LONGING FOR THE TASTE OF EMPING – Part 1

Emping - crunchy and delicious in the traditional way. It sounds very exotic.

Actually it’s just a local food delight that I always looked forward to relishing during my young-eating-everything-yummy days of nonchalance and naivete.

But it is a food delight that, through the evolution of time, now seems hard to find or procure, and, come to think of it, might perhaps soon cease to exist with each passing day because of modern development.

What is Emping?

Emping, to those who don’t know this Malay word, is those thin and flat pounded rice.

It is somewhat similar to oats. So what oat is to wheat, emping is actually rice, the staple food of most Asians, that has been pounded into dry, thin and flat pieces.

Sadly, emping, as mentioned earlier, is difficult to find and seldom found sold in shops in the city nowadays. I should know because I cannot remember ever seeing any, because otherwise I would have bought at least a small pack and share the joys of the traditional emping "dish" recipe with my children.

Living in the city has actually devoid my children from tasting something that I, in my childhood days, relished with the utmost pleasure, as emping were available rather aplenty during the good old days.

But now, emping can, perhaps, only be found at the traditional villages in the rural suburbs where padi is planted. I say, "perhaps" because I’m not too sure whether the modern padi farmers now apportion some of their harvested padi and rice to make them into emping. I hope they still do, because in the olden days, my padi-planter relatives always did.

And that was how I tasted and loved those thin pounded rice.

I lived in Temerloh, Pahang, when small, and most of my relatives then, besides being businessmen and rubber tappers, were also padi planters there. I remember padi planting was an economic activity quite extensively undertaken by my close relatives around the Batu Satu and Sungai Rabit areas in those old days.

Now of course, if we go to Temerloh, we cannot see any more padi fields. The new generation of my relatives living there are no more padi planters. They are businessmen and entrepreneurs (big and small) or are officers and office employees in the government and the private sectors.

Temerloh has, instead, been transformed into a fast burgeoning and busy commercial and industrial town in Pahang. I think it is the second largest town in Pahang after Kuantan, the state capital.

The rice fields that I remember where padi was planted by my aunties and uncles in the 1950s are now all occupied and transplanted by modern cement and brick buildings – shop-houses, residential estates and other structured properties.

And when in those old days the padi fields seemed to be quite a distance away from town, now if they had still existed, those padi fields will be really smack in the middle of town.

Sad feeling... I sometimes feel like I lost a certain part of my life whenever I pass those padi areas that are no more.

Well, never mind. That’s what is known as development. It’s for the good of the country and the folks.

And the best way to soothe the nostalgic mind is always to look forward to the future, right?