It wasn’t so much confidence that motivated Fat Rice chef Abraham Conlon to write a Macanese cookbook after only two visits to the former Portuguese colony of Macau. It was fear.
The problem with compiling a book based on such recipes is that the relative scarcity of Macanese cookbooks means that they’d never been widely codified. So Conlon’s worry that his recipe for diabo, aka devil’s curry, might be spot-on for one family and all wrong for another isn’t without merit.
Macanese cuisine is really a hybrid of Portuguese and Chinese food as well as the food of all the lands the Portuguese passed through in the name of conquest and commerce, including Brazil, Mozambique, India, and Malaysia, among others. During their second research trip, Conlon and Lo visited Portuguese settlements in Malacca and Singapore. It cemented the idea in Conlon’s mind that Macau was just a beginning. Fat Rice didn’t start out as a strictly Macanese restaurant in the first place—the Chinese characters on the front of the restaurant translate to “Portuguese food.” But by researching the building blocks of this obscure cuisine, he’s realized there’s a wider world of food to explore.
By Abraham Conlon, Adrienne Lo, and Hugh Amano (Ten Speed Press) Available October 25
