Sambal, a pungent reminder of home and hardship

NEW YORK — When my mom cooked sambal from scratch, she moved with controlled haste. Her eyebrows would furrow as she used her index finger to mix belacan, a pungent shrimp paste, with water. “Open all the windows!” she would suddenly yell, her warning to my brother, father and me that fiery chillies would be hitting her oiled wok in a few minutes.

Even with windows opened wide, the fumes from sizzling capsaicin invoked coughing fits and heavy breathing.

My mother, who can neither read nor write, never used a cookbook; her version of sambal, a spicy chilli paste that is a staple of Southeast Asian households, was passed down to her through generations of our family when we lived in Singapore.

Since moving to New York, I’m more than 2,000 miles but just one phone call away from my mother, who now lives in West Texas. When I recently called to ask for her sambal recipe to satiate my intense pregnancy hankerings, she gave her usual obscure measurements, like “half a packet of chillies” and “you keep tasting and add until you know it’s enough.”

From about age 5, I remember mixing sambal into white rice, fried fish, boiled eggs, stir-fried cabbage and a splash of kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), a meal my mom prepared often. At times, the heat levels of her sambal reduced me to tears, but I never shied away from adding a scoop.

Sambal is an essential ingredient in Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian cuisines. There are more than 300 varieties, and each household has its own version, depending on the dish, family palate and heat preference.

Sambal oelek, the most basic kind and the one most familiar to Americans, is typically made of red chillies, vinegar and salt. The word oelek derives from the Indonesian ulekan dan cobek, the stone mortar and pestle used to prepare sambal.

More elaborate versions can include shrimp paste, tamarind, ikan bilis (anchovies), garlic, lemongrass, ginger, shallots, scallions, palm sugar, coconut, rice vinegar or juice from the calamansi, a Southeast Asian citrus fruit that’s a cross between a kumquat and a mandarin orange.

In Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian cooking, sambal ikan bilis is a must-have condiment alongside nasi lemak, a fragrant rice dish cooked in coconut milk and served with spicy curry, crisp fried anchovies, toasted peanuts, a hard-boiled egg and sliced fresh cucumbers.

Sambal is as adaptable as the indigenous cooks who created it, and can be used as a marinade for skate, a base for curries, a sauce for stir-fries or a simple dip for fresh vegetables.

In the United States, you can find jars of sambal oelek from Huy Fong Foods, the company that brought us sriracha, in the international or Asian aisle of your grocery store. Thanks to the sriracha and hot-sauce boom, sambal is becoming well-known to many American cooks. Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and others have published recipes calling for a dollop or two of sambal oelek.

Sambal’s new popularity in the United States has made me both excited and territorial. In 1999, when I was 8, my family moved from Singapore to Alpine, Texas, a rural town of 5,000 where my father grew up.

When you’re living thousands of miles from your home country, craving your mother’s or grandmother’s sambal is like getting hit with a wave of nostalgia from a fond childhood memory you can’t fully re-create.

Food, especially dishes that were made and shared communally, has a way of linking us back to our families’ generational hardships and triumphs. There’s a rich and labor-intensive history in the ritual of preparing sambal that should be remembered, and perhaps even revered.

My mother, Ms Rosni Pattillo, grew up in a Malay kampong, or village, in Singapore during the 1950s and ‘60s. As a girl from a poor family with a strict father, she wasn’t allowed to attend school. At age 11, instead of learning math and grammar in primary school like her brothers, she helped women in her kampong make and sell sambal for pocket money.

As a child, she would squat hunched over a long rectangular stone in her neighbor’s yard to pound the red chillies, garlic and belacan into a paste with a blunt rock that served as a makeshift pestle, a fairly common technique in kampongs.

Ms Azalina Eusope, a fifth-generation Malaysian street vendor who now owns and runs Azalina’s, a food company and restaurant in San Francisco, has sambal roots that are similar to my mom’s. Ms Eusope, who was raised by her grandmother in Penang, an island in northwest Malaysia, said sambal was essential to every meal, including breakfast.

Her father told her that the day is not complete “'if you don’t let sambal teach you a lesson,'” she said. “Meaning, the heat from sambal awakens your senses in your body.”

Ms Eusope recalled how her grandmother roasted fresh red and green chillies in front of their kampong house every afternoon and mashed them in a granite mortar with a 4-foot-tall pestle that required at least three people to lift.

Ms Eusope’s job was to keep a close eye on the roasting chillies so they wouldn’t burn; she later graduated to stirring the paste of chillies, limes, coriander seed and fermented soybean in a large wok in front of their home.

The family made sambal several times a week; there were no refrigerators. Her grandmother would make packets of sambal and nasi lemak and go from kampong to kampong selling them.

“For my family, the women in our household are actually the captain of a ship,” Ms Eusope said. “I remember watching my grandmother giving direction while stirring the pots, and no one ever talked back or ignored her. She is the glue to her ship that ties everything together.”

Most immigrants I know desperately miss their mother or grandmother’s cooking, and yearn for recipes that were never documented.

Ms Ping Coombes, the author of “Malaysia: Recipes From A Family Kitchen,” moved to the United Kingdom in 2000 from Ipoh, Malaysia. She remembers a time when she didn’t know how to boil an egg, much less re-create her mother’s sambal belacan, a staple in her family’s refrigerator that didn’t exist in Britain.

“I didn’t think sambal had that much of an impact in my life until I moved away. It was always so readily available,” Ms Coombes said. “My mom is an amazing cook, so I thought the lavish dishes would make more of an impact.”

Instead, it was sambal that inspired her to experiment in her kitchen for the first time. Like most South-east Asian home cooks, Ms Coombes’ mother cooked from instinct and left little reference for anyone who wanted to replicate her recipes. Luckily, Ms Coombes had an old sambal cookbook that she had found in Malaysia.

“Sambal ikan bilis is the first sambal I ever made. It blew my head off because I put so much chillies in it because I didn’t know how to judge it,” she said. “Obviously, these recipes are not really tested, but it gave me an idea of what’s inside.”

After years of honing her craft as a home cook and focusing on the cuisine of her motherland, Ms Coombes in 2014 won “MasterChef UK,” a competitive-cooking television series. Her winning main course? Nasi lemak with a heaping side of sambal ikan bilis. THE NEW YORK TIMES