It takes a special kind of genius to put flavours together that, somehow, once you do, become obvious. The thing is, I guess, that they’re not obvious until someone does it. I think this genius of combining flavours is at is most evident with crisps. Cheese and onion. Salt and vinegar. Even the ordinary flavours are, when you really think about them, quite random.
The same is true of dishes and also people. Odd couples make perfect sense once they are put together. Like Chandler and Monica, or cheese and pickle sandwiches. This marriage of the innocuous and sometimes downright weird makes things more than the sum of their parts.
I think about this a lot when I read the ingredient list for “garlic noodles”, which I experienced for the first time when visiting your family in America in 2019. It was the same time that I brought a dozen mince pies for them to try. As it turns out, the combination of mine and pie in that situation was not, for your family at least, a winner. Eleven and a half mince pies that had been hand carried from Hong Kong – went shamefully and conspicuously uneaten.
We later volunteered – on a subsequent trip to the US – to make garlic noodles for your family as part of a “pot luck” dinner. Which should have been a triumph, but was actually a disaster, as it turns out that kosher salt is way more salty than normal salt, and as a result the noodles ended up tasting like a glass of seawater. Thankfully, the combo of hot red wine, orange juice and spices went down a lot better.
When you read the ingredients for this dish “fish sauce, parmesan, garlic, butter…” it sounds like a child has made them up, picking out random things from a store cupboard. “Oyster sauce too?!”. But that is the delight of this dish. You can – largely from a store cupboard – put together seemingly incongruous ingredients to create a sensationally good pasta dish in no time. Perhaps like us, it’s a collection of things the outside observer wouldn’t put together, but when you do it somehow makes perfect sense.
SHOPPING LIST
Makes enough for two people, with leftover sauce probably
Must Haves
Thin spaghetti - enough for two people
2 tbsp olive oil
1.5 tbsp butter
3 gloves garlic – smooshed to a paste in a pestle and mortar ideally
1.5 tbsp oyster sauce
1.5 tbsp fish sauce
1.5 tbsp light soy sauce
A quarter cup of chicken or vegetable stock
Optional
Big handful grated parmesan
Sliced green onions
HOW TO MAKE
Combine the olive oil, butter, garlic, oyster sauce, fish sauce, light soy sauce and stock in a pan on a gentle heat. Don’t boil, but simmer very gently for a minute or two to combine everything and cook the garlic a little.
Cook the pasta to packet instructions.
To the cooked, drained, hot pasta, add the parmesan (if using) and half the sauce. Stir vigorously and taste. Add more sauce as required to taste.
Garnish with sliced green onion (if using) and eat immediately.