no. 113: something recognizably new

Jan 24, 2026

I write about old dishes a lot, dishes whose origins are unrecorded. This makes me sound like a preservationist – a professional hazard for anyone writing about anything remotely resembling a “traditional” cuisine, like formaldehyde poisoning is for morticians. But what I actually care about is how dishes evolve. So here’s a long letter, in lieu of a short one.

A purple donut, sometime last summer, ube-flavored. It was inoffensively donutty, unremarkably competent in every respect except for its gung-ho purple-itude. Purple filling is one thing, but the purple dough is a commitment.

It came from an Asian American bakery, which also sold donuts in yuzu, pandan-coconut, and black sesame, Asia en brioche. Maybe all cuisines evolve into carbs, in the way all species eventually become crabs. Desi pizza, Ethiopian chicken sandwiches, Asian-American donuts, Neapolitan Pizza xiao long bao. The bakery’s website urges customers to try something new.

The way we eat changes faster than the way we cook, because cooking involves repetition and acceptance and habit, and we can eat simply by going out and buying stuff. The purple donut, for instance, has entered one lexicon but not the other – many more people have eaten purple donuts than have made them. They’re something you make to sell, not something you make to eat. Food is fashion, and cooking is done from memory.

This is the opor ayam from Charlie’s Peranakan Food, a stew of chicken in coconut milk and trade spices. The first recipe I encountered for opor ayam called it a “white curry” – most recipes contain no chili (some call for a small quantity), while others vibrate turmeric yellow.

Charlie’s opor is an childhood blanket, light in body but with an almost magical capacity to warm. The oblong crisps on top are keropok, prawn crackers. I don’t know why Charlie puts keropok on his opor ayam, and neither Chris nor I have ever seen it done. I didn’t think they added anything, but I guess Charlie likes them. The prawn crackers seemed like old habit, a whim that stuck, the kind of “innovation” you might see at home – the kind of thing you do because you want some keropok on your opor ayam. It’s precisely the kind of thing you don’t do to help a dish sell. For that you need a whiter sauce, a nicer bowl, a leaf of gold and a lump of caviar. Or maybe times have changed, and the keropok were, once upon a time, the equivalent of all these ornaments in one.

Like sex, or tooth-brushing, home cooking is a common activity that’s rare in public. Charlie’s, I’m told, is the closest thing you can get to everyday Peranakan home cooking without actually being invited into a Peranakan home. At the Peranakan restaurants in Singapore, everything’s a little more intense, a little more deliberate, even things that maybe shouldn’t be.

This is what strikes me about hawker food – the sense of a home cook working in public, and the bridge it builds between those worlds. In this, the keropok on Charlie’s opor resemble the slices of pork thrown in with the fishballs – it’s a habit, muscle memory.

Muscle memory eventually becomes lore – think ballet, or kung fu.

My favorite Singaporean cookbook of recent years is Bryan Koh’s Among Ixoras, which captures not just recipes, but a genuine, unvarnished sense of how we eat. Jam rolls next to chwee kueh, orh nee and the Filipino food his mother’s helpers cooked. I ate like this growing up too. If anything is missing, it’s a few recipes from McDonald’s. Much of it’s home cooking, some of it’s generally bought from hawkers (fried chicken and laksa) and some, inevitably, is the food of his grandmothers, like this gulai hor cio.

I haven’t made it yet – that’s a photo of a photo – but the recipe is a syncretic marvel, six cultures in one bowl. A Malay-Hokkien hybrid name, a boiled rempah (it’s more commonly fried), driven by black pepper like something from much farther north, thickened with ground rice because grandma learned to do so from a Thai cook. I’ve seen nothing in Singapore like it. A dish this distinct might, eventually, have become the engine of a hawker stall, propelling it through decades and to fame.

You only make a dish like this by cooking it to eat. Something like this isn’t conceived all at once, but many times, when grandma first added too much pepper, or when she started adding the ground rice. The recipe suggests fumbling, surprise, and only vague intention. At some point there’s something recognizably new in the bowl – which one day becomes heritage.

Bryan’s generously letting me reprint the recipe below. And if you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!

This is important: Lauren Leek applies data science to prove something anyone who’s run a restaurant has known for years: the algorithm determines who lives and dies. Now, think about how many platforms a restaurant needs to satisfy: Maps, the other Maps, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Yelp, Grubhub, the other delivery people, maybe EZCater…