FRAGRANT MEMORIES
Lemongrass has a scent able to transport you to Borneo — or wherever you dream of
In 2006, as part of a World Cookbook Awards prize I had won, I found myself on a plane bound for Borneo. After a rough night watching the enormous lizard that was trotting around the ceiling of my hotel room, I joined my fellow prizewinners in the hotel lobby. It turned out only four other people had signed up for the Borneo adventure —a couple of photographers from China who spoke zero English and immediately disappeared, and two older women from Sweden. The itinerary provided for our trip looked decidedly uninspiring, so the Swedes and I decided to join forces and hire our own guide for the week.
As luck would have it, the man tracked down to look after us had been one of David Attenborough’s on-the-ground guides. What an amazing man. He had studied as an ethnobotanist and knew everything about everything.
One day he took us on a long windy drive up into the jungle to visit a longhouse that belonged to the Murat tribe. Until around the 1820s, the Murut people were feared throughout Borneo for their headhunting practices. Before marriage, men had to sever and obtain at least one head, and regular headhunting raids were part and parcel of daily life. More recently, we were told — in the lifetime of some of the people at the longhouse — raids would be made between neighbouring villages to steal young girls for wives.
The longhouse, built to house around 100 people, stood a couple of metres off the ground on big bamboo poles with a single entry via a narrow wooden staircase at one end. It was surrounded on all sides by a thick hedge of lemongrass. This, we were told, was to ward off the mosquitoes. Inside, women were weaving fine fabrics over simple wooden looms, while others sat cross-legged on the floor, making beautiful jewellery from seed pods, shells, beads of glass and stones. We were served lunch on an array of neon-coloured plastic bowls. A wonderfully fragrant delicate curry made with wild jungle greens and finely sliced banana flowers, was partnered with a mound of tender tiny-grained rice — each grain was only about the size of a cumin seed. For all its humble simplicity, our meal was perfectly cooked and the flavours beautifully balanced. The aroma of the lemongrass wafted from the rice and its citrusy notes lingered through the lightly curried vegetables. It was hard to imagine the bloodthirsty past this building had known, and there was no sign of any ghoulish human heads.
These days, whenever I bash a stalk of lemongrass to add to a pot of mussels or finely chop the creamy inner heart to add to a fish soup, chicken bake or dressing, its fragrant scent transports me back to Borneo and that extraordinary day spent among the Murat people in their ancient longhouse, deep in the jungle of Borneo.