Header overlay
The gentlest of giants - John Keay on Alan Davidson, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos - Slightly Foxed Issue 6

On Matters Mekong

Scrolling idly through the SOAS Library’s subject catalogue, I must have brushed an unusual combination of keys, so activating a random function not mentioned on the options bar nor widely known to researchers. The feat has since proved impossible to repeat. But I keep trying; for it was thanks to this truly serendipitous action that up flashed a title which, for its crystal candour, can seldom have been bettered. Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos was so specific it had to be just that – a handbook and culinary guide to the fish to be found in landlocked Laos. The author was Alan Davidson, the publisher Prospect Books, the category ‘Long Loan’, and the status ‘Available’. Like a minnow into the reeds, I darted to the stacks.

There are not many books on Laos. If that is your subject area, you soon become familiar with most of them and hanker after other company. I had already gutted the histories, trudged through the forest with the travellers, taken a turn among the hill tribes with the social anthropologists, and become entangled in the government’s statistical reports. Fish, though, were something different. A whole book on the fish of a country whose natural history has largely escaped scientific scrutiny and which possesses neither a fishing fleet nor a coastline was worth inspection.

Whatever the merits of the book itself, I was intrigued by its genesis. I wondered, for instance, what could have recommended the subject to the presumably non-Lao Davidson; who had he supposed would read such a work; and with the prospect of only a minimal sale, what on earth had prompted Prospect Books of Totnes to publish it? The SOAS copy ran to about 200 pages, one per fish, each with a line drawing. It hadn’t been out on loan for eight years. Perhaps it was the only copy in existence. I cushioned it in my backpack and headed home for a leisurely appraisal.

There then began a process of revelation and acquaintance so rewarding that I now feel no shame at all in confessing my prior ignorance of Davidson and all his great works. In fact I pi

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

Scrolling idly through the SOAS Library’s subject catalogue, I must have brushed an unusual combination of keys, so activating a random function not mentioned on the options bar nor widely known to researchers. The feat has since proved impossible to repeat. But I keep trying; for it was thanks to this truly serendipitous action that up flashed a title which, for its crystal candour, can seldom have been bettered. Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos was so specific it had to be just that – a handbook and culinary guide to the fish to be found in landlocked Laos. The author was Alan Davidson, the publisher Prospect Books, the category ‘Long Loan’, and the status ‘Available’. Like a minnow into the reeds, I darted to the stacks.

There are not many books on Laos. If that is your subject area, you soon become familiar with most of them and hanker after other company. I had already gutted the histories, trudged through the forest with the travellers, taken a turn among the hill tribes with the social anthropologists, and become entangled in the government’s statistical reports. Fish, though, were something different. A whole book on the fish of a country whose natural history has largely escaped scientific scrutiny and which possesses neither a fishing fleet nor a coastline was worth inspection. Whatever the merits of the book itself, I was intrigued by its genesis. I wondered, for instance, what could have recommended the subject to the presumably non-Lao Davidson; who had he supposed would read such a work; and with the prospect of only a minimal sale, what on earth had prompted Prospect Books of Totnes to publish it? The SOAS copy ran to about 200 pages, one per fish, each with a line drawing. It hadn’t been out on loan for eight years. Perhaps it was the only copy in existence. I cushioned it in my backpack and headed home for a leisurely appraisal. There then began a process of revelation and acquaintance so rewarding that I now feel no shame at all in confessing my prior ignorance of Davidson and all his great works. In fact I pity those for whom Alan Davidson is a household name. They will never know the delight of a chance encounter on matters Mekong courtesy of the SOAS catalogue, nor the even greater pleasure of discovering an exceptionally beguiling writer in such otherwise undistinguished company. Only the random thoughts to which that catalogue encounter gave rise may strike a chord, for they concern the reader-author relationship. ‘Oh, so you’re reading Davidson,’ said a friend. ‘Yes, he’s very good on the Giant Mekong Catfish.’ ‘But have you read the catfish piece in A Kipper for My Tea?’ I hadn’t; so I got that too. The Giant Mekong Catfish surfaces in quite a few of Davidson’s books, most of which have nothing to do with Laos or the Mekong. Evidently he felt drawn to this shy creature. To anyone obsessed by the wildest of Asia’s rivers (him in the 1970s, me in the 1990s), the fish assumes a prominence wildly out of proportion to its elusive reputation. Indeed, proportion is much the most notable of its few known characteristics. Specimens of over 250 kilos have been recorded; of the one described by Davidson the head alone weighed 49.5 kilos. It is probably the largest freshwater fish in the world. In Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos other finny curiosities are no less lovingly described. There’s a perch that climbs trees, a carp that feeds on grass cuttings, an archerfish that fires high-velocity water-bullets, and a lesser catfish that goes walkabout down dusty Lao lanes, usually alone and always at night. It belongs, like other common catfish, to the Latin genus Pangasius. Only the Giant Mekong Catfish is a Pangasianodon, which led me to suppose that it might be descended from a dinosaur and have some Jurassic affinity with, say, the iguanadon or the mastodon. I was of course hopelessly wrong. The added-on ‘-anodon’ simply means ‘toothless’. For all its girth and its two-to-three-metre length, Pangasianodon gigas is the gentlest of giants and would harm you only if it fell on you. It is thought to feed entirely on algae, to frequent the river’s depths (over a hundred metres in places), and to migrate for spawning; no one knows where or when, nor whether a breeding population still exists. Obviously its endangered status troubled Davidson. In A Kipper with My Tea he admitted to having once joined a Lao fishing party. This proved to be a highly ritualized affair requiring a suitable phase of the moon, elaborate offerings to numerous spirits, and some prior abstinence from such things as sex and alcohol. Even when actually fishing, the anglers had to observe a rubric to the effect that they keep up a constant stream of verbal abuse. ‘They had to call each other “bald-headed fool” and other even more uncomplimentary names,’ says Davidson, ‘and they exchanged sexual insults in the most liberal manner.’ Despite this – or because of it – ‘they did catch some’; butas to what became of the catch Davidson says nothing. Only in the earlier book, with its promise of dishes as well as fishes, had the culinary aspect been covered. Diffidently and with just a hint of one-up-manship, he there revealed that he had both cooked and eaten it, and could confirm its near-legendary distinction. The flesh was ‘of superlative quality . . . admirable texture and unmatched flavour’. Like the sturgeon, it bore some resemblance to veal, and ‘there are those’, he continued, ‘who, tasting it for the first time, insist that it must be meat rather than fish’.
Yet it is fishy, in a subtle and majestic way. Thin escalopes may be deep-fried or pan-fried successfully. But I think the best treatment is to grill steaks over charcoal, dipping them beforehand in a mixture of olive oil and lime juice (which I flavour with mint or thyme) and basting them during the cooking . . .
Davidson wrote best about what he loved most. From the Introduction to A Kipper, I learned that it was in order to concentrate on fish that in 1975 he resigned from the Foreign Office. Laos had thus been his last ambassadorial posting and, with a neat symmetry, he was Her Britannic Majesty’s last ambassador there; for as the Pathet Lao cadres tightened their grip on the country, British representation was withdrawn and has yet to be restored. For Laos, communism led to isolation, and for Davidson fish led to seafood. Penguin had published his Mediterranean Seafood in 1972, following an earlier diplomatic posting to Tunis. Other now classic volumes – Seafood of the North Atlantic, Seafood of South East Asia – followed. These led on to food in general. A small industry of publications and symposia, all devoted to the adumbration of neglected culinary classics and unlikely cuisines, resulted. Although most of his own books were first published by more mainstream houses, Prospect Books was another Davidson creation; so was Petit Propos Culinaires, its ‘journal of food studies’. In A Kipper, first published in 1988, he dispensed wise thoughts and hilarious anecdotes not only on the Giant Mekong Catfish but on the history of the pressure cooker, on nuts, esculent fungi, the artistry of Tokyo’s coffee barista and much else besides. The Oxford Companion to Food came towards the end of his writing career. It took twenty years to compile and confirmed his iconic status. Official recognition followed when in 2002 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. By chance it was on the evening that this award was announced, and when the Davidson house in Chelsea was therefore under siege by European TV crews, that I presented myself for supper. By then I was one of his most ardent fans. I had boated up the Mekong, taken his name in vain, acquired many of his books, and could quote most of A Kipper’s ‘Giant of the Mekong’ essay verbatim. Though this was to be our first and only meeting, I felt we were already friends. Alan opened the door; Jane switched off the phone. A bottle was produced, although Alan himself neither drank wine nor wrote of it; like haute cuisine, it invited too much ‘gastronomic gush’. We sat down to roast chicken in the kitchen. Catfish featured only as conversational fare. It is not true that reading and writing are unsociable activities. Hours spent in the paginated company of a stylish author afford as many insights, present as many challenges and may engender as much affection as years of personal acquaintance. Living and working in the society of authors is like participating in some exotic function without the onus of attendance yet with every chance of a truly life-enriching encounter. When Alan died almost exactly a year later, I felt no great sense of loss. The man I knew lived on in the books. I turned to his essay on ‘Funeral Cookbooks’ and came up smiling. Try it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © John Keay 2005


About the contributor

John Keay’s Mad about the Mekong was published in February 2005. He and Julia Keay are currently at large in London preparing a new edition of The London Encyclopaedia.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.