Southeast Asia’s cuisines are truly a melting pot of the world
There’s really no such thing as Southeast Asian cuisine. After all, how do you use a singular reference to express such a vast diversity of cuisines? There are no less than 10 countries in this part of the world—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Brunei. They are home to over 640 million people, all with their own distinctive ethnicities, cultures and cuisines, and we haven’t gone on to discuss the regional variations yet. Occupying 4.5 million square kilometres, there are few places in the world that boast such diversity, concentrated in so small a space.
The food of this region is beautifully varied, evolved from peoples who seem to be natural-born foodies. Over the thousands of years, the different ethnicities who live in this region have developed great cuisines that make the most of the vast bounty that grow, swim, fly and live on the same land mass. One can say Mother Nature blessed them with a huge pantry of ingredients, but the terribly sophisticated cuisines that evolved here are also impressive testimony to the creativity of Southeast Asia’s cooks.
Indonesian food, with all its bold spices, is very different from the gentler flavours of Vietnamese, while the joyful cuisine of the Philippines, with its Spanish influences, is distinct from the fiery, sour, sweet complexity of Thai. The huge range of kueh, desserts, snacks, sambals and condiments that exist in some form or other in all the region’s cuisines, also point to societies that cared enough about the enjoyment and social functions of their food to develop their cuisine far, far beyond the mere necessity of filling the stomach and keeping full.
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