Inle Nga Hin, Intha Tomato Fish Curry

From a boat on Inle Lake you can watch both halves of this curry growing at once: fish traps in the open water, and tomatoes — hectares of them — ripening on the floating gardens, beds of woven water hyacinth and lake-bed silt staked in place with bamboo. The Intha, "sons of the lake," farm the water itself, and their signature curry says so: freshwater fish laid into a mass of tomatoes cooked down until the oil returns through them, red and glowing.

Regional variants of nga hin are everywhere in Myanmar, and we say honestly that this is one — but it is a genuinely distinct one. The floating gardens turned decisively to tomatoes during the colonial era, when new roads and the railway to Shwenyaung gave lake farmers a cash crop and lowland markets a taste for hill tomatoes, and the Intha kitchen followed its own harvest. The seasoning tells the same story: a little soy sauce alongside the fish sauce, the hills and the lowlands meeting in one pan.

Everything depends on patience with the tomatoes. They must pass through sauce and arrive at jam, frying gently in the spice base until the oil separates — si pyan, the returning of the oil, the proof the water is gone and the flavor is concentrated. Give that stage its full twenty minutes and the fish needs only ten more. Rice, cilantro, and a slit green chili finish one of the prettiest curries in the country.