no. 82: intermittent industry

I’ve started nearly every issue this year by announcing a pop-up – here are a couple more:

Tomorrow, Saturday March 23, 2-4pm | Kuih-Muih | Formaggio Kitchen on Huron Ave, pre-orders are open till noon today.

I’ll have sarang semut (literally ant’s nest cake) to pull apart; hefty, wobbling blocks of bengka ubi, and some not-entirely-traditional items in the lineup, just to prove I don’t actually hate innovation.

Sunday March 24, 5pm-late | Kueh with your cocktail?| Backbar

Fresh png kueh might be the best accompaniment for a bamboo (or a fitty-fitty) known to humanity. A small selection, eat-in only. Ask about Kayma’s Frank Zappa Fifty Fifty.

And a bunch more hawker pop-ups next month, because you still need to try hokkien mee.

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With apologies to my non-local readers, there will be more such announcements – I just got laid off from the startup where I worked, along with 60% of my colleagues, and now have a surfeit of time and a dearth of income. Pop-ups are the inevitable result (so, unfortunately, are more newsletters). 

These pop-ups are hawking with gilt inlay. At least for now, they turn me into one of the unnumbered immigrants who’ve wound up in “the easiest business to put together, which is of course to cook food and sell it.” I’ll have at least this in common with the churro ladies of the NYC subway, the sidewalk grannies in Chinatown, the home caterers of the Jersey suburbs, and every hawker who’s ever carried a tray down a metropolitan street.

But the gilt inlay matters. I can reasonably expect, after some weeks, or months, or years (if the US visa regime exercises its usual monumental cruelty), to follow the lure of a salary and a benefits plan back into the maw of the tech industry. Most hawkers, we’re told, dreamt of a better life, if not for themselves, then, through the power of education or the geographic lottery, their children. Feeding people is a hard living. 

I was supposedly feeding people by working at this startup too. It aggregated and organized data on agriculture, and sold the cleaned up data feed. The legend goes that the founder initially wanted to invest in agriculture in Africa, to improve the lot of African farmers, and contribute to the continent’s development. At the time, she was stymied by a lack of data: the numbers didn’t exist to prove that this was a good idea, not because there was evidence to the contrary, but because the data was lacking and disorganized. This led to a new idea for a company: one that would provide data on African agriculture, to persuade the capitalists of the world African farmland was a worthwhile investment. She quickly learned that data on African agriculture was meaningless without data on the rest of the world, and this gave rise to the company I joined in 2019. 

“Feeding the world through more efficient allocation of capital” was an unwieldy tagline, so we just used the first part (perhaps it’s now “feeding the world through more efficient allocation of capital and the occasional necessary but difficult Reduction in Force”). In practice, the data was used by  commodity traders and Big Food companies. Data of that scale and complexity has a limited audience, and an African farmer or Singaporean hawker can’t really do anything with this kind of information, even if they take time to parse it. I learned much from my time there, and one thing I learned is that data exacerbates inequality. 

Comparing my work there and the work of actually cooking (or farming) feels meaningless, like comparing sugar and salt. 

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For as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, the line in Singapore has been that hawking was the employment of last resort, the thing you did if you couldn’t do anything else. In the words of the honorable state senator from New York (who’s clearly never tried making 200 plates of chicken rice a day), it’s “the easiest business to put together.” Because we believe in personal responsibility, it is by implication the business you put together if you’re incapable of putting anything else together. 

People slip into and out of hawking. The trade is a raincoat. My grandma used to sell kueh each lunar new year. It was a ritual, but the family genuinely needed the cash. Last year my mum showed me grandma’s bangkit cutters. They were frail creatures of tape-thin brass, at once utilitarian and ornamental, piled like leaves in an ice cream tub. Touching them was like holding her fingers in her latter days. Bangkit are tiny biscuits with no real parallel in the baking of the west, made with little more than tapioca starch and coconut cream. They’re meant to dissolve on your tongue like meringue, but they also need to have a cashmere weight and a tropical warmth. You need dozens and dozens to fill a jar, and they’re always sold by the jar.

The one time I made bangkit. Each of these is about 3cm long. The mold holds 5, a typical Singapore jar would hold about a hundred.

My grandma wasn’t alone in her intermittent industry. Kueh were, and to some extent still are, the cottage industry par excellence in a country full of women who’d been raised to cook, and you’ll still find families who sell kueh from their front door, or bring it to the Hari Raya Puasa (Eid in the US) markets once a year. It used to be that almost every family knew someone they could buy kueh from, but while that’s no longer true, kueh are still everywhere in Singapore, like high rises or greenery. 

Kueh are, in short, a vernacular. In a country that still thinks like a colony, this makes them subaltern cuisine, and puts a ceiling on their price. So fewer cooks make them, because there’s more profit elsewhere, and now most of the kueh you’ll find in Singapore are made in factories and sold stale, mouthfuls of stodge and disappointment. Eventually, people start to think that kueh just taste like astroturf coloring and old oil, because that’s how all the kueh they buy tastes. This is how dishes die. 

One way to read this story is that the market operated as it should have. A fragmented landscape of sellers consolidated, and less efficient producers working with antiquated methods, like my grandma and her leaves of brass, left the market. But another way to read this story is as a perfect example of Gresham’s law, of bad money driving out good. Good kueh exist but have largely withdrawn, as Aristophanes predicted (he had much the same idea as Gresham, 2000 years earlier). You’ll find them in homes, or behind the discreet facades of high end restaurants, where the check reflects what it takes to make them, and also keeps most people from eating there. 

A Singaporean who came to my last pop-up told me “these kueh look like what your grandma makes when she’s really trying to impress someone,” which I took as high praise. I think we need more grandma cooking out in public, a reminder of how these dishes can and ought to taste, and my grandma isn’t around to do it. Going hawking feels a little like going viking.

Also on this topic: [no. 52: sounds in the forest]