THE KING AND I

Durian, known as the 'king of fruits' in south-east Asia has, to put it mildly, a distinctive odour. ‘Dis-STINK-tive’ would be more appropriate, many might say.

“How can you put something that smells so bad in your mouth?” a non-durian lover once asked me. “Well, what about washed rind cheese?”, I countered. “Or cooked cauliflower. Or gorgonzola.”

Durian has some pluses though. It makes up for its ugly look – picture a pineapple on a really bad hair day – and whiffy aroma, with a creamy sweet flesh. In fact once people know the taste-sensation in store, many quickly go from 'ugh! what's that dreadful smell?' to 'durian! where is it?'.

On a recent trip to Penang, Malaysia, as we leave Batu Ferringhi on the north of the island we know what we are craving. Durian. But it’s a problem. If we buy one of these huge thorny khaki beauties from a roadside stall the hotel will never let us inside with it. If we eat it in the rental car, the company will possibly add a surcharge.

Around the north-western tip of this lovely island, often called the Pearl of the Orient, the jungle is tangled with creepers, denser than on the eastern hugely-developed side. Here, nets hang hammock-like beneath giant jackfruit and durian trees to catch the heavy fruit, and somewhere in the shadows grow nutmeg and clove trees.

We drive on, past crude wooden roadside stalls sheltering mounds of this thorny football-sized fruit and are finally rewarded with the answer to our craving.

The 10 hectare Tropical Fruit Farm at 250 metres altitude, overlooks deep jungled valleys that disappear kilometres away into a glimpse of water and the haze of Georgetown, the capital, on the east coast. It should be called Eden because almost every known tropical fruit grows here.

In the farm shop we discover dried and fresh fruits, bunches of rambutans and mangosteens, pineapples and tiny bananas in crates and there is a whole stand of local nutmeg oils and balm. In a chilled cabinet, spotted and weirdly coloured Vietnamese dragonfruit and other fresh fruits are laid out ready to combine on fruit platters.

A spiky mound of durian lies on the floor to one side, and instantly we know what we will be ordering. The durian season runs from the end of February to August. It’s April, so we are in luck.

We select a top-grade one for under A$5 and the assistant chops it open to reveal smooth yellow segments buried in cavities inside. The rest they can leave to us. Seated outside at shaded picnic tables overlooking that magnificent view we pick out the creamy flesh slowly, eating with our fingers and dropping the seeds into a basket below the table. Bliss!

The smell? Well, it’s been described as eating first class custard in a sewer, but that’s too extreme, we decide.

“They smell like hell, but taste like heaven,” says someone else. Despite this, durian’s name has nothing to do with either. It just means ‘thorny fruit’.

It’s pungent, it’s exotic. Faintly redolent of rotting onion with a slight tang of sulphur. Not what you normally associate with fine fruit, but this is Malaysia. We’re in the tropics and this is durian.

And – for us – we are indulging in truly the king of fruits!

RIVER WINE

‘I call this Gordon River chardonnay,’ says my new friend, David Goodfellow, holding up a glass of golden liquid.

I sniff it. Nup! Not like any chardy I’ve ever tried. I taste it. Definitely not a chardonnay.

Bewildered, I ask: What is it?

Well, it turns out I am drinking river water. But not from just any old river. This is the famed and fabulous Gordon River in western Tasmania, passing through a World Heritage region of the highest order.

The air is clearer here than possibly anywhere else in the world. We are in a pristine wilderness rainforest environment. It’s pure. It’s green on green. And constantly dripping with some of the couple of metres of rain that falls each year here.

So what’s with the brown water? You see, now I know it’s not chardonnay, it looks more brown to me, rather than golden.

‘It’s tannin,’ says David, ‘from the buttongrass. It stains it.’

And what does it taste like? Absolutely nothing, I have to admit.

I guess he could call it rainforest ‘tea’, then, if he wanted to, although it is not being marketed as anything yet. No one has caught on to the obvious sales pitch of ‘World Heritage Water’ or some-such, which is a surprise as Tasmanians are an entrepreneurial bunch. After all, someone on King Island in Bass Strait to the north of the island captures rain and markets it as Cloud Juice!

I doubt anyone has analysed this ‘chardonnay’ to get at its properties, but I am guessing antioxidants could be there, which might make it attractive to healthy types.

Right now the only place you’ll ever be able to taste this is on a cruise along the river from Strahan, a delightful picture book village about halfway down the west coast of Tasmania tucked up on the inner edge of the vast Macquarie Harbour which – get this – is over SIX TIMES the size of Sydney Harbour.

David Goodfellow is the manager of Gordon River Cruises, a company which offers passengers an unforgettable escape along one of the world’s quietest, most breathtaking and serenely beautiful waterways.

Funny thing, the water we are travelling on looks dark blue in the sunlight, but in my glass it is undeniably brown.

Oh, OK David – maybe it’s a bit golden. Perhaps it is a little like chardonnay!

SINGING HINNIES

Last year, on a trip to the UK, we visited a country fair in Northumberland, way up in the north-east of England. For the past six hundred or so years there has been an annual Goose Fair in the tiny town of Ovingham (pronounced, we learned later, after having said it wrong several times – Uv-ing-jum).

Long ago, flocks of geese were herded to this place for sale, but the practice lapsed and on the day we attended, despite its name and history, there were just two token birds in a cage on one side of the fairground.

The small field was packed with families and colourful displays, and we felt a little as though we were bit-players in an episode of Midsomer Murders. If you’ve watched this UK murder mystery series, you’ll know that one often features and can be a pivotal part of the story-line.

This one in Ovingham had no murders though, for which we were grateful, but it did have all the quintessential elements of an English fair – Morris Dancing, dunking contests, coconut shies, donuts, chips, hoopla – and soaking rain!

Despite the latter, we did what the Brits do and just ignored the drizzle, taking shelter when it pounded down occasionally, and continued to happily squelch our way around.

Finally I found what I had hoped I would. In a far corner some ladies in spotless white mob caps were set up at a stand making singing hinnies, a traditional dish of the area. These dried fruit-studded flatbreads are delicious, and I was hooked at first bite. They have a toasty buttery flavour from contact with the pan, and sweet bursts of currants as you bite into them.

Singing Hinnies are a traditional currant griddle scone, and perhaps as a food they are not so unusual – but the name certainly is!

Evidently they were originally made long ago on flat iron griddles over open fires in all the area’s small country cottages. Children haven’t changed, and the tantalising smell would have had each mother’s many children clamouring for them.

‘Mother, when will they be ready? Can I have one now?’ one country mother was supposedly asked, so the legend goes.

’Not yet. They’re just singin’ hinnies,’ she patiently explained – hinnies being the local word for ‘honeys’, her Geordie endearment for them. By ‘singing’ she meant, of course the squeak and sizzle of the butter and cream as it melted from the batter onto the fiery plate.

These words somehow kept the waiting children quiet for the few moments until the next cake was ready to be scooped off, buttered quickly, cut into pieces and dropped into their eager hands.

So ‘singin’ hinnies’ they became – and here is how to make them from the recipe given out by those mobcapped ladies who were making them at the Ovingham Goose Fair.

NORTHUMBERLAND SINGIN’ HINNIES

If you don’t have an open fire and a griddle, make these in a heavy frypan on top of the stove. Some recipes also suggest adding sour cream to the liquids.

2 cups self-raising flour

75g butter

75g lard

110g currants (about 3/4 cup)

pinch salt

2 tablespoons milk mixed with water (more if needed)

oil or butter for the griddle

butter for spreading

Rub the fats into the flour, add salt, currants, and just enough milk and water to make a soft dough. Roll out into rounds on a floured surface and bake each one on both sides on a hot griddle until golden brown. Spread immediately with butter and cut into quarters, serving immediately.

Makes about four rounds. Double or triple the mixture depending on how many ‘hinnies’ you have!

BITTER FAREWELL

‘Bitter’ is not a flavour many of us favour. Or think we do. When you get down to it, bitterness is essential in many dishes and often our favourite foods – think dark, dark chocolate, tonic water, marmalade, beer, some olive oils. Get my drift? The stomach welcomes it too. Bitters and herbal tonics such as Swedish bitters are said to help the digestion, getting everything get back to normal after a meal.

But a bitter dessert?

Come with me to a restaurant tucked away down a side street in East Sydney.

La Mint has been here four years, owner Leanne Lai told me. Sydney has a large Vietnamese population, but mostly situated in other suburbs to the south and west. Leanne and her husband wanted to reflect Vietnam’s French history – and little wonder when at least that colonisation brought fresh yeast breads and sauces and a style of cooking which worked well with fresh herbal local dishes.

In the dead-end of Riley Street they have created a little piece of Hanoi with candles, rattan backed chairs and elegant banquettes. On one wall a disconcerting gaze of a golden Buddha follows you wherever you go and we watched, amused, as diners walked back and forth in front of it to test it out.

The crowd here was not the pho-slurping youngsters, the students you might find in Bankstown. These diners were Anglo, affluent, and executive. They were picking the golden pavé de pork, pork belly with chilli sauce, and enjoying it’s melting tenderness as much as we were, I am sure. We passed on the escargot, though, and went for the more trad ‘shaking beef’.

Relax, vegetarians! The name refers to the cooking technique of tossing the eye fillet rapidly in a pan – not its mental state at execution. Despite not being marinated it was remarkably tender too, and served with an addictive lemon and green pepper sauce. But enough of our meal – read the menus on the website www.lamint.com.au

I am here to tell you about the dessert.

Bitter melon looks like a squash or a marrow or even a light-skinned cucumber with a particularly bad skin condition. Its wrinkled, pitted, warty exterior gives little hint of its flavour or what is inside.

In Vietnam, raw bitter melon slices are often eaten with dried meat floss. But that’s another story. The melon may be stuffed with ground pork and used to make bitter melon soup. Or it can simple be stewed. That dish is usually cooked for the local Tết holiday because of its name – a reminder of the bitterly desperate conditions experienced by Vietnamese people in the past.

And so we order La Mint Pudding – as the name suggests the restaurant’s signature dessert, and cast on the menu as ‘exotic bitter melon jelly pudding and coconut milk’. Chef-owner George Lai, Leanne’s husband devised this dish using the juice of the bitter melon which turns the jelly a rich bottle green. It is mixed with cooked sago, set into a mould, and then at serving time drizzled with coconut milk.

It looks luscious, with the shine and colour of a satin evening dress. My tongue hunts for bitterness. There is just a little, a subtle tickle at the back of my tongue as each spoonful slips down. Yet it has not been laced with sugar either to mask the flavour. It is refreshing, elegant and sensuous. Most importantly it tastes nothing like the bitter melon looks.

And I imagine it has done wonders for my digestion.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

La Mint Restaurant & Bar, 62-64 Riley Street, East Sydney, 02 9331 1818, (www.lamint.com.au) has a cooking class on the last Sunday of each month. Maybe, they will teach you how to make this dessert!

ONION SOUP IN THE MARRIAGE BED

It is generally agreed that the French have long held monopoly in the romance department. With Cupid in their corner it seems, while they somehow understand exactly how to maximise the moment of seduction, they still also take sensual delight in many everyday situations. Throw in a celebration and they are never happier.

So picture this. The wedding is over. You have finally shaken off the last of the friends and relations, kissed your family goodbye (or so you thought) and, with a sigh of relief, you stagger upstairs to the honeymoon suite. Just moments later, as you are about to relax, there is a gentle tap at the door, and from the other side, muffled chuckles, excited noises and an unmistakable odour. That smell! Is that, can that actually be – onions?

On investigation, you beaming well-wishers proudly presenting you with two bowls of onion soup.

"Eat it all," they tell you, then warn, "We will be back!"

And they are – quite soon, to make sure those bowls are good and empty, signifying that you have been properly, finally, launched safely onto the turbulent sea of matrimony.

While urbane French couples will possibly never be faced with this post-nuptial activity, that would have been the scenario if you had married in parts of rural France some time ago. No one knows the reasons behind the custom, but people still living today remember their mothers and grandmothers recounting tales of those bowls of steaming onion soup, their own strange wedding night fare.

There is certainly no doubt that onions are basic to French cuisine. Even the language supports this. 'Occupe-toi de tes oignons' you will be told swiftly – literally, watch your own onions – if a French person thinks you need to mind your own business. Make a scene, and they say you have created 'un spectacle des petits oignons', but take extra care when you do something and they will praise you for making it 'aux petits oignons.' And those same family members who toasted the bride and groom with soup at midnight, when lined up to kiss them after the ceremony in a queue, would be described in French as 'en rang d'oignon'.

It is hard to know how that onion soup custom came about. Onions, as indeed all members of the lily family, asparagus included, have long been dubbed aphrodisiacs, so perhaps that may be the link. Certainly onion soup has also long been considered a great restorative – although surely yiu would think that should better qualify it for a place on the morning-after menu, rather than the night before!

Tears and weddings traditionally go together, and onions and tears have a natural affinity too. Although they have been cultivated for 6000 years, still no one has yet developed a varietu which doesn't make us cry. It is believed that when the slaves assigned to building the pyramids were not consuming garlic, they ate onions, a tribute to that vegetable's strengthening properties.

Hippocrates thought onions were good for the sight, but while love is blind, could this be taking the supposed romantic powers of onions just a bit too far? One 16th-century food writer assured his readers that onions promote sleep. Fine advice, but not necessarily on the wedding-night and, when you think about it, how romantic is onion-breath, anyway? Perhaps that is why both the bride and groom were asked to drain the bowls.

Folk-sayings are thick with claims for onions. They make peasants work harder, cure bee stings, frighten away snakes, allow roses to smell sweeter if planted between the bushes, clean out the bowels and reduce blood pressure. If a man sleeps with an onion under his pillow, people were once told, he will dream of his future wife.

Modern health experts now accept that onions contain a natural antibiotic, but still steer clear of the old claim that onion juice squeezed on a bald head will cause hair to regrow. Even more archaically it was once suggested that onions increase 'lust and lecherye'.

While it is easy to sneer at simple wisdom, perhaps the French knew something we don't, for onion soup is a great dish at any time of the day or night. Maybe the custom is worth reviving. With a bit of luck it might just arouse the passions, restore your strength, or, at its worst, merely lull you both into a sound night's sleep.

In case you want to try it for yourself, here is a simple recipe.

FRENCH ONION SOUP FOR TWO

30g butter

1 large onion, thinly sliced

l clove garlic, crushed

l teaspoon flour

pinch sugar

1 1/4 cups beef stock

1 cup water

salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 tablespoon dry sherry or red wine

Heat the butter in a large heavy pan and add onions and garlic. Saute gently, stirring constantly until the onions are golden. Add flour and stir well, then add sugar, stock and water. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add sherry or wine, and simmer a few more minutes. Meanwhile cut 4 thin slices of french bread and sprinkle with grated cheese. Ladle the soup into two heatproof bowls and top each with 2 slices of bread and cheese. Place under a preheated grill and cook until cheese is melted.

CHEESEY PEASY

I’ll get the grumble out of the way first.

One night this year I visited Formaggi Ocello for the first time. I am ashamed to admit this. I should have been there much earlier as this amazing cheese providore in the inner east of Sydney has been open now for many months and is an absolute must for cheese-lovers. Cheese freaks. Food aficionados. Anyone with a tastebud or two.

It has perhaps the longest display cabinet of cheeses in this city, and the shop’s shelves and refrigerators are packed with anything to partner your formaggi that you could ever want or think of – we’re talking syrupy balsamico, relishes and olives and Italian-style conserves, bottled figs – the works.

All this, and a huge and tempting cheese room. And herein lies the grouch.

Just at the entrance big glass windows allowed us to gaze in on a large room stacked with giant wheels of Grana Padano, balls of ash covered cheeses and wedges of other things. I say ‘other things’ because the sign on the door firmly said: ‘Staff Only’, so we could explore no further. There was to be none of that rapturous gasping-in of cheese fumes as the door opens; no involuntary cries of ‘I want to live in here!’ (that’s me); no judicious fingertip pressure on a rind here and there; no voyeuristic reading of labels and trying out the pronunciation; no……. well, no interaction with the stars of the show.

No lingering, to-be-relived-later, whiff of washed rind clinging to our clothes or hair, either.

I was disappointed, although I could understand the reason. Hot and unhygienic customers could disturb the room’s carefully maintained balance. These cheeses, their maturation and their prime condition is what the shop is about, after all, and absolute cleanliness is required where cheese-handling is concerned.

A few times in the past couple of years I have caught up with the shop’s owner, Carmelo Ocello, at various farmers’ markets around town where he and his heady products have become ubiquitous. One time I bought an amazing cow’s milk cheese, testun al Barolo, that is matured on the residue of nebbiolo grapes which add quite another dimension to the flavour. Another time he persuaded me to buy a ‘real’ stracchino and I knew then he meant that this soft silky one had been made far in the north of in Italy. Each time, my purchases were carefully wrapped in heavy white paper, just like the true gifts they are.

The thing I like most is that Ocello not only imports the cheeses, he brings their stories along for the trip as well. He knows those makers by name. He has visited their dairies – some of them very small – in distant corners of Europe. But before you huff and say, why not Australian cheeses too, I have to say he does also stock the best from this country as well, including Victoria’s multi-award-winning Holy Goat and a handful of others.

We’d all end up with mental indigestion if I even attempted to list the cheeses in this place. Ocello keeps about 200-250 on show at any one time, but in the spirit of this blog – highlighting the unexpected – here’s just one for starters.

Formaggi Ocello is perhaps the only place where you can order a ‘cheese wedding cake’! Yup! Wheels of premium cheese stacked and lightly decorated with fruit and flowers. I’ve seen a brochure about it. So it must be true.

You know, I reckon many wedding guests might be happier with a wedge of this to take home than fruitcake.

+++++++

Formaggi Ocello, Shop 16, 425 Bourke St, Surry Hills (St Margaret’s), NSW. Parking available under the building – one hour free. Phone 02 9357 7878, www.ocello.com.au

Open weekdays 9am to 8pm, Saturday 9am to 6pm, Sunday 10am to 6pm. Order an alcoholic drink during ‘Aperitivo’ at the shop every weekday from 5pm to 8pm and enjoy the Milanese-style custom of receiving a complimentary appetiser.

Also market stalls at: EQ Markets, Moore Park, Wednesday and Saturday; SMH Good Living Market, Pyrmont, 1st Saturday of the month; Northside Produce Markets, North Sydney, 3rd Saturday of the month.

+++++++++++++

This is the first of what will be a growing collection of ‘Sydney Food Finds’.

This city, to me means much more than the CBD and inner suburbs. It’s the whole urban sprawl, and it never ceases to amaze me with its variety and scope of food places – whether it is producing the stuff which others use, or preparing and serving it skilfully.

OK, Melburnians, I hear you! Your city rocks too, and could certainly quite often show Sydney a thing or two, but this is my town and I love it……and its food and dining.

+++++++++++

ACHACHA – A FRUIT YOU COULD DANCE TO

I just love new foods. The thrill of finding something I have never tasted before. Especially one I have never even heard about!

It was a night of firsts, actually, this week – first taste of an achacha (pronounced ah cha-cha, as in the dance), and also in visiting Baroque Bistro & Patisserie. The latter, newly-opened upmarket premises on the pointy-end corner of George Street and Hickson Road in The Rocks, was the venue for the launch of achacha fruit in Sydney.

So, of course, we were greeted on arrival with a sparkling achacha cocktail, and invited to sample the yellow egg-shaped fruit from baskets around the room. They look like large loquats, but Bruce Hill, a member of the four-member group responsible for growing them in far North Queensland, shakes his head when I ask him if this is right.

After he teaches us the trick to opening them – fingernail to pierce the skin at the midline then a twist to release the firm, soft skin – we gingerly taste the tangy, pearly white flesh surrounding one or two large seeds.

A relative of mangosteen, maybe, I venture? But no, wrong again.

It seems these are stand-alone fruits, from the heart of the rainforest in the lowlands of Bolivia where they grow wild and are called achchairú. Never grown in Australia until Helen and Bruce Hill’s group got permission from our vigilant quarantine services to plant them, this is perhaps the most exciting new fruit in this country in decades. In fact it is the world’s first commercial achacha (Garcinia Humilis) plantation. The Achacha Fruit Group plantation overseen by plantation manager and grower Ross Oliveri, has 17,500 trees, which means NQ now has more achacha trees than anywhere else in the world.

Bruce Hill

While most of us in the room were content enough mastering the pierce-twist-open technique, and devouring the fruit, it seems there is more to this fruit than just its use as a snack food.

The skins can be used to make a refreshing drink which has been called an natural appetite suppressant (yes - now they are talking!) and the low-sugar flesh is high in Vitamin C, potassium, folate and riboflavin. Achacha works well in cocktails, as we’d already discovered, and also in sorbet, ice cream and jellies, even in salads.

This unusual fruit grows on an equally strange-looking tree. The shaggy foliage conceals the flowers, and bees love them. When hives were placed in the plantation this year, the result was a rosy honey said to be full of medicinal virtues! In Bolivia it achacha honey is an expensive delicacy.

Achacha is the traditional New Year fruit of Bolivia. Here the harvest season is expected to run from November until the end of March. Right now you should find it in distinctive and colourful paper carry bags in Harris Farm stores, Thomas Dux the Grocer, Norton Street Grocers and other fine fruit and vegetable purveyors.

So what do I say to these people, the Hills, who have spent the past seven years of their lives and untold $$$$s when I congratulate them on this landmark event?

Sure, I tell them it is an amazing achievement, but – greedy and hard-hearted soul that I am – I can’t help but ask them can they please grow me makesas as well.

Don’t know these, the world’s best passionfruit – Bali’s answer to Panama? Hmm, let’s wait for more on that another day – or maybe until Bruce and Helen begin to grow them as well.

Want to know more about achacha? www.achacha.com.au

STOP PRESS: Australia's devastating 2011 cyclone Yasi fortunately spared this years achacha crop. Read more.

Or why not share what is your favourite fruit – and why?