Ikan Bilis in Paris Store

My mum would make nasi lemak on her off days. On some Saturdays, I'd walk into the kitchen and breathe in the aroma of ikan bilis frying off in one pan and the sambal bubbling away in another. When she makes food, it's never for just one meal. It's for multiple meals, and each component can be used as accompaniments for other dishes. One batch of fried ikan bilis can be kept in a jar for a week or two.

She'd ask one of us - either my sister or I - to wash the rice and run it in the rice cooker. There'd be scurrying around in the kitchen - fetching a pandan leaf or the box of Kara coconut cream, taking the already marinated fishes or chicken (or both) out of the fridge, chopping up the cucumber.

Lunch (and our dinner, for the next 3 or 4 days) would be ready, soon.

The traffic swerved around us as we walked as close as possible to the shops that line Pasar Ikan Tanjung Pinang, and away from the roads. It's impossible. The roads are packed with motorcycles, minivans, cars, etc. We try our best. The scent of fishes - fresh and dried - wafted in the air. My mum stopped upon seeing the shop she wanted to enter. She knows the shops. Years of living in Singapore did not dull her senses when it came to selecting the best shops to buy ikan bilis from. She then talked to a shopkeeper, who was suggesting some products to her. She smiled and kindly rejected his recommendations. She'd already selected which ones to buy, calculated how much ikan bilis she could bring home, and to whom she could gift each packet to. She's also determined to stock up some in our fridge so we'd never run out of it until the next time we returned to Tanjung Pinang. I took a deep breath; the saltiness of the sea nearby, the smog of traffic, the umami of ikan bilis and ikan asin laid out on rattan trays.

Home.

I gasped when I finally found some ikan bilis (dried anchovies, but I will refer to them as ikan bilis) in Paris Store (at the frozen food section, which I didn't check before because in my mind, Ikan Bilis is not a frozen food). I had a hankering for them because we've made nasi lemak multiple times but never had them with ikan bilis (or sambal, for that matter). It's not that I couldn't find them - I knew they exist in France - but they were either too expensive or not exactly the ones I was looking for.

So when I found some from Thailand which were affordable (€2.80 for a 100g packet), I was ecstatic. I mean, we're not feeding a family of four. And I'm the only one who'd eat it, anyway. So that was enough.

When I opened the packet, I breathed in the scent deeply. People talk about sniffing wine, or cheese, or coffee. Get the full depth of aroma. Whatever the hell else they say. But this was ikan bilis. The thing you compare yourself to when you're a lowly paid employee in the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. It smells fishy and salty, like you would expect a dried fish to smell like. But this wasn't just a dried fish product.

This was... home.

I was returned to a time when my mum would deep-fry multiple batches of ikan bilis in a wok, and then kept them (when they are cooled) in plastic jars - that we reuse from our kuih raya - lined with kitchen paper. I was returned to a time when I was walking along the roads of Tanjung Pinang, at the pasar near the ports.

I've written about Food as Bearer of Memories, and in it, I said:

To find familiar food, in places I least expect them to be.

And this was it. Ikan Bilis, in the north of France. Bearing memories of 32 years of my life, each bite unlocking a time capsule of my time in Singapore and Indonesia. The shiokness (omg I MISS THIS WORD!) of shovelling nasi lemak, ikan bilis, sambal and egg onto a spoon to give you the perfect bite. Explosions in your mouth. I can recreate this tonight, right now.

All because I found Ikan Bilis in Paris Store.