[Sca-cooks] "fish sauce"

[Stefan li Rous]

Urtatim mentioned:
> Well, as far as i know, we don't get all those brands here - just the
> Tiparos. But we also get several brands of Pilipino fishy stuff, and
> Vietnamese fish sauce, and ISTR Chinese fish sauce (we have Hakka and
> Hokkien communities here, and i'm wildly guessing southern coastal
> folks would be the Chinese with fish sauce). Clearly here on the Left
> Coast of the US, and the East Coast of the Pacific Ocean, we have a
> lot of East and Southeast Asians

We have a pretty good Asian buffet here in Austin, called "Buffet  
Palace" which has a wide variety of Asian foods at a good price. Not  
just Chinese, but also Korean, Japanese and southeast Asian.

Among the specials tonight were whole crawfish and mussels? on the  
half shell to go along with the usual boiled, unshelled shrimp.  
Liking crawfish, especially when I'm not paying by the pound and  
throwing half of it away, I got several of these and proceeded to  
pick up the "spicy seafood sauce", in the type of bottle you often  
see restaurant syrups in,  to use as a dip for the shrimp and/or  
crawfish. I don't care for tarter sauce, and prefer the red, tomato  
and pepper based sauces. Well, as I picked this up I thought "hmmm,  
this seems awfully light and it doesn't slosh like it is very thick".  
And brought it closer to check it out, and lo, it was the type of  
fish sauce you talk about above. :-) Not the red seafood sauce I was  
expecting. :-) While it's okay in some dishes, I don't think of it as  
a good dipping sauce for shrimp or crawfish.  So, be careful of the  
"fish sauce" you pick up.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****