no. 89: an offering

 Jon said to me, a few months ago, “you really need a glossary, I don’t know what three-quarters of these things you’re talking about are, I just know they’re fascinating.” 

So here’s a new benefit for paid subscribers – the Cambridge, MA Companion to Singaporean Food, an ongoing series, which I’ll collect on this website, about all those words I italicize in essays, like lou bak, and rempah, and kopitiam. It’s modeled on one of the most beloved books on my shelf, Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, a reference text that’s warm, erudite, and opinionated, but also as solid as basalt. The goal is to be more entertaining than wikipedia, but more informative than Tiktok.

The first entry follows. I’ll add one every week. Comments and corrections are very welcome – I claim no special qualification for writing this other than a willingness to pursue harebrained schemes.

If you’d like to have access to these, there’s no better time to sign up, especially since for the next two weeks, I’m putting subscriptions on a deep discount. 

Which leads to another announcement: I’m putting most of the archive behind a paywall, starting when the sale ends in a fortnight. While these essays will continue to land in your inbox without a paywall, they’ll be moved behind the paywall two weeks after publication. This is a hard decision, because I want my writing to be available to anyone on the internet, and one of the main reasons I keep writing is the knowledge that many thousands of people have read and enjoyed these essays, and that they’ve changed how people think about food. 

I think this is the most valuable work I do, and it takes a great deal of time, and unfortunately, we’re all forced to place an economic value on our time. I’d love to make it pay what you want, but Substack doesn’t offer that option (it also sets a hard floor on my pricing – I can’t set it to less than $5/month, though I can discount it, as I’m doing here). 

Still, especially on sale, a month’s subscription costs less than coffee in a big city – and I hope you have, at some point, read something here that you’ve enjoyed at least that much. 

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Chye tau kueh

Also spelled chai tow kueh, chye tow kueh, or chai tau kueh. Simplified Chinese: 菜头粿 Pinyin: cài tóu guǒ.

Almost universally translated as “carrot cake” even though the only root involved is daikon. A related cake, lor pak koh (Simplified Chinese: 萝卜糕 Pinyin: luó bò gāo), also made with daikon, is referred to as “turnip cake,” and to further confuse things, sometimes no daikon is used at all, just a plain rice batter (this variant is almost unknown in Singapore today, though it was common in the mid-20th century).

Chye tau kueh is a savory cake made by folding grated daikon into an unleavened batter of rice flour and water, often with a small proportion of other starches, then steaming the mixture in a deep pan. Similar cakes are common across the south coast of China, which prevents easy attribution to a single province or dialect group. After steaming, the cake is allowed to cool, then either sliced and fried on its own, or cut into smaller pieces and used as the foundation of a dish with other ingredients added.

In Singaporean use, the term usually refers to the complete dish, which is made by frying chye tau kueh in a large griddle (e.g. this hawker in 1977, or this one, who must have been one of the last few hawkers to actually work in the street) with garlic, preserved daikon (chye poh), and eggs, heavily seasoning the mixture with fish sauce and white pepper. This pairing of daikon cake with preserved daikon might be as close as hawker food comes to new Nordic cuisine.

Two major variants exist – white, with just the ingredients already listed, and black, with the addition of a sweet sauce based on dark soy sauce, similar to that used in char kway teow. The black version has a longer history in Singapore, while the white version seems to have emerged in Singapore in the 1960s and 70s. Leslie Tay traces the evolution of the dish in a review of a stall descended from the purported inventor of the white version, and many of the details are confirmed by oral histories in the National Archives (1, 2). 

Both should be garnished with at least a token scattering of cilantro and chopped scallions, and can be ordered with sambal, which is usually added in the pan. Numerous stylistic variations exist, differentiated by how thoroughly the kueh is fried before other ingredients are added, how small the kueh is cut, and the quantity of egg used (enough, in some places, that the result is served in slabs, a quasi-pancake). Naturally, the composition of the sauce used in the black version is often considered a trade secret, although it’s just as likely to be sweet soy sauce (kecap manis), enthusiastically dispensed straight from the bottle.

A word on etymology. To call chye tau kueh a “cake” stretches the definition of the English word, since it is neither sweetened, nor leavened, nor enriched with fat, though a miniscule quantity of oil is part of most recipes. It plays a role often filled by noodles, but the form factor makes “noodle” as poor a description as “cake.” “Dumpling” might be the most suitable English term, since dumplings are often plain and at least occasionally unleavened, but most dumplings are shaped before cooking, rather than cooked in a large body and then divided.

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And some other bits you might enjoy:

Gastro Obscura on descriptions of steamed white rice.

The Only Thing That Lasts is a podcast about farmland in America. Production values are high and the reporting is thorough, and chapter 3 alone should convince you that you ought to know more about farmland. One of my favorite things about it is that it’s funded by a tech company that makes, essentially, quickbooks for farmers. I guess this is what our media landscape looks like now?

The troubles of the Hunts Point Produce Market, the produce clearinghouse that more or less feeds New York. I’ve got a long piece coming on food as infrastructure – an interview I did with the Deb Chachra – and this feels like a teaser. One of the many reasons Hunt’s Point is interesting is that nearly every piece of the distribution infrastructure that gets food to NYC (or indeed anywhere else in the US) is owned by a private, for profit corporation – and Hunt’s Point is not. It’s run by a co-op, one that’s getting increasingly stretched. One result of supermarket chains consolidating is that an increasing proportion of the infrastructure of food production and distribution became private – trucks and warehouses and processing plants – but these private facilities still depend on public networks of roads, water, and power lines. 

Related: the benign dictatorship of HEB, the most Texan supermarket chain on earth, on the Grocery Nerd substack. 

Totally unrelated: if you’re just tired of hearing about AI, and want to listen to someone think through it with caution, optimism, and a total lack of hyperbole, try this interview with Holly Herndon, a musician who makes music with machine learning models. As a bonus, it might get you listening to Herndon’s music, which has been the backdrop to much of my week. 

And finally: if you’re just here for the pictures of food, what are you doing here? Here, anyway, is the chye tau kueh from last month’s pop-up. Spot the differences between this and my description above.