦。“第二个原则是，把将军挡在厨房外面，”她说；她的意思是，只关注食物，即便是在政治、种族冲突或者边界争端可能会进入画面的时候。

After more than 30 years of near-constant travel in turbulent places like Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar, Ms. Duguid is convinced of the importance of food in the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Inside their homes, at their stoves and tables, is often the only place where people feel safe. Mr. Tabun, while declining to comment on life in Yangon under military rule, said the city’s residents could always find comfort in a morning bowl of mohinga, a rich, aromatic breakfast soup that is often called the Burmese national dish.

30多年来，杜吉德女士几乎不停歇地在一些动荡的地区旅行，比如西藏、孟加拉和缅甸，她因此深知食物对于生活在特殊环境中的普通人的重要性。在家里，在灶台和餐桌旁，往往是这些人唯一感觉安全的地方。塔邦先生拒绝谈论军事统治期仰光的生活，但是他说这个城市的居民总是能够从早晨的一碗汤(mohinga)中找到慰藉；这种汤原料丰富、气味芳香，常被称作缅甸的“国汤”。

Even in politically turbulent places, as a lone woman who looks like any other Western tourist with a camera, Ms. Duguid said her presence in a food market generally went unnoticed. But the key for making real contact with cooks has always been to not ask questions too soon. “I try to hang around and not need anything from anyone for as long as possible,” she said. “After a while, people seem to decide that I’m harmless, either because they think I am a lunatic, or because I have this wide-open peasant face.”

杜吉德女士说，即使是在政治动荡的地区，她出现在食品市场通常也不会引起注意，因为她孤身一身，拿着相机，与其他西方游客没有任何区别。但是跟厨师进行真正的接触的关键是，永远不要过早开始提问。“我总是尽量多徘徊一会儿，显得我不是想从任何人那里索取任何东西，”她说。“过一段时间之后，人们似乎会确信我不会带来伤害，或许是因为他们觉得我是个疯婆子，或许是因为我这张大宽脸，看起来像农民。”

Now, Ms. Duguid divides her year between Toronto and Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, which was her base for research trips to Myanmar. The two regions share a dish, a rich coconut-milk chicken curry with springy egg noodles, called khao soi in Thai and kout swe in Burmese, that is a touchstone for lovers of Burmese food.

现在，杜吉德一般住在多伦多或者泰国北部的清迈，后者是她探访缅甸的大本营。两地有同一种食物：用油腻的椰奶鸡肉咖喱做汤底的劲道的鸡蛋面，泰语称之为khao soi，缅甸语称之作kout swe。这道汤面是检验一个人是否喜爱缅甸食物的试金石。

“That balance of rich and tangy and spicy gets me every time,” said the New York chef Sara Jenkins, who recently cooked an all-Burmese dinner at her restaurant, Porsena, although her culinary grounding is strictly Italian.

“那种油腻、刺激和辛辣的平衡，每次都能打动我，”纽约大厨莎拉·詹金斯(Sara Jenkins)说；她最近在她的餐厅Porsena烹制全部由缅甸菜组成的大餐，虽然她的烹饪基础是严格的意大利风味的。

One appetizer was a dish of tiny dried anchovies, as slim as spaghetti, fried crisp and dusted with garlic and chile powder. “They tasted Italian as much as Burmese to me,” she said. “That’s the fun of getting out of your comfort zone and into the world.”