Rice Rage

A while back, someone tweeted their displeasure at a video of a guy reacting to someone cooking "egg fried rice" on BBC Food, using a version of the archetypal Chinese uncle's accent reminiscent of Stephen Yan's.

They were irked at the notion of making comedy out of exaggerated accents, which they say debases people who speak that way, and panned such acts as entertainment for snobs.

Did "Uncle Roger", a.k.a. London-based Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng, assume this guise to poke fun at the stereotype? Were "snobs" supposed to laugh at him every time he went "Haiya!" or "recalled" some anecdote out of a clichéd Chinese childhood?

Probably not, but the clip Ng's persona reacted to made waves among Asian communities for how rice was cooked in it.

Too much water.

 

Probably not cooked enough.

Draining what looked like partly cooked rice in a colander and rinsing it with running cold water. 

 

Outrage coursed through the Twittersphere. Then, some pointed out that the chef in the clip was cooking rice the Persian way, leaving many of us chastened for jumping the gun.

However, days afterwards, more reactions to the BBC segment emerged on YouTube, with some replicating the recipe almost step by step. A BBC interview with Nigel and Hersha Patel, who demonstrated the recipe, also surfaced. The latter revealed that the recipe was the BBC's and she was following the station's script. 

 

Or maybe these guys were late to the party. What we can conclude from the later reactions is that you won't get "absolutely delicious" egg fried rice from that recipe; one commentator even said that the BBC dish was not "egg fried rice" but "fried rice with egg".

I'm probably not qualified to ask this but did they look at the part where the recipe says to use "150g/5½oz long grain rice or basmati rice"? What rice did they use?

Of course basmati rice would be cooked that way and of course someone from that part of the world would hanker for fried rice and should be allowed to make it how they like with what they have. Just look at how Jamie Oliver does it - do both recipes look authentic?

I've committed crimes against rice - overseasoning, too much water, etc. - when making single-portion servings of it by steaming during the first MCO, using a tip from Twitter. But I do it because it works and I get to eat every grain instead of scraping some off the bottom of the rice cooker pot.

Who'd be in the mood for egg fried rice or anything else Done Right™ when they have so much else going on?

In that light, someone mocking a foreigner doing rice different with an ah pek's accent is committing a worse crime than merely not being funny.

Many of us gleefully dunked on the clip, assuming it was one of a recent string of incidents where Westerners messed around with "our food", and got burned. A more mindful approach would have saved us the embarrassment and give us enough cred to write posts like this. 

 

With no mention of the type of rice being used and why it's cooked the way it was, the clip alone would have raised more than just eyebrows in East Asian homes.

Plus, the written instructions for the rice on the BBC website do not include the hackle-raising step of rinsing the cooked grains that's so prominent in the clip, which now seems to be location-dependent. Perhaps a response to the backlash, or confirmation that the recipe is tailored for certain audiences.

That doesn't change that fact that saying others can't enjoy making and eating certain dishes from certain cuisines because they didn't cook them right is conceited and racist.