NO DURIAN ON BOARD

I couldn’t bring myself to eat a durian—and I’m sure I’ll regret this when I’m back in California—but I did check out many food stalls around town. In Singapore, food is a feeling.

A durian stall in Singapore’s Chinatown. I’m afraid I smell it at Kent Ridge.

The smell of a durian—even in open air—renders me catatonic. In a previous newsletter, I’d commented on the ban on durians inside Singapore’s buses. My reaction to this fruit is probably universal, after all. The experience reminded me of the song of the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. The Greek hero Odysseus, upon the advice of the sorceress Circe, escaped the danger of the song of the Sirens by stuffing the ears of his crew with wax so that they were deaf to them. Smell can create a trance, too.

I believe that a scent or the opposite of it, an odor (typically considered to be bad and used pejoratively) can have the same magnetic pull. But what may seem heavenly to some may be unsavory for others. When the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain put Singapore’s hawker culture on the map, he wasn’t exactly thinking about the preferences of lacto-ovo vegetarians like me. Every dish Bourdain mentioned dripped with the fat of animals that I do not eat.

Singapore’s hawker centres felt inaccessible to me at start. I still have not quite understood why, even with a vegetarian population and a “flexitarian” crowd (a flexitarian is a vegetarian who is an occasional meat-eater) of 7 and 39 per cent, respectively, the food stalls cater mostly to the carnivores among us. When Lakshmy Bhaskar, my cousin’s cousin, introduced me to hawker stalls in Singapore in mid-January, something changed. Since then, I’ve never missed an opportunity to wander through the aisles of a food court whenever I saw one, even though the food could still seem alien and I sometimes tended to feel like a Martian on earth.

Judging by the insanely busy food stalls in Singapore even in a post-Covid Phase 3 era, I could glean how Bourdain was captivated when he first experienced Singapore several years ago. Bourdain said he landed here “to eat”. He observed that “Singapore is possibly the most food-centric place on Earth, with the most enthusiastic diners, the most varied and abundant, affordable dishes.” I had mentioned in a previous post that Covid-19 did not just decimate businesses; it put a damper on relationships because often people went to hawker centres simply to commune with friends and family. The offerings at a food court (or “kopi tiam” as they are often referred to) are cheap and are a blessing for the common man. These food stalls are all individually-owned mom and pop operations that serve street food and drinks from Chinese, Indian, and Malay cultures. Note that the term kopi tiam is made up of two words—“kopi” means “coffee” in Malay and “tiam” means “shop” in the Hokkien dialect. Typically, it is a traditional coffee shop offering beverages and food and it is popular in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Southern Thailand.

Aside from Bourdain’s own reviews of specific street food at hawker centres, most Singaporean literature that I’d read (both fiction and nonfiction) expressed a longing for a dish called chicken rice that was popular at these food courts. I asked Lakshmy about the fame of this fabled dish. “That’s like asking why dum biryani is famous,” Lakshmy retorted, recalling the popular dish from the Indian subcontinent. “It’s just very delicious!” she said, pointing out that the Hainanese version is the most renowned of all. The balance of three things is what makes chicken rice in Singapore perfect, I learned. “The rice is not over cooked and the chicken is succulent and most importantly the ginger and chili sauce that go with the dish is fresh and spicy.”

Born in Malaysia’s Kangar (Perlis) and raised mostly in Alor Setar (Kedah) in the sixties, Lakshmy studied in Malay all the way; her father was a school teacher and her parents imparted to her the love of English and Tamil alongside Malay. When Lakshmy talks about her love of the many different foods of Singapore, I sense a longing for the tastes of her childhood. Many of the dishes that are popular in Singapore actually originated in Malaysia. So many Singaporeans of all ethnicities were born and raised in Malaysia that I suppose hardly any local will deny the deep influences of Malaysia in the food markets of Singapore.

Tau huay (or tau foo fah) is a sweet tofu pudding that needs to be sweeter.

The day Lakshmy and I met to try some street foods, she bought me a tau huay (or tau foo fah). This is simply a sweet tofu pudding drenched in maple syrup that can be eaten warm or cold. Gelatin is used as the coagulant.  Tau huay wobbles. It glides like chiffon. It’s light on the tongue and lighter still on the stomach but it’s packed with protein. That morning, she also escorted me to several other stalls. I saw many flavors of kueh. At one stall, an old woman was stirring ingredients in a wok in preparation for a batch of carrot cake. “This is nothing like American carrot cake, okay,” Lakshmy warned. At yet another stall, rice sheets were being laid out to make chee cheong fun. This is a thin roll made from a wide strip of rice noodles which are then filled with shrimp, beef, vegetables, or other ingredients. When plain and made without filling, the rice noodle is also known as jyu cheung fun. It reminded me so much of the Gujarati khandvi.

These were potstickers at the Singapore Island Country Club. I had to share a picture of this delight.

In retrospect, of all the many things Lakshmy introduced me to, however, I’m thankful, most of all, for her suggestion that I should always ask for “chili padi” just in case I wished to spice things up. This explosive condiment became our savior many a time. We asked for it at a pizza place and demanded it with pasta. We even expected to be served it at our favorite fusion Thai restaurant, naturally, until we realized, while mopping a sweaty forehead and dousing our tongues with cold water, how impossibly dumb we had been. Of course I managed, yet again, to sprinkle a  generous amount of chili padi over the char kway teow Lakshmi made for us last weekend at her place. An epic noodle dish from Malaysia, the vegetarian version of char kway teow is just soft flat rice noodles cooked on high heat with light and dark soy sauce, garlic, chili, sprouts and a choice of vegetables.

Chili padi can be deathly on the tongue even though it is a divine union of chopped red chili peppers (bird's eye chili) and soy sauce. The fruits are so piquant my husband hiccups even as he glances at the diminutive bowl with the sauce. This nectar, I learned, is a gift from Peranakan cuisine. The Peranakan people descended from marriages between Chinese or Indian men and local Malay or Indonesian women from the Malay Archipelago. Although I haven’t eaten Peranakan or “Nyonya” food, I understand it is a melange of Chinese and Malay culinary traditions incorporating a range of indigenous herbs and spices: galangal, laksa leaf and pandan leaf, tamarind, lemon grass and kaffir lime, among others.

Since that first trip with my friend through hawker markets, I’ve wandered on my own through food stalls to drink, eat or, simply, to gawk. My husband and I now love the local sugarcane juice spiked with lemon and ginger. At most fruit juice stalls I can create my own drink and I’ve particularly loved that. The passion fruit with mango defies description. The kaya toast with kopi—please do not ever force me to dip it in runny egg with soy sauce—will remain a craving long after I’ve taken off on Singapore Airlines from Changi.  

My most favorite of all the street dishes remains the popiah. My husband and I have been back to eat it several times already and, recently, during the heightened lockdown here in Singapore, we went up to Ann Chin at Coronation Plaza and picked up three popiahs and went to a nearby park to gorge on them. The vegetarian version of popiah, meaning “thin pancake” (in the Teochew dialect) is a thin paper-like crepe or pancake wrapper stuffed with a filling made of cooked vegetables. Its roots are in Fujian Province in China, of course, owing to the people who immigrated here. I’m learning that it was, in fact, derived from the spring roll, which was eaten during spring when there was an abundance of vegetables.

The popiah at Ann Chin. Sigh.

I guess among the many gustatory experiences very specific to Singaporean culture was the unexpected feast of local delights as seasons and festivities rolled around. There were the pineapple tarts,  arrowhead crackers and a box of freshly made kuehs at Chinese New Year, thanks to our friend, Beng Chin Ooi, who kept inventing reasons to send us goodie bags during our quarantine. These arrowhead chips are a staple Chinese New Year snack. They were so addictive that a huge jar of them didn’t last us more than two or three days.  

In February, Josephine Chia, an author I talked about in SMALL STORIES, EPIC EVENTS, made me a vegetarian Mi Goreng, a popular one-dish meal that’s an Indonesian style spicy fried noodle dish. She was kind enough to hold off mixing in the quail eggs into the noodle dish when I told her I would not be able to eat it with them mixed in. “But eggs are eggs,” Josephine said, when I bit my tongue and, again, politely declined tasting the eggs. My gracious hostess had laid out a beautiful tea table with a tray of terrific home-made scones, clotted cream and jam. I couldn’t imagine shirking her hospitality with my words. I did, however, want to argue that chicken eggs were just not tantamount to quail eggs. Perhaps we’d never have resolved it with an intellectual debate? I wished I could have told her that my tongue would’ve known the difference and rejected it, just as my tongue knows when an unintentional split mung bean (moong dal) enters a traditional Tamil sambar made with a cup of split red gram (toor dal). The problem, you see, is that our sense of taste defines and sustains us until the day we die.

The tofu at this place…Holland Drive Market.

When I return to the United States next week, I know that the mean fresh tofu at Saratoga’s Sogo Tofu will never match the one I bought at the Holland Drive Market & Food Centre. There’s a reason that the tau huay I ate held firm while seeming poised to flow. The perfection in the ordinariness is what attracts me to street foods.  

I do see now why Bourdain didn’t really get tau huay. He is reported to have said that “soy milk and tofu (unless it’s fried in animal fat) just don’t do it for me.” My reaction was altogether different to it, however. It’s personal preference. I like all sweet things to be confidently sweet. The desserts in these parts are never sweet enough for me. I want them sweet the second they strike my tongue. I want them rich, too. I crave the cloying “give-me-a-heart-attack” stance of sweetmeats from my motherland.

That said, I did polish off the tau huay in no time at all that morning with Lakshmy and I did see why Lakshmy found comfort in it. In Singapore, probably more than anywhere else in the world, food is a feeling. It takes people back to other eras, to unspoken tales of loss of family, to the cries of unborn voices. It is a subtle embrace, too, albeit in another medium, of other peoples. This thing we call food today once offered the only source of income for countless immigrants who sought to make a life here by putting up ramshackle stalls by the Singapore river. Now, transformed inside these kopi tiam food and drink courts, it continues to sustain and give comfort to generations of young and old people from many ethnic backgrounds, connecting them to the scents and flavors of home.