no. 45: please duck soup responsibly

Hullo to readers old and new!

First, an announcement. I’m doing some pop-ups in Cambridge and Somerville, featuring some lesser known dishes from Singapore. The first three will be:

Sunday 3 Oct, at Backbar (indoor dining only, no take out, proof of vaccination required) – kiam chye arh – more on this below.

Sunday 10 Oct, at Backbar (indoor dining only, no take out, proof of vaccination required) – most likely bak chor mee.

Sunday 17 Oct, at Elmendorf Baking (outdoor seating, or take-out) – featuring a whole bunch of kueh, and signed copies of the best cookbook ever to come out of Singapore (you need to pre-order the book, but for kueh, just turn up).

If you are in the Boston area, I hope you’ll stop by!

---

Kiam chye arh (咸菜鸭) is not on anyone’s list of famous foods from Singapore, which might be why I’m serving it. It’s sour, pungent, humble and heady, and photogenic as a hangover. Kiam chye arh translates as “salted vegetable duck,” and the dish is brutally simple. A clear soup of duck with fermented mustard greens, salted plums, and tomatoes, seasoned with nothing more than salt and white pepper. 

I think of the dish as Teochew, but only because my grandfather and older relatives enjoyed it. This perhaps takes it out of the realm of Teochew or Hokkien or Peranakan cooking – all three groups will claim the dish – into the realm of “food old people like (and younger people often don’t).” My affection for it is probably telling. Despite its simplicity, this was considered a festive dish, partly because it was only on festive occasions that meat appeared. The name is also a tacit recognition that the innate qualities of this combination are worth celebrating: we cook fish and pork in very similar ways, but attach less significance to those dishes. 

The soup is uplifting and tonic, the sweetness of the duck veiled in layers of acid. The fat and musk of the meat lend seriousness to a light dish. The classic description for this was, loosely, that it was more-ish, something that both refreshed and satisfied the palate. I think my grandfather was happiest when his expectations of a glorious meal were just beginning to be met, and this dish was perhaps an incarnation of that feeling. To me, the aroma is the most perfect complement to steamed white rice, celebrating everything about it that’s worth celebrating. 

As I write, I’m imagining what it would be like to actually spiel this dish. “Spieling” is the term for tableside patter, the explanation a server offers about your food and drink (it’s both a noun and a verb). At the restaurant I used to run, our preferred approach to spieling was to keep it brief and factual, something like “this is cucumbers, buckwheat, and mole” or “squid, asparagus, and celery.” 

By those standards, the introduction above is a saga – three whole paragraphs, when it should maybe be “duck, mustard greens, and rice.” But kiam chye arh, like most traditional dishes, was never meant to be eaten by strangers, whereas the food at our restaurant was meant for strangers first and foremost. The point of that sort of cooking, of “spinach, sunchokes, and sesame,” was for the food to be just unfamiliar enough. We were trying to unmoor our guests from their established perspectives, because we felt that for our food to speak, we had to make room for it to be heard. 

A dish isn’t just a reflection of cultural and economic context, but a certain perspective on food, and traditional cooking often depends on that perspective being shared by the diner and the cook. Food works as a medium only if the cook and the diner value the same pleasures, seek the same joys. A dish like kiam chye arh has an internal logic shaped over generations, and the logic embedded in the dish has in turn shaped both eaters and cooks. When one party doesn’t follow it, the dish falls flat. 

Perhaps the caricatures of “ethnic” cuisines exist here because those cuisines came to America before their cooks were given voices. Perhaps red sauce Italian, cream and curry Indian, and duck sauce Chinese exist in part because the food had to speak for itself, and make unfriendly strangers listen, in a language that wasn’t its own. Sweetness, richness, and quantity have almost universal appeal, and they are easy to proffer in a land of plenty. Food like this can only be understood when its makers are heard, a privilege that is only now, hesitantly, being accorded.

(This was edited shortly after sending, because I embarrassingly used the wrong characters for kiam chye arh - this post now uses the correct ones.)