Eating is the Singapore national sport. An irresistible vein of foodieness runs deep in the Singaporean genetic makeup. We plan lunch over breakfast and dinner over lunch, and then go out to supper. We incessantly trade tips about the best places to get the shiokest dishes. Our Chinese wedding dinners stretch to nine courses over four hours. We endure forty minutes of queueing for a simple bowl of minced pork noodles with black vinegar. Why? Because we can’t find the particular savor of the stall’s old-fashioned chili sauce anywhere else.
There is a such diversity of ways and places to stuff your face here, from hawker centers and corner coffeeshops to the classiest contemporary Asian and Western restaurants. You can empty your wallet for a French dinner one night and sit down to a $1 dosai (south Indian rice crepe) the next morning. Given the details of our island republic’s history, our egalitarian omnivorousness is no surprise. Over the centuries before and since its founding in 1819 by the Englishman Sir Stamford Raffles, Singapore has had a cultural life braided with Chinese, Malay, Arab, Thai, Indian, Indonesian, Eurasian, colonial British, and continental influences. Our cuisine, then and now, reflects this. How else to explain a Chinese chicken soup with macaroni, crispy shallots, and fried bread croutons? A rich curry of pork ribs and bamboo shoots? A Hainanese chef’s special “chicken cutlets” in H P Sauce-spiked brown gravy with chips and peas? A staple breakfast trio of hot buttered toast slathered with coconut-egg jam, a soft-boiled egg drizzled with dark soy sauce, and a cup of thick, black, highly sweetened coffee? When you grow up with such an eclectic mix of edibles, your taste buds get a uniquely intoxicating education.
Chinese Cooking: Dialectic Differences Forget the greasy homogeneity of the oriental take-away menu too often found abroad. The true diversity of Chinese cuisine is as wide and deep as regional French or Italian. There is no “Chinese food” per se—there is food from Hunan and Swatow and Beijing and Yunnan and Shanghai and that’s without considering the web of Chinese ancestry extending throughout Southeast Asia, the Thai-Teochews, Indonesian Chinese, and so on, each strand of which has its own culinary distinctions.
Terry comes from the match of an Indonesian Chinese father and a mother whose antecedents came from the early Peranakan clans of Malacca, Penang, and Thailand. Then again, his father’s family also had Hokkien roots in China’s Fujian Province, and his mother’s family a branch of good Teochew stock from Swatow Province. Every family feast was a glorious tok panjang—the Peranakan festive offering of dishes spread across a long table. Chris’s maternal grandfather was a true-blue baba who married a true-blue Cantonese lady, and their household meals were an eclectic mix of classics from both worlds, brought together in a mouthwatering alchemy.
In essence, Chinese food in Singapore has four main regional branches—Hokkien, Teochew Cantonese, and Hainanese. Teochews are inordinately fond of soups, braised dishes, and a disservice to summarize India’s cuisines in anything less than several hundred pages, but as a rough reference for the palate, southern Indian food in Singapore is characterized by rice flour based breads as well as rice dishes, with an abundance of seafood, fresh vegetables, cool yoghurt, and sour tamarind as foils for aromatic, chili-hot spice blends spiked with mustard seeds and curry leaves. Northern Indian food here calls more often on wheat breads as staples, and boasts many rich and complex curries as well as tandoori specialties. A meal of either ilk is typically built around a mix of dry and wet dishes, and chutneys and pickles. One “Indian” curry, made with large fish heads in a spicy, sour gravy, is in fact a uniquely Singaporean variation on a Keralan theme that you won’t find in the motherland.
Beautifully mottled flower-crab shells.
Peranakan roots: Our Own Fusion Heritage Also known as Straits Chinese, the latter meaning “born of the soil,” the Peranakan people have roots in Chinese, Malay, and Indian culture—the respectful term for Peranakan men, baba, comes from an Indian word; women are called nonyas. The original community arose centuries ago in Malacca, and today the other centers of the diaspora are in Penang and Singapore, with small groups in Indonesia and Thailand. Each community has its own distinct culinary emphases. Malaccan and Singaporean Nonya food is largely similar, but many Nonya dishes from Penang, further north, have a Thai mood about them, and Penangite patois embraces many Thai words. Many Peranakans were of Chinese-Indonesian parentage, like my father; the nearby Riau Islands were a Peranakan outpost.
All told, it makes for scrumptious eating. A natural example of “fusion” cuisine—without any of the hapless connotations that word has gathered in the modern era, if you please. The Peranakan culinary canon integrates its diverse roots into a glorious whole. It includes curries of seafood, beef, and chicken, but also pork; braised meats almost purely Chinese in style, but enlivened with a snap of spices; fattening festive noodle dishes and healthy salads of raw vegetables and herbs; and rich desserts that will have you napping after lunch. Perhaps its most iconic dish is chicken and pork ribs cooked in a spicy tamarind gravy with buah keluak, Indonesian black nuts whose meat tastes divinely like the offspring of a black truffle, a dark chocolate bar and wet earth after rain.
The best Nonya cooks, like cooks everywhere, measure ingredients and cooking times with their hands, eyes, noses, and ears, and they give a name to this cooking by feel: agak-agak. Much of Terry’s own style in this respect was handed down to him by first his grandmother and then his mother, bless their Nonya souls, who in assigning him sometimes tedious kitchen tasks made him an unwitting trustee of the culture. Chris was not forcibly steeped in his ancestry in the same way, but picked it up mostly through osmosis, as it were.
Vegetables bagged for sale
man serving up chicken curry at the Adam Road food center
a well-connected roast meat stall at the Tiong Barhu food center
durian, the king of fruits.
As food writers, our sense of our heritage reminds us that we have a duty to arouse curiosity and passion about food culture in future generations, to instill a respect for tradition as well as a level-headed appreciation for innovation. We must all learn to care about our food traditions enough to prevent them slipping away, to keep the precious legacy of our parents’ and grandparents’ kitchens alive and bright. We hope that this book will spur you on to do that.
How To Use This Book
This book was written for three kinds of people. One is the Singaporean who doesn’t cook much, but wants to get to know his own food heritage better. The second is the intrepid non-Singaporean who wants to broaden his culinary horizons. Welcome to our world! The third is everyone else. Why would one want to miss out on great food?
If your desire to stir up something delicious is tempered by a vague idea of cooking as a complex, tedious process and therefore a dreaded chore, be reassured that none of these recipes are particularly difficult. A few require a dedicated investment of time, and all benefit from your full attention—the unexamined dish is not worth eating, after all—but, trust us, the returns are worth it.
Cooking once was more laborious, true. Buying a chicken also used to mean killing, defeathering, blood-letting, and butchering it. Terry has severed his fair share of chickens’ jugulars, scoured neighborhood hedges for the bunga telang flowers his mother would press a dark blue-purple dye from to color her ang koo kueh (mung bean and rice flour cakes), and taken countless bus rides to the seashore to gather, at low tide, tons of wet, slimy, icky seaweed to be dried in the sun, boiled down, clarified, and cooked with sugar and water to make delicious agar-agar jelly for Chinese New Year.
But that was long ago. Nowadays, you don’t have