I have a friend whom I can frighten by simply pronouncing the word tapioca. Not for her bubble tea or tapioca pudding. But I rather like those rubbery little eyeballs, having been introduced to them in early childhood in the company of sweet sauces and custards. The sticky, slimy concoction is a form of comfort food for me, I guess: a pablum that grownups can eat without shame.
Well, when it comes to comfort food in the form of edible slimy pastes — as it seems to have in this fillip — nothing can match ambuyat, apparently. I recently learned on a CBC radio broadcast [MP3] that this favourite traditional food of Brunei is making a comeback there. Much like tapioca, which is starch extracted from the cassava plant (and then commonly formed into "pearls"), ambuyat is the starch found in the sago palm; and in Brunei it is not formed into "sago pearls" (as it might be here — see a recipe for sago pudding from Jamie Oliver), but is cooked and eaten as a paste.
There's a little more to it than that, thankfully. First, there's a traditional chopsticks-like device to eat it with: you plunge it into the slime, withdraw a… clot, dip that into a sauce that has some taste, and bon appetit. Just so you're left in no doubt as to how this all looks and works, I'm providing a very short video below that will make this as clear as… can be. (There's also a Flickr set of photos that show how it's done.)
I gather that this dish has been a part of Brunei life for a long time. When WWII came to Borneo, the Japanese occupiers commandeered much of the food, forcing local residents to fall back on the sago palm and ambuyat. Those who endured the war had had their fill of this delicacy, and it fell out of favour, returning recently, however, as bit of nostalgia.
Now, before you rush right out and start pounding the trunks of nearby sago palms in your greed for goo, you need to be aware of the potential for some dangerous horticultural confusion. There's a plant, Cycas revoluta (no, not revolta), that goes by the name of sago palm or King sago palm; but this poseur — it's not even a palm, but a cycdad instead — is poisonous. Really really poisonous. It's the other sago palm that's goo, er, good to eat: the Metroxylon sagu. Let me be clear:
Moreover, neither Slaw nor any of its employees accepts any responsibility for any distress or death that may be caused from a confusion between palms or near palms and you the viewer by the act of reading this accept and affirm your full responsibility for any actions on your part in relation to or as a consequence of sago or ambuyat or any other comestible of similar consistency or source. May cause nausea, the shakes, the fantods and really bad indigestion or death. Likely void where prohibited by law or even vaguely disapproved of.
Tapioca and its cousin sago were served on Wednesdays and Thursdays throughout my boarding school days. I cannot face them now; all I can remember is a convulsive gag reflex each time I tried to eat them. I shall not try any other remote cousin and, if forced to eat any of them, I might well prefer the poisonous variety.