Yes!

That’s what I was getting at earlier – and I reckon the reason SJ’s and similar don’t stock the creme de la creme of asian ingredients is that they’re available at a frickin’ pittance from Asian grocers.

It’s not worth their while to fill their shelves with stuff that (even with double their usual markup from wholesale) would only make them a small profit. Better to get de puy lentils for $5 a kilo, put them in tiny little containers and flog them for ten bucks.

But then again, my idea of food heaven is eating char kway teow off a banana leaf in front of an open drain by a Penang roadside, cooked by some 70-year-old auntie. And whatever ingredients that auntie was using surely didn’t come from Simon Johnson’s.

I agree with everything you say, although I don’t have a problem with Ashfield council asking shop owners to have shop names in both languages, unless it was done in a heavy-handed way? I remember reading about it in our local papers some years ago. friends have always come and gone from the area so it’s a haunt, but not a “know it like the back of your hand” haunt any more.

I also rely heavily on Rosemary Brissenden’s South East Asian Cookery, Charmaine Solomon’s Encyclopaedia of Asian Food, Deh-ta Hsiung’s The Chinese Kitchen and Emi Kazuko’s Japanese Food and Cooking. There’s more at my (incomplete but getting there) library thing under the tag “Asia” (and yes, there are more specific country tags and tags “Europe”, “America”, etc ;)

I agree about the potential for whitey confusion, which is why I ran a session for my women’s group called “Demystifying the Asian Grocery Store”, which I mentioned in this post. A relevant section:

“I think one reason why some people are cautious about buying things from an Asian grocery store is that so much stuff is packaged, and if you don’t know what it is, or what the thing you want looks like, it gets confusing. So we ripped open all the plastic and set about rehydrating, sniffing, poking and tasting.”

That, as opposed to a chefly word from on high, is how to learn about ingredients. And you can do it by yourself, I did.

And I can’t accept that the “food media space in print is not going to earn money from catering to anything but the core audience“, when Australians spend $60 million a year on food and cookery titles, according to the research of Professor Donna Lee Brien.

Culinary snobbery reminds me of one of the mothers who turned up to watch a college cricket match some years ago, dangling a miniature schnauzer off a lead. People duly commented on the little dog. “They are very fashionable, of course,” she told us. There it was – not a family pet but a fashion accessory.

Separately, I don’t know why anyone would have expected the Australian to be groundbreaking — Lethlean and Wilden were acquired for name recognition and commercial advantage, in the same way Matt Preston was recently. Preston is the only one with diverse writing skills there. The food media space in print is not going to earn money from catering to anything but the core audience. (And Fairfax had already destroyed its strength in food before it lost the above names, so there’s no reason to expect anything better anywhere I guess.)