no. 104: a bigger pot

This is mostly an essay about New Mexico, but it’s also kind of about Singapore. Or maybe it’s mostly about Singapore, except New Mexico gets a lot more space on the page.

First things first. I have a piece about a couple of pillars of Singaporean cuisine in the current Cook’s Illustrated (Sep/Oct 2025). It’s about sambal tumis and the kind of chicken curry we eat every day, and it includes possibly the worst-rated recipe they’ve ever published.

I have no idea what the review says. I’m sure it’s hilarious. Here it is on the internet, if you’d like to go look.

I originally pitched a comparative tasting of sambal, in their classic style, but the editors told me fine-tuning sambal might be too obscure a topic for Middle America (I wound up doing this anyway, and wrote up some notes here). They suggested a good dose of grandma this and memory that instead, but in the end, I wrote about how this was merely one sambal tumis among many, and how it’s almost beside the point to write a representative recipe at all. Maybe the reviewer found this dispiriting.

I found myself thinking of canonical dishes without canonical recipes when we were in New Mexico last month, as we ate some version of “red or green” 5 meals in a row (literally every other meal was tacos). If only my body would let me, I could happily eat this way every day for a year.

The red chiles were plain as water and simple as bread. To my understanding, they were all the same thing, the sauce at Orlando’s that tasted of red fruit and high summer, the sunbaked, growling one at La Cocina, the one in the tamales from Leonel’s, sharp and bright as a songbird’s eye. Or maybe they were actually different dishes – Orlando’s red chile, La Cocina’s red chile, Leonel’s – and drawing a circle around them is a disservice.

There’s something interior about this food, a real sense that this is home cooking brought out in public, like someone just went and bought a bigger pot. It’s monotonous in a way that feels thick and alive. A cuisine rather than an industry, a set of shared practices rather than a set of restaurants. Food like this resists systematization. A stubborn, inherent refusal to be written down in a single book, a single lifetime. In a way it’s pre-commercial, and resists consumption altogether.

Today New Mexico is essentially a middle-income country, much like Singapore when I was born, the way rural Malaysia is today. The buildings are a blend of blocky, utilitarian, and a little ramshackle in a way that stirs some deep, deep memories. Light industrial neighborhoods everywhere, tacos handed over in plastic bags. The eateries are small, basic, and hardy, but there are so many, and so obviously rooted in households or homes. It makes the culinary landscape feel lush, like people still cook, like capital hasn’t finished its desertification.

A lot of hawker food feels like this too: older than boredom, older than novelty. Sambal and chile are simple ornaments, with enough complexity and character that eating them every day is a practice, not an ordeal. There’s enough space for there to be inconsistency and refinement. But there’s also enough in common, shared practices and shared aesthetics. Most importantly, there are countless cooks and countless eaters, the food is eaten by people who understand how it’s made.

I don’t think we talk about this enough in food. How culture needs to be nurtured and grown, like everything else we consume. What happens when thousands of households keep cooking and eating the same thing – and what happens when they stop.

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Speaking of home cooking brought out in public: my friend Auyon and his mum are publishing a cookbook, and it looks BRILLIANT. Auyon’s been talking about it on substack, and they’re about to embark on an extensive book tour with 40(!) stops, starting next week. The book’s about home cooking as an Indian family in America, if you enjoy my writing, you’ll certainly enjoy theirs.

I hope this counts as promotional use, Auyon!

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Red chile and pork tamale, Leonel’s, just outside Taos.