no. 71: heavy metal rempah

I spent most of last week making rempah (spice pastes) and kueh for a private chef gig I was doing.¹ Whenever I do this, I find myself wondering if there’s anyone within a hundred miles doing the same thing – peeling a hillock of shallots, gutting chilis, toasting belacan and hoping their neighbors don’t complain. These are tasks that can’t be hurried. I’ve found impatience just leads to frustration, so I try to prep rempah late at night, when my mind is quiet from tiredness and wine, and the cool, insistent breeze reminds me of Singapore at its kindest. If it’s early enough, D might come peel some shallots, or shape kueh, but mostly she keeps me company.

In Singapore – the Singapore of the imagination, if not the actual land of sweat and shopping malls – this sort of cooking is a communal activity. The image of an entire clan (or at least the female members thereof) getting together to cook is a touchstone for “how things should be.” It’s illustrative that Peranakan weddings used to include designated days for making kueh and preparing rempah. 

I don’t remember my family making rempah together, but my grandma never made kueh alone, and she made a lot of kueh. If my mother wasn’t there, there were aunts and uncles, sometimes friends or neighbors. Even my cousins, who no more knew how to wrap soon kueh than walk on the moon, were represented by earmarks, quantities determined with them in mind, though their only involvement might have been to peck grandma on the cheek. 

This is a domestic cuisine, sustained primarily through the act of cooking and eating together. There’s a canon of dishes but no canonical recipes, because it’s mostly cooked within the home, for the family – so there are as many “correct” versions of a dish as there are families (though are always grognards who insist on the existence of a “true” version, usually theirs). This makes the cuisine inherently communal, because the definition of quality and the composition of menus are determined by an ongoing, tacit, and cooperative dialogue between the eaters and the cooks. After a generation of eating together, an aesthetic grows, like bonsai. 

Here, I cook alone. 

In many senses, I’m self-taught. This is no shade on my mother nor my grandma, superb cooks and uninformed pedagogues. It’s remarkably hard to impart physical skills, especially to those you love. The fundamental technique for doing so is telling someone when they did the thing right. This method is almost universally effective – it’s the basis of nearly all animal training, and central to the teaching of everything from capoeira to yoga. Crucially, this approach depends on repetition and more repetition, so if the skill in question is Singaporean cooking, it helps to have a large family eating the same dishes over and over again. 

I left Singapore soon after I started cooking seriously, so this avenue was closed to me. Instead, my approach might most kindly be described as “academic.” I keep a spreadsheet of rempah recipes, transcribed from several books whose authors variously measured ingredients by count, centimeters, square centimeters, spoons, or grams – sometimes all in one recipe. I convert all these to gram weights, a ritual which brings a sense of security I’m certain is false. At least I’ll err consistently. 

And then I deviate. I taste the chilis, the shallots, the belacan, and tweak as I need to. The deviation is itself a ritual. I always use more galangal than called for, and I’ve never changed the spreadsheet. It’s agak-agak agak-agak, which could reasonably be translated either as “approximately approximation,” or “in a sense, cooking using my senses.”

I work like I’m still in a restaurant. I’ll tot up all the ingredients for all the rempah I need, peel all the shallots one day, toast belacan while peeling galangal the next, then deal with the chilis the day after, ideally the day I’m grinding. I don’t have a mortar and pestle, so no bibik can judge my skill by listening. A eavesdropping bibik would hear a sort of heavy metal rempah-ing, first in a robot coupe, then in a wet mill if I want it really fine. This is what happens when you prep 20 portions of everything on your own, at home (and your marriage prospects don’t depend on sounding good with a pestle). Machines are your friends, especially when your friends, even the ones who might pith chilis with you, don’t know how to pound rempah. Working this way, I’ll make three or four different rempah over the course of a week, then portion and vacuum pack them. I’m not sure my grandma even knew what a vacuum sealer was, but I know exactly how this flow would fit the weekly rhythm of restaurant service. 

And even as this workflow induces a sort of kitchen dysphoria, the mounds of rempah are deeply reassuring. It just looks right to fry rempah for 20, in a way it never does when I fry rempah for 6. The dishes themselves retain the memory of crowds, of long stirring in large pots, the kind of thing you want to do in company, for company. The pleasure almost offsets the niggling sense that there’s something not right about how this came together, that there should have been more hands involved, that the rempah should taste of chatter as well as chili and galangal. But maybe my approach is just another household’s variation, more evidence that there’s no such thing as a canonical recipe.

The 20 portions of rempah go to pop-ups, to private dinners, to feed this friend or that. Each batch is an experiment, and the results are never recorded. D might be the only person who’s tasted every batch. She tells me the ikan assam pedas improved last year, when I started cooking the rempah a little less. While rempah should never taste raw, we like how the dish tastes a little fresher now – not more energetic, but perhaps more like walking through a field still wet with dew. Are two people a community? My spreadsheet has more rows than I have relatives. 

My paternal grandmother’s mortar and pestle, now being used by one of my aunts (she uses it for its intended purpose as well).

1. Yes, I do private chef gigs. If you’d like me to make you dinner, you can get in touch by replying to this email.