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 to coax damp wood to make a fire in a hung lo (earthenware) oven—a museum piece nowadays—or grind your own rice flour, or even peel your own shallots (though it does build character). Shopping for and cooking local food can be a source of pure pleasure. We urge you to take the time to explore your local wet market. Smell the herbs, pat the vegetables, watch the butchers and fishmongers carve up their charges, and above all chit-chat with the stallholders and their regular customers, who are invariably founts of culinary information. You will learn, if you haven’t already, how to choose fruit and vegetables, how to appraise seafood with a wise eye, what this spice and that gourd is for, how to best portion a chicken for a family of five. This is knowledge not on sale at the supermarket, which though convenient and clean—and fast, if you’re pressed for time—lacks the sheer exuberance of the open-air Asian pasar.
Chris, an former psychology student, likes to think of cooking as therapy; the sequence of shopping, assembling, prepping, and following the final sequence of steps is a contemplative, creative and deeply satisfying activity. Taking a recipe and experimenting with it until it has gotten under your skin requires no less art and gives no less joy than learning to play a Chopin etude. We urge you to agak-agak, to judge, and adjust quantities of ingredients on the fly, to imbue the dishes with your own personal touch.
This collection of recipes is a personal and idiosyncratic one. It is not meant to be a definitive guide to Singaporean gastronomy—as if such a thing could be contained in a single volume!—nor is it an anonymous collation of ersatz ethnic expressions packaged for painless digestion. These dishes are drawn from our lives, from the home repertoires we have cooked our way through many times over the years. They are what we enjoy eating. We hope you find them shiok too!
Intense heat produces intense flavor.
Sambals, Achars, Chutneys and Sauces
Among all the things Singaporeans are notorious tor, one is absolutely true. You can always spot a group of Singaporean tourists on holiday in the Northern hemisphere, not by the “lahs” that pepper the conversation, not by the ruthless efficiency with which they bargain for souvenirs—but by their jars of home-made sambal, smuggled past Customs in a plastic bag tied with a rubber band, which they pass around surreptitiously when confronted with a bland buffet of foreign food.
This chapter, which could potentially be infinitely long, is devoted to the accompaniments and condiments that make the Singaporean meal the endlessly stimulating mix that it is.
Hoi Sin, Wine, and Sesame Oil Marinade
1 tablespoon hoi sin sauce
4 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon finely crushed garlic
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
1 Blend all ingredients well. Use as a marinade for whole joints of pork, pork fillet, or chicken, before roasting.
Makes 115 ml (scant ½ cup) marinade
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Hoi Sin, Oyster and Worcestershire Sauce Marinade
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons water
1 Blend all ingredients well. Use as a marinade for barbecued spare ribs or fried chicken.
Makes 100 ml (scant ½ cup) marinade
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Wine, Oyster Sauce, and Sesame Oil Marinade
4 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
2 tablespoons oyster
