New Loon Moon

9 Gerrard Street
London W1
020 7734 3887

The New Loon Moon is one of Gerrard Street's three Asian supermarkets: the others are Oriental Delight and the enormous Loon Fung. The New Loon Moon's distinguishing feature is that it stocks groceries from a huge range of Asian countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, India, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and even a tiny selection of Burmese goods. It has an interesting selection of fresh Thai herbs, including holy basil and pea aubergines, and lots of tropical fruit and vegetables including, on this visit, lurid pink dragonfruit, and the biggest jackfruit I had ever seen - about two feet long by a foot and a half wide, covered in spikes, and being sold by the slice.

I bought shrimp paste, Burmese dry balachaung, and a packet of Chinese instant honey and ginger drink (sweet and warming if you have a cold or an upset stomach).

The other supermarkets are worth checking out too. Oriental Delight is a treasure house of luridly packaged Chinese and Japanese snack foods. Get your chocolate-filled koalas, Hello Kitty biscuit tins and green tea flavoured Pocky here, as well as a dubious-looking tubular snack called Chocolate Flavoured Collon.

The Loon Fung has a vast range of mostly Chinese food, although there are small Thai and Indian sections as well; it also has a big meat and (frozen) fish department, where you can buy beef thinly pre-sliced to cook in a 'steamboat' stockpot, and every conceivable part of a pig or cow, including oxtail, trotters and ears. It also stocks a big range of pre-cooked dim sum, fresh noodles and buns.

Gerrard Street is the heart of London's Chinatown, at least at present (it's currently threatened by rising rents and redevelopment). As well as the New Loon Moon, Oriental Delight and the Loon Fung there are about a dozen Chinese restaurants and three bakeries: the Golden Gate Bakery, which had set up a stand outside making tiny waffles and selling them by the dozen when I was passing; the Kowloon bakery which does great pork buns and moon cakes; and the Wonderful Patisserie, whose window is a riot of elaborate cream cakes covered in fruit (the most startling were raspberry tarts with what appeared to be leopardskin patterned icing).


Ingredient 2: Shrimp paste (belacan, blacang, trassie) and Burmese dry balachaung


Shrimp paste is a gamey-smelling condiment used across south east Asia. It's a fermented paste of salted shrimp, which looks and tastes a bit like a dark brown cross between Gentleman's Relish and a stock cube. The brand I have previously bought was called Shrimp and Boy, and came in wonderfully retro packaging depicting a small rosy Chinese child, wreathed in lotuses, astride a large shrimp. This time I bought the rather less fancifully-packaged Trachang brand shrimp paste from Thailand. It's an essential component of all Thai curries, and can add salt and flavour to all kinds of dishes.

I also bought a related condiment, Chinthe brand Burmese dry balachaung. This is a crunchy, spicy mixture of fried onions, garlic, chilli and dried shrimp, with a texture slightly reminiscent of very finely ground Bombay mix. It's delicious sprinkled over stir-fried greens. The jar - which shows that it's manufactured in London - recommends using it as an accompaniment for rice or curry dishes, and adds: "Use as a sandwich filler or spread on hot buttered toast!" I've tried it in sandwiches: they're right.



Recipe: Makeua oop

This recipe is adapted from Hot sour salty sweet: a culinary journey through south east Asia, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. is a wonderful book which looks at south east Asian cooking by regional style rather than by political boundaries. The recipe caught my eye originally because they called it The best eggplant dish ever. I think they may be right. It's a recipe from the Shan States of Burma: oop is the name of the cooking style, and means that the dish has been steamed without water in a pot with a tight-fitting lid.

This version mutated partly because I misread it the first time I cooked it, and used shrimp paste instead of dried shrimp. Other features of my rather more slapdash cooking include the use of an onion, instead of shallots - by the time you've cooked anything in a paste including belacan, the chances of telling the difference between onion and shallots are small, in my opinion.
Anyway, as I cook it: soak three dried chillis in warm water (you can buy these in large bags from Chinese supermarkets, or you can do as I do and buy fresh ones and use them up when they've wizened on the kitchen window sill). Chop an onion and some garlic (Alford and Duguid suggest five cloves - I sometimes use more). Pound the onion, garlic, and chillis into a paste with a teaspoonful of salt and a tablespoonful of belacan - you can use a mortar or a food processor. Take a few ounces of minced pork - they recommend a quarter cup, I tend to use a bit more. The main thing is that the meat is a frugal seasoning rather than the main ingredient.

Brown the meat in a little oil, then add half a teaspoonful of turmeric and the onion, shrimp and chilli paste. Fry this for a few minutes, and then add some thinly sliced aubergines - cut to about a quarter inch thick . I used four enormous Spanish ones this time. I've tried it with the smaller and more delicate-looking Asian aubergines, but the end result was exactly the same.

Then clamp the lid on the pot, turn the heat reasonably low, check it and stir it every five to ten minutes, and cook it until, as Alford and Duguid say, "the eggplant is very tender and shapeless." You end up with a potent and intensely flavoured brown stew. I served it with rice, and steamed kale sprinkled with the Burmese dry balachaung, but it works pretty well in sandwiches too.

I keep meaning to try the oop technique for other moist vegetables - I think mushroom or okra oop would also work well.