Image courtesy of Belacan Alor Ibus FB
By Dr Rahim Said
Smells, like memories, are always local. What makes one community feel safe and familiar can send another into a full-blown emergency drill.
Just ask the good people of Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, who recently mistook the King of Fruits for a gas leak.
Yes, durian — that prickly, custard-like treasure of Southeast Asia — managed to trigger a response fit for a Hollywood disaster movie.
Engineers from the gas board arrived, police officers tagged along, and worried shopkeepers braced for the worst. After much sniffing around, they finally discovered that the “hazard” wasn’t methane but Malaysia’s national pride.
Reading that report, I couldn’t help but smile. It carried me back decades to my graduate student days in the 70s, on a Midlands campus, where something very similar once unfolded.
A group of us had decided to cook the food of home — salted fish fried with belacan, topped off with a fiery sambal. To us, it was a taste of family kitchens and village markets.
To our British neighbours, it was the unmistakable stench of a “dead rat.”
Someone, quite understandably, called the authorities. Before long, the fire department came knocking, boots heavy on the stairs, convinced they were about to uncover a health hazard.
The mystery was solved the moment they opened the kitchen door and were met not with a crime scene, but with a wok of belacan crackling away.
The firefighters were puzzled, slightly amused, and more than a little relieved.
We, meanwhile, were just delighted to be eating a dish that carried us across continents back to our mothers’ tables.
What was offensive to others was comfort to us.
That day taught me something about the cultural divide in smells.
To locals, salted fish was unbearable. To us, it was memory, belonging, identity — the very things that sustained us so far from home.
It seems Britain hasn’t changed much. Then it was belacan on a Midlands campus; today it is durian in a Lancashire fruit shop.
Different foods, same confusion. And always the same lesson: one person’s nuisance is another’s nostalgia.
Perhaps the moral is this: food isn’t just about taste, it’s about memory. Smells linger longer than anything else — the whiff of durian, the smoke of sambal, even the sting of belacan — and for many of us abroad, those smells were a lifeline.
So when the fire brigade came knocking all those years ago, they weren’t really putting out a fire. They were, unwittingly, witnesses to the invisible bridge that food builds between home and faraway places. And I’d like to think, all these years later, those firefighters still remember the day they met their first belacan — and how it nearly made heroes out of them
WE