The next stop on the food tour is Myanmar, or Burma, or, in analogy to Derry/Londonderry’s moniker as “Slash City” I may just call it “Slash Country” to avoid treading on any toes.

As a country between India and Thailand Burma has a combination of traits from those cuisines. For instance the book I use has curry-like recipes - some of which involve typically Indian garam masalas and some of which involve typically Thai nam pla (fish sauce) and lemongrass. Though less frequent in my book there are also heavily Chinese-influenced dishes using soy sauce or Chinese preserved vegetables. Naturally, there are features of the cuisine that aren’t common in any of Burma’s neighbours’ cuisines - such as the flavour combination of pork and mango or the use of laphat - pickled tea leaves (one ingredient it actually is hard to source). It’s a wonderful combination of influences and the food I cooked for this post doesn’t reflect its full diversity.