no. 54: thinner than porter
Hullo to readers old and new!
As you might be able to tell, I’m in Singapore, which makes it easy to eat and hard to write. If you’re one of the several hundred Singaporeans reading this, I’d love to buy you a kopi/Nylon coffee/cocktail etc., because I’d like to hear about your relationship with Singaporean food (research for a project that’s still under wraps). Just hit reply!
I love the inconvenience of kway chap.
To start with, there’s the queue. A long line at a hawker stall is always a good sign, but a kway chap stall without a queue is a risk. A key component of kway chap is pork innards, and when they’re not done right, they tend to be done very wrong. And kway chap just isn’t as omnipresent as chicken rice or mee pok tar. With fewer stalls, demand concentrates, good stalls all have long queues. So if you want some kway chap, you go to a hawker centre, you get in line, and you wait.
The wait is a small penance. You stand there, sweating through your shirt, taking a sauna in a dim sum steamer, watching people eat in perfect Smell-O-Vision. A foot to your right, a table of happy ah peks, each with at least two bowls of kway in front of them, besiege a pork hock that glows like polished ebony. A foot in the other direction, someone is scarfing chye tau kueh and setting the air ashimmer with wok hei.
The hawker uncle at the stall chiak-chiak-chiaks away with his cleaver, bringing you closer plate by plate. Inevitably, someone in line is buying lunch for four generations of their family, or an army platoon. Another seems to be getting a week’s worth of takeout, and to judge by the stanzas of instructions, has a special request for every meal. The uncle just nods and keeps chopping, and in the meantime ah mas trundle shopping carts over your toes, the better to call your attention to the open bags of youtiao on top, burnished and ruched, still fresh enough to warm your knees as they pass.
Forty-five minutes later, you present yourself to the hawker uncles and offer up your supplication, “zeg nang ziah” (one person eating), and receive a snort of acknowledgement. The more soy-spattered of the two will start fishing flotsam and jetsam from the cauldron next to him, and introducing them to his cleaver. The cleaner one, who just snatched your money out of your hand, has a cauldron of his own, into which he’ll throw some kway. Kway shouldn’t be cooked so much as rinsed, ideally with an expression of supreme disdain.
There will be a stack of trays at the front of the stall, filmed with grease and dishwasher. Yours will be filled with, in this order:
One saucer of chili sauce, fine ground, uncooked, shot through with garlic and lit with vinegar. Sugar, regrettably, seems to have infiltrated the standard formula.
One bowl brimming with inky lou, in which sheets of kway float like silk in dye. Hopefully the hawker graced it with some fried shallots or fried garlic, and a gleaming of shallot oil. The kway are rice noodles in broad sheets, the size of your palm. It’s the same stuff as kway teow or chow fun, but shaped for maximum inconvenience to the eater. The sheets billow from the spoon and skate off chopsticks, flicking lou at you and your shirt as they go. Lou is the liquid in which the innards, and all the other components of this dish, were cooked. It’s based on soy sauce, and good places keep it going as an eternal braise. The lou in the bowl should be diluted with some cooking water from the kway pot, to bring the salt level down to the point where it can be drunk like soup.
One plate of pig parts. Skin, scraped free of fat, and large intestine are compulsory, as are some pieces of muscle, usually the belly. Potential elaborations include stomach, small intestine, colon, hock, trotter, and fallopian tube. The plate should also have wedges of egg, hardboiled as the hawker, and some form of tofu, either firm or spongy. This all gets drenched in more lou – my favorite stall holds the plate over the cauldron as they ladle the lou on, decanting the excess back in before handing it over. Plate and bowl should both have a desultory scattering of cilantro.
If the uncle at the stall wasn’t considerate enough to spill lou all over your tray, you’ll have to do it yourself. This is easy, since the plate is really very shallow, the bowl is really very full, and lou is thinner than porter. When you’ve navigated the biker gangs in lycra surrounded by their Bromptons, the old men and their midday Tiger beers, and the aunties with their bustles of plastic bags, you can finally confront your food, at least the portion of it that hasn’t wound up on the tray.
The hawker centre offers easier gratifications, shorter lines, noodles that aren’t so independent. But no other dish offers this constellation of pleasures. A good bowl of lou is liquefied complexity, like drinking depth. It is substantial in flavor, but never in body. The plate is a textural wunderkammer, a jumble of pieces that bounce, bite, gush, melt, squeak, stick, and give. The egg, chalky and brittle, acts like a beauty spot. And then there’s the kway chap itself, a combination that inspires belief in providence. Unlike rice, the kway offers neither chew nor fragrance to distract from the lou, just a silken pretence of substance that sharpens your focus on the richness before you.
In some sense what I love most about the inconvenience of kway chap is that when I eat it, the real inconvenience falls on someone else. The hours cleaning intestines in the morning dark, the daily hauling of meat and kway, the years it took to raise the lou to its present profundity – someone else put in all that work. The reciprocal rituals of queueing, of pressing an extra bill into the hawker’s hand, and eating with care, are utterly inadequate and yet utterly necessary, because food culture is as much about how we eat as how we cook. These small ceremonies are surely not too much to ask.
My favorite stall is Chris Kway Chap at the Bedok Block 216 Food Centre. The lou derives more of its drive from flavors other than soy sauce, and there’s enough white pepper to make it sing alto rather than tenor. To-Rico’s Kway Chap at Old Airport Road is a close second. The photo below comes from Chris.
Great window into Singaporean culture.
Reading this warmed my heart on this brisk autumnal morning in London – thank you! A perennial family favourite is the one in BTK Boon Tong Kee Kway Chap, not the best as kway chaps go, but it is always well prepared, and there is a kind of comforting deliciousness in its quotidianness (but it is not mediocre! There is a distinction). A recent favourite is Cheng Heng Kway Chap and Braised Duck Rice in Holland Village hawker centre run by two elderly sisters... exquisite, with some of the most delicate kway I have had the pleasure of eating.