Reviews The Age EPICURE Restaurant Reviews
GARLIC. We've been on the stuff for years. It's been found in the tombs of ancient Egyptians. Roman poet Horace wrote of "garlic, more harmful than hemlock", that could drive one's lover to refuse a kiss and retreat to the far side of the bed.
This we know because the late, great Alan Davidson put it in his Oxford Companion to Food. And Davidson is nearly always the last word on such matters. But.
"In Asia, garlic is important in cooking, but there seems to be no parallels to the special Mediterranean dishes which are centred on garlic," he writes. "For Asians, garlic is just something which is used all the time to add flavour to savoury dishes, with no special fanfare attending it."
By which he means there is no Asian equivalent to pesto, gremolata or aioli. But were he still with us, I'd like to take Mr Davidson for a bite at Laksa Me, where the chef's "succulent grilled Thai sausage" may prompt him to reconsider. This is garlic such as to force the retreat of one's lover to the far side of the suburb.
I had two.
For the record, this excellent morsel - chef Allen Woo's interpretation of sausage - doesn't look much like what you might expect. Not even if you've had Thai sausage before, which if you haven't, you should, because it is good. Here, a combination of spiced minced pork, coarsely chopped garlic (which must have been blanched, because it doesn't have anything like the aggression of raw or just-cooked garlic), glutinous rice and more garlic is wrapped in a corn husk, making a bonbon-like parcel, tied at each end.
They get grilled in their little organic shells, slit down the middle, bunged on a bed of shredded lettuce and smothered with a delicious relish of diced fresh cucumber, toasted chopped peanut, fresh red chilli and fresh coriander with a tangy salted plum sauce.
The waiter reminds us not to eat the husks and, in these litigious times, I guess that's advice some could benefit from.
At $3.50 a piece, the sausages and their sauce are magnificent, with considered fresh chilli, floral scents, a nuance of smoke from the charring and the textural interplay of the soft, unctuous sausage itself against the fresh, zingy crunch of the cucumber. But perhaps not on a first date.
To me, the dish is an unmitigated celebration of garlic, but as if to prove Davidson right, the menu, which describes the dish in some detail, fails to mention the stuff at all. You have been warned.