Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Sup Bakso Ikan

    This is a recipe for Fishball Soup (Sup Bakso Ikan).  We’ve been generally very hesitant to eat fish bought from the store since we left the States since we are always worried about quality.  This was especially the case in Indonesia, so much so that we never bought any fish while we were there, relying on trips out to restaurants for seafood.  In retrospect, this was probably dumb.  It’s far easier to tell if fish has gone bad than meat.  Look at the eyes of the fish–if they are clear, and the fish doesn’t smell bad, it’s good to eat.  Contrast that with ground beef or chicken thighs, which we have bought and which have made us sick, although not since we left Jakarta.

    This soup is very obviously Chinese in origin.  In fact, the much-beloved bakso, or omnipresent Indonesian/Malay meatball, is Chinese in origin, but has become so ingrained into local cooking that it’s no less Indonesian than sate (satay).  You can’t overmix the meatball ingredients–it’s the exact opposite of the Italian style of making very coarsely combined meatballs.  What’s nice about this soup is it’s not so heavy (in contrast to Sop Buntut) and it’s quick to make.

    Fish Balls
    4 Tbsp. water
    1/2 tsp. salt
    1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
    10 oz. mackerel or other white, oily, fishy fish
    4 tsp. corn starch

    Soup
    2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
    4 cloves of garlic, crushed
    4 thick slices of ginger
    1 1/2 cups of clear fish or chicken stock (see note)
    6 oz. bihun, cooked
    4 cups bean sprouts
    1 cup chopped cilantro or celery leaf
    fried shallots
    salt and ground white pepper

    Sambal
    2 Tbsp. soy sauce
    2 red chilies, thinly sliced

    To make the fish balls, cut the fish into small pieces and combine all the ingredients in a food processor.  Process until extremely blended..the goal is to make as smooth and uniform of a mixture as possible.  Bring a pot of salted water to a simmer.  Using two small spoons, make small balls out of the fish mixture and drop into the simmering water.  They are done when they float to the top.  This should make around 30 fish balls.

    Make the sambal by combining the soy sauce and chilies, then setting aside.  To make the soup, heat the oil over high heat until shimmery, and then add the garlic and ginger.  Stir fry for 2 minutes until fragrant, then add the stock.  Bring the soup to a boil, cover and reduce heat, simmering for 45 minutes.  Strain to remove garlic and ginger pieces.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  In four bowls, make piles first of noodles, then sprouts, then fish balls.  Ladle the soup over these ingredients, then garnish with fried shallots and cilantro or celery leaves.  Serve with sambal on the side.  Here’s a picture.

    Note on Stock: You want a clear but flavorful broth for this.  The authentic way to do it here is to take 100 grams of little dried fishies called ikan bilis, which you stir-fry with the garlic and ginger until just beginning to brown, and then add water instead of stock, so that you’re making the stock fresh.  Then when you strain, you’re straining out ginger, garlic, and little fishies. This makes an extremely intense stock that is best if combined with chicken broth in a 2 parts fish to 1 part chicken ratio. We can’t imagine that you’d find ikan bilis outside of Southeast Asia, though, so a nice fish or chicken (or combination) broth is good too.  Here’s what a bag of several thousand tiny fishies looks like, with my left hand to compare.

  • Orientalism, Essentialism, and Revisionist Intellectual History

    Tom Friedman recently wrote a column in the New York Times about democracy and political freedom in the Middle East.  Friedman is normally pretty good, in my (TP) opinion.  He writes about big topics, and he makes sometimes controversial arguments, and he, like any good op ed columnist, seems to thrive on making people angry.  Just what I like.  But the disagreements with readers should come from taking controversial stands that involve making a normative judgment about the social world, not from getting the facts wrong.  Like, arguing that protectionism is a good idea is fair game, but saying that protectionism doesn’t exist is not, because that’s not correct.  Which is why Friedman’s repetition of the conservative mantra that political correctness in American universities prevented the US from promoting democracy in the Middle East is so lamentable.

    Admittedly, I’m a sensitive guy on this subject.  I find diatribes against liberalism in academia particularly infuriating in terms of attacking the quality of research.  This is not to say that I embrace all aspects of intellectualism–the "no confidence vote" against Larry Summers at Harvard was ridiculous, and I believe that it was an irrational response by Harvard faculty against broaching a taboo academic subject.  But people who whine about ivory-tower liberalism being some sort of intellectual closemindedness haven’t spent any time in an American university.  I guarantee you, the quickest way to get tenure or funding is to take a controversial stand and defend it with good evidence.  Arguing is all that faculty members do in universities.

    I’ve heard Friedman’s claim a number of times.  In essence, the claim is that in Western universities, in places like political science and anthropology departments and Middle East studies work groups, liberals had so hijacked the debate that debate never existed, at least in the 1990s. No one questioned the perserverance of dictatorship in Arab states, because to do so would be to ignore the values that Arab citizens have, or to not respect their own cultures.  Doing that would be "Orientalist", a term coined by Edward Said to refer to the tendency of Western scholars and citizens, in good post-colonial tradition, to view the East as different, weak, exotic, infantile, and in need of Western guidance.

    OK.  I spent quite a lot of time in the 1990s going to conferences, attending classes, sitting in at seminars, watching panel discussions, and the like, at a university.  You could make the argument that this university (Brown) was one of the most liberal and politically correct in the country–in a bad way.  You’d be right…when I was a senior, a group of students stole a whole issue of the daily newspaper in a protest action for it having run an ad by David Horowitz, who claims that slavery reparations are wrong "and racist too."  Pretty dumb, to my mind.  I am also quite liberal and politically correct myself.  I say "Native American," I don’t believe that we should have 10 Commandments in public places, and I someday will probably walk around in a tweed jacket and affect a fake pseudo-British accent. I was part of the problem.

    But there was no problem.  Friedman and his ilk are either misremembering, lying, or they just don’t know, when they talk about the intellectual climate of the 1990s.  Hardly anyone took the stand that Friedman is talking about.  If they did, it was seriously questioned.  People vigorously debated the subject, but few–if any–people viewed the existence of dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia as a good thing for citizens of the Middle East.  Even then, democracy was propounded as a superior political arrangement.  The problem–and this continues the problem–is that invading a country to make it democratic is a coarse tool, and it has costs.  The problem was how to make democracy happen given that American politicians, neoconservative, conservative, and liberal, had little interest in invading any countries, and most were content to keep the petrodollars flowing and contain Islamic radicalism.  Indeed, the suggestion that current neoconservatives were the ones who "thought up" democracy as a tool for reducing Islamic radicalism is laughable, and wrong.

    So when we talk about the reluctance of American policy makers to truly promote democracy in the Third World before 9/11, let’s get it right.  Let’s not blame it on Volvo-driving, wine-drinking, politically correct intellectuals.  Let’s put the blame where it truly lies–squarely on the heads of the politicians since the 1960s who thought that they had better things to worry about.