The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I don’t think I would enjoy travelling nearly so much if I wasn’t so greedy’
For celebrity chef Dame Prue Leith, eating with local people conveys the flavour of a country better than any guide book
In the early 1970s, when I was a newly-fledged restaurateur, I once ate in five Michelin three-star restaurants in three days. I was worshiping at the shrines of nouvelle cuisine: Bocuse, Chapel, Troisgros, Verge, Pic. I was blown away every time.
Having grown older, however – and become less involved in the restaurant trade – I find that on my travels I’m far more interested in what locals eat. And I’ve been lucky. My husband John is addicted to travel and his idea of heaven is far from five-star luxury. Instead, he prefers us to bash off in a hire car to see what we can find. As a result, we have eaten a lot of very interesting local food.
It’s not always been easy to come by, though. In Oman, every hostelry we visited served up what they thought western tourists would like – some approximation of hamburgers or KFC. But in one motel we smelt something delicious emanating from a back kitchen. We followed our noses and ended up in the staff restaurant eating excellent Omani curry. John has developed another cool trick to avoid tourist food: he asks the chefs to make us what they would make for their mothers. This is usually greeted with disbelief, followed by delighted acceptance.
Travel not only broadens the mind, but also makes you think. Twenty years ago, in Cantonese markets, I saw what my Western mind perceived as an appalling lack of hygiene and a cold indifference to the suffering of animals. Live frogs were skewered in a stack on a long metal rod and sold off one by one; fish swam in a tarpaulin in the back of a pickup; sellers killed and butchered chickens to order, chopping them up on the pavement. But there was logic to it at the time. In a hot country with little refrigeration, food had to be kept as fresh as possible – and nothing is fresher than still alive. Housewives shopped every day and bought very little, cooking it fresh in the sterilising temperatures of a blazing wok. There would be no leftovers and they would repeat the process again the next day. I now wonder whether the food-poisoning rate in China has decreased or increased since fridges became more affordable and readily available.
When it comes to my favourite destination, Bhutan wins hands down – especially the seldom-visited eastern part, where there are almost no modern buildings, life revolves around the temple, and people still cut corn with scythes and wear colourful national dress. We stumbled into feast days all the time – the entire community dressed up to celebrate – and found people friendly and genuinely happy (Bhutan measures its Gross National Happiness and is very serious about it). Sadly, though, the food was dire. You have to eat tourist food, because the amount of chilli locals put into their stews of overcooked vegetables makes a vindaloo seem as mild as porridge.
Once, while walking in the country at harvest time, we were invited to join a group of women picnicking in a field, babysitting all the village children too young to help with the harvest. They were eating rice mixed with dollops of commercial chilli from a jar, so strong that we could not manage a gnat’s portion. A baby, not yet crawling, was clamouring for the chilli jar. When his mother relented, he plunged his fat fingers into the chilli, then into his mouth and all over his cheeks. My theory is that many of the Bhutanese (and the Tibetans) have completely shot their taste buds from an early age.
Japan was an entirely different proposition. We expected – and got – superb bento boxes on the bullet train and impeccable sushi in an eye-wateringly expensive traditional restaurant that served only 10 people round a counter, all eating in concentrated silence. But the most delicious thing I ate on that trip was cheap as chips: a hot, deep-fried ball of rice bought at Tokyo railway station. The outside was coated in crisp panko crumbs, the inside, a layer of thick curry sauce moulded around a perfectly softboiled egg. It was not easy to eat, but it was absolute heaven. Then there were the famous Japanese ramen shops. They are everywhere, but it’s easy to spot the best ones by the long lines of locals patiently queueing outside.
In Madurai in southern India, we hired a foodie guide (foodiesdayout. com) to take us on a street food walking tour, stopping at the best stalls. There, we sampled wares including a little paper cornet full of lightly spiced noodles; mini clay pots of curry; newspaper-wrapped fried chickpeas and puffed rice; bowl-shaped appams (rice pancakes) filled with vegetable mixes; those panipuri (fried, filled dough discs) that explode in your mouth, releasing a stream of slightly sweet chilli sauce; lentil dahl in a banana leaf; and deep-fried mini doughnuts called adhirasam, full of super sweet jaggery.
The Atlas Mountains of Morocco provided another memorable trip. It was a walking holiday and we trekked for hours a day through breathtaking scenery. Our nights were spent in sub-zero tents, snuggled in sleeping bags lined with donkey fur and listening to our Berber guides singing softly as the pack mules farted loudly outside. The highlight each day was lunch. We would round the shoulder of a mountain to find our guides had spread a carpet on the sand with a picnic of such visual perfection that we would hesitate to destroy the idyllic scene. We would take our shoes off (very important: keeping them on would have been shocking) and the guides would bring elaborate jugs to rinse our hands in running water before we tucked in. There were dishes of salad dotted with pomegranate and small decorated ceramic bowls of nuts, tomatoes, olives, cucumbers with mint, yogurt; platters of samosa-like little pasties; rice dishes; savoury cakes; flatbreads. All followed by strong, sweet coffee and rose-scented baklava.
I had a very different hike in Laos, with my daughter, Li-Da, across the mountains on the Chinese border. Our itinerary promised picnics under waterfalls, watching the local bird-catcher calling birds and a home stay in a guest house complete with “Western WC” in a picturesque mountain-top village. Of course, it wasn’t quite like that when we arrived. Our guide explained that the five-day walking tour we’d purchased began with a 10-hour bumpy ride in an ancient combi and the last day would be spent on a ferry across the Mekong to Thailand. The latter involved wading in the river with our luggage on our heads.
During the three days in the middle, we did not see waterfalls or calling birds and the promised guest house had blown down. Instead, the village chief kindly offered to put us up and I would not have missed it for the world – although I wouldn’t do it again for the
Two of the chief’s wives were plucking kingfishers and canaries. They lived on what they could trap
world, either. The chief ’s house (like all the others, on stilts) was by far the biggest, serving as his home and also the village council chamber, meeting place and communal kitchen. There were two fires in the middle of the floor, one for meals and one for animal feed, but no chimney: the smoke just had to find its own way out (none too well) through the grass roof.
On our arrival, two of the chief ’s many wives were plucking what looked like kingfishers and canaries, the iridescent blue and lemon yellow feathers going straight into the fire. The village people lived on a diet of sticky rice and whatever they could trap: birds, squirrels, rats (though they drew the line at cats, which – thank heavens – are sacred to the Buddha). Food waste, of which there was very little, went through gaps in the floorboards to the chickens and pigs under the houses.
As soon as word got round that we had brought beer and plenty of food, the villagers filled the room and our guides cooked huge quantities of the sort of fare that they would be lucky to see once a year on a feast day: chicken and vegetable soup; green curry of pork and vegetables, fragrant with lemongrass and galangal; sticky rice and delicious, ripe mango. We were ravenous after a fivehour uphill hike, and it tasted like heaven. The men sat round on their haunches eating and drinking and arguing loudly. The women crouched similarly, but in an outer row, each with a toddler on her back and a baby on her front. When offered anything they shook their heads, smiling and shy.
Less exotic, but equally memorable, was my best barbecue ever: a traditional asado in Argentina. We were staying with friends in a finca on the pampas and it became a sort of all-day lunch. Preparations started after breakfast with the building of a bed of stones, on which a fire was lit and logs burned to embers. This was covered with a huge mesh grill to cook sausages, liver, kidney and chitterlings. The main event was a freshly-slaughtered whole lamb, opened up and splayed on a wooden frame. This was propped in front of a fire slowly to grill first one side then the other. There were salads and salsas, but there was one clear hero: a meat-fest never to be forgotten.
My childhood memories of barbecues in my native South Africa are less dramatic but no less fond; no one should visit without experiencing a braai. I remember eating Cape lobster grilled over a fire in an open-air restaurant on Table Bay beach; buying fresh perlemoen (abalone) barbecued on coals in a tin-drum on Cape Town docks; at a family braai, being torn between cheese-and-apricot jam toasties (meant for the children) and the grown-ups’ yellowtail fish caught by my uncle and steaming in foil on the embers.
Eating outside is what South Africans do. The Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town has a deservedly famous buffet beside the swimming pool and almost all the wineries round Franschhoek and Stellenbosch sell wonderful picnics, where fashionable Italian antipasti can be followed by South African melktert (a cinnamony custard tart) or koeksisters (deep-fried pastries soaked in syrup). I’ve not been back to South Africa for two years and I can’t wait to return now that we can visit once more.
I don’t think I would enjoy travelling nearly so much if I wasn’t so greedy and so keen to taste the world. Food is part of a country’s culture, so it seems mad to baulk at giving new flavours a go. One of the best ways for a speedy introduction is to join a cookery class or a street-food walking tour: I have done this in Vietnam, Thailand, Holland and Egypt. Exploring the world through your tastebuds is far more fun, at any age, than reading a guide book.
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