A Culinary Compass: How Southeast Asian Breakfasts Shape My Travels — Epoche B2
Morning Flavours: Four Breakfasts, Four Cities Most travel writing starts in the afternoon, at the monument. Mine tends to start at twenty past six, in a queue, holding small change — for a bowl of phở in Hanoi, a parcel of nasi lemak in Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of jok in Bangkok, or a plate of tapsilog in Manila. Breakfast is the meal a city cooks for itself rather than for visitors, which is why the queue is local and why the menu is usually one item long. Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food is good on how many of these dishes began as food sold to people on their way to work, and that is still what they are. Four mornings, in particular, have decided where I go back to. Hanoi, Bát Đàn street, 6:20 a.m. The queue at the phở shop runs out of the door and you join the back of it, pay first — around 60,000 dong — and carry your own bowl to a low stool. What arrives is deliberately plain: flat rice noodles, thin beef, broth, a scattering of spring onion. There is no plate of basil and bean sprouts, no bottle of hoisin. That is Saigon's version, and northern eaters will tell you so before you have finished asking; Andrea Nguyen's book on the dish draws the same line, and it is the reason I stopped reaching for hoisin. What you get here instead is a jar of garlic pickled in vinegar on the table, a wedge of lime, and quẩy — fried dough sticks torn up and dropped into the soup to soften. The shop stops serving when the pot is empty, usually before ten. The north–south split is not a matter of taste alone; it has a date. Phở is a northern dish, and its southern form took shape after 1954, when the Geneva Accords partitioned Vietnam and something like a million northerners moved south. The dish travelled with them into a region with different produce and a sweeter palate, and it acquired there the plate of herbs, the bean sprouts and the sweet fermented bean sauce that a Hanoi shop will not put on the table. So the absence of hoisin in Bát Đàn is not austerity. It is the older version of the dish, which is worth knowing before correcting anybody's seasoning. On where phở itself came from, Nguyen is careful and so should I be: the two standard stories — a Vietnamese adaptation of French pot-au-feu , or a descendant of a Cantonese beef-and-rice-noodle soup — are both arguments from the name and neither is settled. Kuala Lumpur, a stall by the roadside, 7:00 a.m. Nasi lemak bungkus : coconut rice with fried anchovies, peanuts, two slices of cucumber, half a boiled egg and a spoonful of sambal, folded into a banana leaf and then into paper, for two or three ringgit. It is designed to be eaten with one hand, standing, or carried to a desk. The sambal is the whole argument — every stall's is different, some sweet with caramelised onion, some sharp enough to end the conversation. The name says what it is: nasi is rice, lemak means rich or fatty and refers to the coconut milk the rice is cooked in, and bungkus means wrapped — the parcel version, as against the plate. Sambal is a chilli paste, here typically chilli with shallots, garlic, tamarind and belacan , a fermented shrimp paste that supplies the savoury depth. What makes the comparison between stalls worth making is that the dish is a fixed bundle with exactly one free component: the rice, the anchovies, the peanuts, the cucumber and the egg are the same everywhere, so any difference you taste is attributable to the sambal. It is as close to a controlled experiment as breakfast gets, and that is the reason a week of it is not repetitive. Bangkok, a market lane, 6:45 a.m. A bowl of jok , rice cooked down until the grains have collapsed, with pork balls, shredded ginger and spring onion, and a raw egg cracked in at the counter so that it cooks in the heat as you carry it. Forty to sixty baht. Alongside it, patongko , the small paired fried doughs, for dipping. It is soft food for a day that is going to be thirty-four degrees by eleven. David Thompson files it with the rice dishes rather than the noodles, which is right about how it is eaten. Two things there deserve a sentence. Collapsing the grains is a matter of water and time: steamed rice is cooked at roughly one and a half parts water to one of rice, while jok uses eight or more, simmered long enough for the starch to leave the grain and thicken the liquid. And the egg is not a garnish trusting to luck. Egg white sets at about 62 °C and yolk a little above that, while the congee leaves the pot near 90 °C; a small egg stirred into a large bowl of it settles at around 80 °C, comfortably hot enough to set the white in the minute it takes you to find a seat. Manila, a canteen with plastic chairs, 8:00 a.m. Tapsilog — cured beef tapa , sinangag (garlic fried rice) and a fried egg with the yolk still moving — for about 150 pesos, with a saucer of vinegar and crushed chilli on the side to cut through it. The naming system is a small joke that has become a menu: swap the beef for sausage and it is longsilog, for cured pork and it is tocilog. The joke is a rule, which is why it spread. Take the first syllable of the meat, add si from sinangag and log from itlog , the Tagalog for egg: tapa gives tapsilog, longganisa gives longsilog, tocino gives tocilog, and a diner can coin a new one the moment a new meat appears. Two of those meats carry the country's history in their names — tocino and longganisa are Spanish words for cured pork and sausage, from three centuries of Spanish rule that ended in 1898 — which is part of why Doreen Fernandez, writing on Philippine food, treats the everyday plate as the most reliable historical document available. What they cost, and what the price is telling you The four prices above are in four currencies and mean nothing side by side, so here they are converted at rates of the mid-2020s, along with the hour at which each stops being available. City Dish Local price Approx. USD Gone by Hanoi Phở bò 60,000 dong 2.40 Before 10 a.m. Kuala Lumpur Nasi lemak bungkus 2–3 ringgi