Substitution of ingredients

Substitution of ingredients is a fine art.

My collection of cookbooks contains a number of books purchased at the source. Thai cookbooks from Thailand; Singaporean food information direct from Singapore. The recipes they contain are completely authentic, down to odd local measures, seasonal vegetables with unpronouncable names, and spices that exist only in a two kilometer radius of the author's home. Trying to cook from them here in Japan is a challenge.

Last night we had friends over for a barbecue. Tod settled on satay, spiced beef on skewerd served with a chili-peanut sauce. I made gado-gado and compressed rice patties to accompany it. It was delicious, but not quite the same as when we made it in Singapore.

Shopping for exotic groceries here is a multi-step process. In Pittsburgh, I might spend a morning in the Strip, asking for something at all the oriental groceries there. But here, not only do I have to try to find blacan, a hard block of dried shrimp paste used in the gado-gado sauce, but I have to translate it into Japanese. How does it sound? What kanji might be used on the label--shrimp, dry, black, sauce, spice, foul-smelling? I haven't yet found the Tokyo equivalent of Pittsburgh's wide-ranging food wholesale district so my searching is confined to local markets or else takes me zigzagging across the entire city.

I suppose it could be worse. I have a few cookbooks in my collection that offer Asian recipes from an American perspective. They are quite amusing. "Asian barbeque sauce" combines tomatoes, green peppers and pineapple. I've never seen that in any part of Asia I've visited. The authors have obviously rewritten recipes to suit American tastes and ingredients. Ironically, I can't find their substitutions in Tokyo. I'll stick with the originals.