Reverence before reinvention
Four lines from the Osaka documentary, and what each one means to me.
For Serumpun Sarawak's international debut at Seaside Studio CASO, alongside Sarawak Week at World Expo Osaka, Atlas Collective made a short documentary. Most of it is me talking about why I cook the way I do. These are the lines I would keep if I could keep only a few, with a word on each.
“Food plays a huge part of this connectivity. It serves as the main memory.”
The film opens with my grandmother, because everything opens with her. She is my first mentor. I still remember hurrying home from school to find out what she had made me for a snack, and when I cook now I am often trying to recall a particular flavour, a texture or an aroma from that time. Nothing substitutes for it. That is why I say food is genuine and innocent: you can use it to carry a true message, and people will believe it.
“The integrity of cuisine should be something recognisable, either in flavour, in form, in taste or in aroma. It should not be something that you intellectually think is delicious.”
There was a time when diners were excited by foam and air and play on the plate. I think that time has passed. I want a guest to recognise what they are eating, and to enjoy it without being told why they should. Deliciousness is not a matter of opinion. Everyone understands it.
“It’s not an interpretation. It’s to pay a lot of reverence to the roots of why they use certain ingredients.”
We spend a long time making sure that this is the integrity of the cuisine. Sarawak today is not the Sarawak of a hundred years ago. An ingredient may come from a single place and a single people, and today, because of modern knowledge and access, it is shared by many, each with their own way of cooking and enjoying it. The work is to know why it was used first, by whom, and to honour that before we do anything else with it.
So we immerse ourselves completely. We learn from the people, from the communities and the tribes, from the authorities and from the academics, and we check our facts with them, so that we do not misread or misrepresent anyone’s culture.
“From the very inception, it’s a movement. It was never meant to be just a place, just a venue, just a philosophy, just a principle.”
Serumpun Sarawak is about people coming together and supporting one another. That is also why the film ends with an invitation. Sarawak has to be experienced in person: on the ground, in the longhouses, as part of the community.
Come and experience Sarawak.
Deliciousness is something that everyone understands.
James Won, in the Osaka documentary
Recognisable, rooted and shared: that is the whole of it.