It’s just what the doctors ordered
INGREDIENTS
ALT, sweet, sour, spice, umami and crunch – Burmese food has it all, and yet it’s still relatively unknown in the West. However, it’s unlikely to stay this way for long, if Emily and Amy Chung have anything to do with it.
The women, who both work as doctors, have just published their first cookbook – The Rangoon Sisters. The Chungs have Burmese parents and their nickname comes from the largest city in Myanmar – Yangon – also known as Rangoon.
Most people still aren’t really familiar with Burmese cuisine, which Amy drily describes as “absolutely delicious, obviously”.
“It does have influences from neighbouring countries, like Thailand, China and India, so there might be some familiar flavours and spices – and there’s lots of onion, garlic and ginger,” she explains.
“But Burmese cuisine has a lot to offer as an individual cuisine as well; it has curries which tend to be more mildly spiced and aromatic after slow cooking, and you also have lots of vibrant fresh salads, which are more substantial than your average salad. It’s full of textures and different condiments.”
Emily says her favourite thing about Burmese food is “the extra bits you can add onto your plate, to make each mouthful a different flavour”. She associates an “intensity and saltiness” with it because of the prevalence of “shrimpy, fishy flavours”. This, coupled with all the dips and sauces that tend to feature, means “you can make your plate your own”, she adds. “So if you’d like lots of chilli flavour, you can have that, and you can alter the sourness as well – there’s something for everybody.”
The sisters were born and grew up in South London and say their Anglo-Burmese-Chinese heritage inspires their cooking. They started showcasing Burmese food through supper clubs.
Looking back at their first one in 2013, the sisters laugh. “We hadn’t really thought too much about what we were undertaking,” says Emily with a groan. Instead of starting small, their first event was for 60 people, which Emily says was “quite frantic when we were in the kitchen”.
All of the recipes they served for that first ever event are now in their cookbook – starting with chickpea fritters, followed by ohn no khauk swe – a classic Burmese dish of coconut chicken noodles, often served at birthdays – and ending with mango cheesecake.
Their quest to champion Burmese food might be going from strength to strength, but the Chungs haven’t given up their day jobs. Both sisters say their work as doctors complements their culinary side hustle.
“It helps in the sense that as a medic, to get your day done, you have to be organised, you have to be able to manage your time, and you have to be able to prioritise and communicate with your team,” says Emily – and the same applies to cooking.
She continues: “I think it’s really nice to be able to do something quite different, and put your energy and focus into something else that you can get pleasure out of – even though it is quite hard and tiring sometimes,”
It might be an escape from the intense world of medicine, but writing a cookbook came with its own difficulties.
“One of the challenges we both found is when you’re doing recipes from your mum or grandma or dad, they don’t have fixed instructions or quantities,” says Emily. “So you have to watch what they’re doing and you can’t take your eyes off them, because they’ll be adding this and that without thinking about how much... you pick up those behaviours... But now at least it’s all documented.”
The Rangoon Sisters: Recipes From Our Burmese Family Kitchen by Emily and Amy Chung, recipe photography by Martin Poole, is published by Penguin, £20.