Nga Tha Lauk Paung, Slow-Steamed Hilsa

Nga tha lauk — the hilsa — is the most argued-over fish in the Bay of Bengal, and Myanmar's share of the argument swims up the Kaladan and the rivers of the western coast every year. Sittwe's markets weigh it like treasure, and honesty requires saying the neighbors do too: this is the same silver fish Bengal calls ilish and reveres to the point of poetry. The slow-steamed pot is cooked across lower Myanmar — the delta claims it as warmly as the coast does — and the method almost certainly settled into its modern form in the colonial era, when Akyab's rice-port world faced Bengal across the water and their kitchens traded habits along with cargo.

What earns the dish its place in the Rakhine chapter is the accent. The pot is soured hard with tamarind, sharpened with slit green chilies, and run on two tablespoons of oil — hilsa is so rich a fish that the coast's lean doctrine costs nothing here; the fish brings its own.

Paung means steamed, and the word is doing precise work: a sealed pot, liquid only partway up the fish, the lowest possible fire, and hours of patience. The reward is the famous miracle of this preparation — hilsa carries a forest of fine forked bones that defeats novices, and the long acidic steam dissolves every one of them into the flesh, the way a can does for sardines but gentler and infinitely better. A fish you fought last time, eaten with a spoon.