no. 86: weekly sacrilege
Hullo to readers old and new!
I’m popping up at Backbar again this Sunday, with, among other things, Katong laksa. The full menu is below, but like any proper food blogger, I’m going to make you read about my feelings first.
Katong laksa – the geographic specifier (which refers to an area of maybe 2 square km, if that, in Southeast Singapore) is absolutely necessary, as just saying “laksa” is as meaningful as just saying “pasta” – has been on my mind because of a recent conversation with another Singaporean expat about the realpolitik of assessing Singaporean food abroad. Last Sunday’s mee siam left me with a bunch of shrimp heads and therefore several litres of shrimp stock. The internal logic of kitchens matrix multiplied with random conversations equals a menu, and this week, that means Katong laksa.
My problem is that while Katong laksa is a Singaporean touchstone, I don’t actually like it that much. This is my second essay about Katong laksa (the first is here), which means I’ve now written about it as many times as I’ve actually enjoyed eating it.
This might be because Katong laksa is possibly the most bastardized hawker dish I know. It’s essentially thick rice vermicelli in a soup or gravy made with rempah and thickened with coconut milk and finely ground dried shrimp. The liquid is thin, and served in quantity, and most people drink it with a spoon. Good cooks will use shrimp stock, but a common shortcut is to use dried shrimp and water. The other essential component is a sprinkling of daun kesum, a herb most commonly known in the US by its Vietnamese name, rau ram.
Like a happy Labrador, this combination easily goes to seed. The recipe is two steps from pudding to begin with – soft, sweet, rich. There’s no acid and no edges. The best bowls growl a little, the Labrador is guarding a stolen turkey leg. The broth needs presence, not just body and sweetness from the coconut milk, even though that seems to satisfy many diners. There should be a blizzard of daun kesum, but most places offer no more than a tentative dusting, the first snowflakes of November. Katong laksa made like this is little more than reddened coconut milk with noodles in it, a hot savory falooda, a minced oath in your mouth.
But even if the execution is sound, if the soup is balanced, I’ve never been able to get behind the use of chor bee hoon in this dish. Chor bee hoon are thick round rice noodles, mostly seen in the US in mixian restaurants, in bún bò huê. They’re slippery as eels and basically waterproof, so they’re less a vehicle for the gravy than a way of spraying it all over your shirt. Most vendors scissor them into ostensibly bite size pieces, which just increases the instability of their temperament, and the blast radius when things inevitably go askew. They’re also basically jelly, and offer no body to house the gravy’s soul.
So I’m making my Katong laksa with mee pok (think, fettucine), rather than chor bee hoon. There are hawker dishes where the noodles are fungible, but Katong laksa isn’t one.
This feels like a different sort of sacrilege than serving ham chim peng (a yeasted doughnut shot through with fermented tofu, a siren song that lures me to doom in nearly every hawker centre) with mapo tofu, which I just did on Sunday.
It feels like a different sort of sacrilege than making pineapple tarts that contain candied pomelo peels, a combination so good I’ve done it four times since February.
The Backbar popups came about because I wanted to serve some genuine hawker food, the kind that’s increasingly hard to find in Singapore, cooked without shortcuts, gussying up, or fancy graphic design. I can’t single-handedly replicate the industrial and social structures that underlie hawker culture, but I can replicate the food and the individual commitment to the idea that feeding people is an important and worthwhile thing to do. And I can replicate the idea that underpins every actual hawker stall (i.e., the ones run by actual hawkers, that aren’t franchises) – that a dish is the way it is for a reason, that its form and aesthetic are worth preserving – even, or especially, in the face of a world that places outsize value on novelty and innovation. I don’t know what to call that except commitment to the dish, commitment to the cuisine, and I think that’s a value worth embodying.
So Katong laksa with mee pok feels like going to the dark side. Not in the sense of factory rempah, and franchises, but in the sense of imposing my line cook’s palate on a dish that has a logic and beauty that I’m just too blind to see. Maybe not every dish needs an edge. Maybe not every soul needs a body.
If you’re near Camberville, come tell me.
The rest of the menu:
Hae bee hiam sandwich – I’ve heard people explain this as “the Singaporean version of a PB&J” which I suppose is functionally accurate, in that it’s an easy snack to feed kids (and big kids). White sandwich bread (an idiom which contains multitudes) buttered, then scattered with a sweet-savory, spicy, dried shrimp sambal. Hae bee hiam is literally “dried shrimp spicy” in Hokkien. I like mine toasted, but I think untoasted might be more common.
Kaya toast – The classic breakfast/comfort food/culinary fado/last meal/ afternoon tea/midnight snack of peninsular Malaysia. I’m making the toast over charcoal, which only a handful of places in Singapore still do. Ask the bartender for an Irish coffee with yours.
And by way of showing my work – my reference point for Katong laksa so far, from Depot Road Zhen Shan Mei. The other one I’ve enjoyed was from 328 Katong Laksa.
