Honeycombe Pandan Cakes In Exchange For English
After School Hunger, The Cambodian Lady & Pandan Ice Cream Recipe
I was hungry. Everyday I was hungry and ravenous. I couldn’t think of anything other than the rage that my body felt. I felt like I personified anger. I was hungry. My insides ached and panged. Everything made me angry. No longer a fish and chip shop along my long journey home from school, far from my little brother and my primary school friends.
Every day, for years but what seemed like decades, I raced to the top of the steepest Dartmouth Hill, alone. Surpassing the gorgeous south facing Victorian houses I dreamt of living in one day when I would grow up with a husband who loved me and two bouncy children. I wanted to reach the bus stop before the blaring bus stop where all the roaring kids from the neighbouring school, Ackland Burghley got on. They were loud and scary. They screamed and pushed each other whilst their crisps fell to the ground and someone would carelessly trod on them. They wasted what I desperately craved for, they threw cheesy puff wotsits at each other for laughs. I quickly stared at the florescent orange dust imprinted on their jackets, like moth powder. They smelled like vinegar, chocolate bars, soggy cabbage and fresh laundry. Their legs were scrapped, covered in bruises and sticky grey stains of sweet treacly carton juice that had spilled earlier and taken on dirt and grime. I was terrified that they would look at me and come up to me so I kept my head down. I sat on my lower deck seat at the back of the bus, next to the exasperated old ladies with their carrier bags and miserably looked out of the window as if I was covering my eyes in hope to not be seen. I envied those kids they had crisps, a luxury not afforded where I belonged.
I would eventually arrive home from school to a small, modest council flat upon the junctions of Highbury and Hackney, the inner city of London where the telephone code on my street was 0208 and over the road was 0207.
The fragrance of coconut, the balm of grass and floral aroma of pandan was wafting the air the nearer I got. I could smell the sweet pasture from the ground floor—and we lived on the fourth—shifting through the meadows of boiled potatoes, beans on toast, and boiled peas.
Sometimes I heard laughter from my mum’s fellow Vietnamese speaker friend who lived in a council flat near us in Manor House. She was a four-foot, five-inch Cambodian lady called Lam Lien. She had (and still does) a very loud, coarse, and echoey animated voice. She was always perfectly dressed, with fitted homemade knitwear and beautifully blown-dried ’50s hair. She was a refugee of the Pol Pot regime to Vietnam, then a refugee from the Vietnamese.
We always called her, Bà Tiều, “The Cambodian Lady” because like many traditional Vietnamese people, my mum would describe people (with affection, always) rather than using their names, like “sister two,” “brother three,” “the chubby man”, “beautiful girl,” and so on. Although she must have been young when we were young, we always saw her as an old lady, like a grandma, with constant sage advice to my mum about a good skin care regime, how to be more desirable and gave us little horror stories if we didn’t eat every grain of rice. She referred to my mum and her kids as “mày” the most derogative term for “you” because she could, she was the eldest and everyone has to respect the eldest person in the room.
In Vietnamese, there is only a formal you (bạn) and I (tôi), which you only use if you do not know the persons you are talking to. At home, we talk to each other using our names in the third person, like, “mum go shopping” or “Chou (my family nickname) feel hungry.”
In the ’90s, when President Clinton lifted the embargo on Vietnam and we were able to buy more Vietnamese produce in the U.K. The Vietnamese ladies of Hackney were joyously dealing lengths of pandan leaves in their kitchens. They were sharing them in little plastic bags, counting coins and giving each other careful instructions: How to preserve freshness. How to squeeze out every last drop for an extract. How much water to use. How to obtain the extract.
The kitchen was often a green mess, with circles of dark emerald extract on the surfaces. Among the pandan air, the ladies counselled each other on the health benefits of the spears. It cures everything apparently! Reuse the leaves one would say, don’t waste it, you can have another go at that. Its amazing drenched in hot water for a tea.
I was alway happy to see, smell and feel pandan. They meant joyful sweet cakes were on the horizon, which lifted my spirits from a hard day. Desserts not being a necessity were never a discussion, they were wholesomely required, not just to round off a meal but what it provides in comfort and joy. As a feeder, my mum made sure something was always there, be it a shop bought trifle or a mix of Birds custard powder on buttered toast. But more often, my mum would stand in the kitchen amongst the steaming pots, opening tins of coconut milk, talking to herself and cursing that the Cambodian lady is withholding information about a recipe, she was certain of it. Yet the scent was still mesmerising and this was how she acts upon her love.
The Cambodian Lady visited us with a bamboo basket of white, pink and green steamed honeycombed coconut and pandan cakes/ muffins (bánh bò) every weekend. In exchange, she asked for me and my brother to teach her English. It went on for years. She brought pandan rice puddings, mung bean layer cake and chiffon sponge cake. And she would only learn: “How are you?” “I would like to buy fish.” “Thank you very much.”
That was enough for us to eagerly await Saturday afternoons and enough for her to keep making those pandan sweets, whose secrets she only half shared. We were nearest to her family of 12, 10 of whom she had lost to Pol Pot. Her gifts, her offerings of love and affection, made her feel part of a unit again. She taught me how to knit and advised me to always look smart no matter what.
Lam Lien is now in her 90s, no one is sure of her exact age. Her hair is as white as the snow she stood on when she first arrived in London in 1982. She resides in Vietnam. When she comes back to the UK, she wants to go back to Saigon. When she is in Saigon, she wants to go back to London. “Please show me the way home”, she croaks and laughs.
She has always been into natural beauty, keeping her skin white and flawless, washing her hair with rice water and conditioning it with coconut oil. I used to bring her The Body Shop skin care goods when I had a 50% staff discount from my Saturday job and she still loves wearing red lipstick and elegant clothing with great style. Drink good tea she says, but always wash it first, someone would have trodden on it.
I invited her to have dinner with my friends and family 14 years ago when Jamie Oliver visited for his TV show. It was one of the best days of our lives, one we always remember and talk about. I gave her a taste of pandan ice cream, and she was impressed. “If only I have an ice cream machine, I would have made the best. Tell me,” she whispered, “what’s your secret?”
Pandan Ice Cream from my cookbook - ‘Vietnamese’ by Uyen Luu, published by Hardie Grant
Serves 6
80 g (3 oz) pandan leaves, cut into 10 cm (4 in) pieces 200 ml (7 fl oz/scant 1 cup) coconut water
200 g (7 oz) condensed milk
200 ml (7 fl oz/scant 1 cup) double (heavy) cream
Blend the pandan leaves with the coconut water until smooth. Push the liquid through a sieve and into a bowl, making sure you squeeze out all the juice but discard any dry minced pandan.
Mix together the pandan extract with the condensed milk and cream. Churn in an ice cream maker for 50 minutes, or according to the machine instructions. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, place the contents into a tub and freeze for 2 hours. Mash it up with a fork, then freeze again. Repeat once or twice more until the ice cream is frozen through.
________ I have written about Ba Lien, based on a piece a I wrote for Food 52 and chapter openers for my books which has been edited out due to lack of space.