by Dave Dewitt
We flew into Singapore from Bangkok aboard Cathay Pacific Airlines—certainly one of the best carriers in the world. The efficient folks from Franco-Asian Travel picked us up at the airport, checked us into the Regent hotel, and wasted no time introducing us to the wonders of Singapore’s great food.
“We’re off to the Newton Circus Hawker Centre,” announced Jeanne Seah, our culinary guide for the evening. Within minutes, we were sampling barbecued stingray—and other strange but delicious foods.
The Hawker Centre—so named because in the past the cooks would “hawk” their food to customers—consisted of perhaps 50 open-air stalls and 100 tables, and was jam-packed with hungry diners. Intense and exotic aromas wafted from the food stalls, which sported an intriguing array of signs, such as “Juriah Nasi Padang” and “Rojak Tow Kua Pow Cuttlefish.” The hawkers specialized in a bewildering selection of quick and inexpensive foods from many cuisines. Among the delicacies we tasted on our first night in Singapore were Chinese 1,000-year-old eggs, the famous Singapore chilli crab, Indonesian satays, Indian curried dishes, and the Malayan stingray.
Newton Circus Hawker Centre in Singapore’s Chinatown at lunch time. Photograph by Ypsilon from Finland. Wikimedia. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
I was intensely curious about how and why so many cuisines were represented in one place. Later, back at the Regent, I bought a copy of Singapore: 101 Meals (published by the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board), which explains the history behind the foods we had just tried.
Flashback: Singapore’s Culinary Heritage
Singapore is the melting pot (or maybe the tossed salad) of Southeast Asia, so it’s not surprising that many ethnic influences are present. Originally, this tiny island nation—smaller than New York City—was part of what is now Malaysia, which means that its original cuisine was Malay. Fresh spices are the key to Malay cookery, and they include lemongrass, turmeric, kaffir lime, galangal (a rhizome similar to ginger), and, of course, the ubiquitous chiles—spelled “chillis” over there.
Since Singapore is so close to Indonesia (Sumatra is just across the Strait of Malacca), the influences from that huge archipelago-nation are significant. In fact, since the words for rice (nasi), chicken (ayam), hot sauce (sambal), and many other food terms are identical, it is difficult if not impossible to separate the Malaysian and Indonesian influences on Singaporean food. The famous satays, barbecued meats and seafood, occur in both countries and are very popular in Singapore. Interestingly enough, the satays are thought to have originated with early Arab spice traders who introduced the concept of kebabs to the region.
In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles colonized Singapore for the British, and soon the small fishing village became the leading port east of the Suez Canal. The British influence accounts for the fact that the principal language of Singapore is English (other official languages are Tamil, Malay, and Cantonese), but the impact of the Brits on food was not so great. Nowadays, about the only surviving British culinary heritages involve drink; the hotels and restaurants serve high tea in the afternoon, excellent Singapore-brewed beers and stouts, and plenty of gin drinks.
The expansion of Singapore as a major trading center led to settlement by other ethnic groups. By 1821, the population was over 5,000, and besides Malays and Europeans, there were numerous Chinese and Indian settlers. Under British control, the settlers were kept in their own ethnic enclaves so they could not easily unite and rebel. These enclaves—such as Chinatown, Arab Street, and Little India—though unofficial now, still exist to this day. Singapore was a British colony until 1959, when it became autonomous within the Commonwealth. In 1963, Singapore joined with Malaya and neighboring straits states to form the Federation of Malaysia, but that union did not last and Singapore became an independent nation in 1965.
The influence of the Chinese—who now make up about three-quarters of the population—has been vast. The major Chinese immigrants were Hokkiens (from Fujian Province), Teochews, Cantonese, and Hainanese. All brought their own regional cultures and food traditions to Singapore and settled in their own enclaves. Many of earliest Chinese settlers were men, and because of the lack of Chinese women in Singapore, they married Malay women. Thus a distinct subculture was born, known in Malay as Peranakan (meaning “to be born here”). The women of that subculture were known as Nonyas, Malay for “ladies.” The intermarriage of Chinese and Malays ended once the population of Singapore grew large enough to include Chinese women, and Nonyas soon became part of the mainstream of Singapore culture. But one Nonya tradition—cooking—lives on. Nonya cuisine is an excellent example of a collision of cultures as it combines the subtlety and relative blandness of Chinese cooking with the spiciness of Malay food. It has been said that “in one meal, you get a perfect balance of opposing flavors, textures, and colors.” Some notable Nonya dishes include assam gulai, fish in spicy tamarind sauce; buah paya masak titek, papaya soup with chillis; sayor nanka masak lemak, jackfruit and chicken in spicy coconut gravy; and the notable Nonya kuehs, elegant dessert cakes fashioned from glutinous rice, coconut milk, palm sugar, and fruits.
After boning up—so to speak—on the history of the Singaporean cuisines, I felt ready to eat my way across the city. Of course, there was the usual problem: so much food, so little time.
Satay udang, tiger shrimp satay with lemongrass skewer. Photograph by Gunawan Kartapranata. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Off to the Markets
With Anthony as our driver and Vincent as our guide, we continued our tour the following day with a trip to the dry and wet markets of Little India and Chinatown. In Little India, we first visited the “dry” markets selling the various spices that comprise the curries: chillis, cloves, turmeric, star anise, peppercorns, cinnamon, coriander—and more. It was a vivid sensory assault on the eyes and nose. As Mary Jane put it, “I’ve never been any place that smelled so wonderful and exotic.” We watched Indian cooks prepare the chapati flatbread, and we tasted a wide variety of “chips” made from various flours.
The “wet” market, so named because there was water on the floor from the cleaning of seafood and meats, was a huge warehouse-like affair with the sides open to the air. It was neatly divided into sections: fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, groceries, and food vendors. Despite the noise and crowded conditions, I was surprised by how clean everything was. All vendors touching meats or seafood wore plastic gloves, and everyone was low-key and very friendly—even urging me on occasion to photograph them in action cleaving the heads off of fishes. We found out later what the fish heads were used for.
There was a profusion of food in the wet market. Lamb and mutton were hanging to age, every type of tropical fruit was available for sale—except the notorious durian, which was out of season—and there were tiger prawns seven to eight inches long. The fresh chiles for sale looked just like the ones we had seen the week before in Bangkok, and I soon found out why: they were imported from Thailand because Singapore does not have much of an agriculture industry. Typical of chile nomenclature around the world, the kinds available were “bird peppers,” green or red piquin-like, fiery little devils less than an inch long; “yellow chillis,” about three inches long; and “red chillis,” which looked like a cross between cayenne and New Mexican varieties and were also sold in the green form.
We took a break to sample Indian rose milk and tea, and then pushed on to the Chinatown wet market, where I was surprised by the number of live animals for sale. There were large fish swimming in aquariums—the freshest imaginable—and huge crabs crawling around in cages. I recall one memorable transaction where the vendor removed several frogs from a cage to show a customer how fresh they were. The woman shopper chose the one that jumped the farthest and the vendor quickly killed and skinned it on the spot. I was relieved to note that there were no live pigs for sale in the market.
But there were some black chickens—described by our guide, Vincent,
as “another race” of fowl. The plucked flesh is naturally black, not dyed, and is used by Chinese cooks for medicinal purposes—like helping people regain their strength after illness. Chicken soup must be a worldwide cure.
Alimentary Adventures
The next couple of days were a blur. We took a trip across the causeway to Johore Bahru, Malaysia, where we toured the Sultan’s palace, now a museum, and then stopped at a very modern supermarket where we found a wealth of Malaysian hot sauces filling the shelves of three aisles. On the way back, we toured the excellent Singapore zoo and an orchid farm, and finally stopped for a late lunch at a neighborhood Chinese coffee shop. It was unlike any coffee shop in the States because we feasted on “rib tea,” bak kut teh, a pork-rib soup with spices. The dining technique called for removing the pork, dipping it in two different chilli sauces, and then drinking the soup later. Since it was about 90 degrees with no air conditioning in the restaurant, I opted for a Tiger Beer instead of coffee.
The following day, it was time to split up. The women in the group wanted to shop along Orchard Road, Singapore’s fabulous row with designer shop after shop. I, as the lone male, opted for the Singapore Botanic Gardens and its great collection of tropical plants and trees.
After shopping, Mary Jane, Ellie, and Laura visited the famous Raffles Hotel, where they took Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 advice, “Feed at Raffles when visiting Singapore.” Fortified with Singapore Slings and gin and tonics, they snacked on tiger prawns with a spicy herbal dip and curried mutton samosas (turnovers) with a yogurt-dill dip. Then they discovered that Raffles has a “Provisions” shop, where locally-produced food products can be purchased, so more shopping was in order.
Hungry after wandering for miles through the Botanic Gardens, I ate at an Indonesian restaurant on upper Orchard Road (I confess I forgot to write down the name). It must be a local favorite, because no tourists were in sight. The mutton soup, flavored with coconut milk and highly spiced with chiles, was fabulous. I spooned it over a side dish of nasi kunyit, yellow festive rice, and had no idea if that technique was proper or not. But since no one yelled at me or even gave me that “funny foreigner” look, I guess I did okay.
Raffles Hotel. Photograph by James Mason-Hudson. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
After playing tourist for a day, it was time to get back to the business of planning the culinary tour, so we arranged to interview two of Singapore’s noted cooking authorities. Our first visit was to the Thomson Cooking Studio, where Mrs. Devagi Shanmugam was preparing dishes that were being photographed for a brochure for McCormick Spice Company. Mrs. Shanmugam is of Indian heritage but has mastered all of Singapore’s numerous cuisines. We tasted her green beans with spicy prawn paste, which was excellent, and some stir-fried sea cucumbers, which are definitely an acquired taste. Sea cucumbers, for the biologists in the crowd, are echinoderms related to starfish and sea urchins, and their flesh is gummy and bland. They were the only food on the entire trip I didn’t love—but they are considered to be quite a delicacy in Singapore.
Mrs. Shanmugam showed us her huge recipe collection, and I decided to take a chance.
“Do you happen to have recipes for mutton soup and nasi kunyit?” I asked. She smiled, quickly produced recipes for the very dishes I had tried the day before, and urged me to share them with our readers.
Our next culinary advisor was Violet Oon, the foodie star of Singapore. Violet is one of those people who have so many enterprises going at the same time that she probably has a fax machine in her Mercedes. Along with her assistant, Diana Lynn, she operates a cooking school, publishes The Food Paper (one of the most interesting food publications I’ve ever read), and manufactures her own line of food products, which are sold by the Raffles Hotel.
For our last evening in Singapore, Violet decided that since we had already sampled Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Nonya foods, it was time for some Indian treats. She and Diana drove us to Little India where we dined at the Madras New Woodlands Restaurant and the Banana Leaf Apolo.
We sampled every curry imaginable, using banana leaves for plates, and I was particularly impressed with the fish-roe curry cakes (I ate shad roe for breakfast when I lived in Virginia). And, although it doesn’t sound very appetizing, the fish-head curry was nothing short of spectacular—once I got used to the fish staring at me. The curries were a fitting end to a whirlwind week in Singapore.
Planning an overseas tour may be hard work, but when it involves food, it’s fun too.
PS. I gained 15 pounds in Singapore.
Fish head curry on a banana leaf. Photograph by Pelican. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.
CHINA AND BEYOND
Despite the recent popularity of Thai cooking in the United States, there is little doubt that the Asian reputation for hot-chile cooking began with China, particularly the regions of Sichuan and Hunan. However, we should not ignore other parts of China. Although most current Chinese cookbooks are devoid of chile pepper recipes from Canton and other areas of south China, two members of the family Solanaceae eventually were adopted there. According to Chinese food expert E. N. Anderson, “Tomatoes and chiles not only transformed the taste of southern Chinese cooking, they also provided new and very rich sources of vitamins A and C and certain minerals, thus improving the diet of the south Chinese considerably. Easy to grow, highly productive, and bearing virtually year-round in the subtropical climate, these plants eliminated the seasonal bottlenecks on vitamin availability.”
But it was in the West where chiles really triumphed in Chinese cuisine, and there are at least two mysteries about the use of chiles in western China. The first question is, how did they get there? The second, why did the Chinese love them so much?
Some experts speculate that chiles were imported from Singapore, or carried inland from Macao, where hot dishes are more popular today than in neighboring Canton. More likely is the theory that chiles were introduced into Sichuan by sixteenth-century Indian Buddhist missionaries traveling the Silk Route between India and China. After all, western Sichuan is closer to India than to either Macao or Singapore.
According to Jeremiah Jenne, writing in The Beijinger, the first record of chiles in China is from a 1671 gazetteer in Zhejiang Province: “It is red and can be used for seasoning.” He also cites a reference in 1682 from Liaoning, giving credence to the theory that chiles arrived in China by sea. The first reference to chiles in Hunan was in 1684, but surprisingly, the first mention of them in Sichuan Province was much later, in 1749. China has “pockets of heat” like we’ve seen in Central and South America. Some provinces, like Guangdong and Zhejiang, where chiles first appeared, did not develop chile cuisines, while other provinces, namely Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Xinjiang, adopted chile peppers with great enthusiasm. Another Beijinger writer, Robynne Tindall, observes: “Chiles have conquered the palates of most of China in one way or another but each province has its own way of applying them and other spices based on the local climate and produce.”
‘Facing Heaven’ chiles. Photograph by Richard Elzey. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
Tom Arnstein, also writing in The Beijinger, notes that “it was Mao Zedong who famously said, ‘no chiles, no revolution.’ A native of Hunan, Mao was no stranger to the fiery effect that chiles could have on a person and although we can’t be sure whether it was the power of spice that fueled his fighting spirit, we can only assume that it provided a helping hand.” Then he went on to write that there are 2,000 types of chiles in China, but 5 of the most notable cultivars are ‘Facing Heaven’ (40,000 SHU), ‘Yunnan Wrinkled Skin’ (55,000 SHU), ‘Sichuan Seven-Star’ (60,000 SHU), ‘Hainan Yellow Lantern’ (170,000 SHU), and the hottest of them all, ‘Yunnan Shuan Shuan’ (1,000,000 SHU).
No matter how they arrived in western China, chiles soon became enormously important to the food of the people. E. N. Anderson, who has studied the chile sit
uation in China extensively, describes the effect of chiles on the cuisines of East Asia as “epochal.” The use of the large varieties of Capsicum annuum, called la chiao, was important because of the addition of vitamins A and C to low-vitamin grains such as rice. In western China, chiles were easy to grow and simple to preserve, and soon became vital to life there.
The second mystery is why chiles were embraced with such fervor in western China. As usual, many theories have been advanced by ethnobotanists, anthropologists, and Asian-studies experts. The three most likely theories are the Perennial Cool-Down Principle, the Food Preservation Scenario, and the Poetic Proposition.
The Perennial Cool-Down Principle holds that since New World cultures utilized chiles to cool down in hot climates, it makes sense that they would be put to the same use when introduced into other regions. In China, there are hot tropical inlands similar to regions in South America and Mexico, where chiles were first adopted into the human diet. In such regions where it doesn’t freeze, chiles grow as perennials, so they are available all year long.
Another possible reason for the popularity of chiles in western China is the Food Preservation Scenario. Before salt was mined in the region, the Sichuanese utilized hot spices as a substitute. Later, chile peppers came into use as a food preservative in the form of chile pastes and chile oils.
Perhaps the most persuasive theory for the popularity of chiles is the Poetic Proposition, which recalls Chao Hun’s poem. According to author-chef Karen Lee, “The hot peppers stimulate the palate, causing a sensitivity that brings an awareness of the spectrum of flavors to follow: after the hot and spicy, the mild, mellow, sour, salty, sweet, aromatic, bland, bitter, and pungent flavors linger in the aftertaste.” This theory echoes Chao Hun’s “Summons of the Soul” because it utilizes the combination of multiple flavors in a single meal.