GoKawiilThere is a specific, sharp mist that hangs in the air when you slice into a calamansi. The fruit is small, usually no larger than a marble, with a thin green skin that yields an abrasive, floral acidity — something halfway between a key lime and a sour mandarin. Last week, standing in my kitchen, I halved a handful of them and squeezed their juice into a Dutch oven full of simmering chicken and okra.
Calamansi limes for sale in Vancouver’s Granville market.
The dish was bamya asam. If you consult a standard cookbook, bamya is a Middle Eastern staple, a slow-braised lamb and okra stew whose character relies on a deeply savory tomato base heavily perfumed with garlic. In the middle east, its signature sourness comes from lemon juice (typical in Iraq or Anatolia), tamarind (as found in southern Iran), or can even be coaxed out of the dusty, fermented acidity of noomi basra — sun-dried black limes.
My pot, however, smelled reminiscent of the Southeast Asian tropics.
I have written previously about the internet’s neurotic policing of culinary borders. God help the poor soul who posts a carbonara with a splash of cream on Reddit; you will be digitally excommunicated before the pasta water boils. Strangely enough, we tend to measure dishes we are less familiar with (or did not grow up with) with a level of cartographic exactitude. Meanwhile, the dishes we grew up with are deeply authentic to us, shaped by the subsitutions and tastes of our parents and grandparents.
The calamansi I have readily available to me in Toronto.
So why was I, an Australian in Toronto who grew up in Singapore, making a Middle Eastern stew with a citrus from the Philippines? To trace the lineage of the stew bubbling on my stove requires engaging with a different metric entirely. It requires Plutarch. (I mean, not really. But I enjoy being superfluous.)
In the late first century, the Greek philosopher Plutarch recorded a thought experiment concerning the mythological King Theseus. If a wooden ship is preserved in a harbor, and over the decades its decaying planks are replaced one by one with new timber, is it still the ship of Theseus? When applied to diaspora cooking, the paradox is identical. If you cross an ocean and substitute a recipe’s ingredients to accommodate a new geography, at what point have you cooked an entirely different meal? Which one is the ‘authentic’ dish?
The Ship of Theseus paradox is so old it has become almost a cliché, and these days is applied so often it loses a lot of its original wonder. However, it’s a nice reminder that food authenticity is not very well defined. Variations of a dish exist in both space and time, turning a clear categorization into a messy (and beautiful) family tree.
And this is essentially the backstory of my Iraqi-Jewish-Singaporean stew. To understand why a tropical lime has any business being squeezed over an Iraqi stew, you have to trace a maritime route that spans centuries and oceans.
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