reverence

a wednesday wander

Over lunch at that pseudo-Singaporean food court in midtown Manhattan, Adam asked me if any non-Singaporeans are cooking really good Singaporean food, in the way of those Japanese cooks who lavish their energies upon pizza, or pasta, or French cuisine; or the occasional American who learns to make sushi. His question implies a curious but probably valid benchmark: a cuisine can be so influential and so revered that outsiders will devote years to perfecting it. 

My initial response was that this kind of stature is almost never bestowed on the cuisine of a colonized country – only those of colonizers. The exception that proves the rule is the cooking of Thailand, on which at least 2 white chefs have built careers. 

But like most opinions expressed over lunch in a hawker centre, this was too simplistic. Restaurants are only one kind of showcase. White authors, mostly women, have been painstakingly recording recipes from the region for at least half a century (well before Japanese cooks started opening high-fidelity pizza places in Tokyo). 

It’s also worth asking whether a restaurant can really represent a cuisine that’s fundamentally domestic, that lives and evolves and thrives in homes rather than restaurants. Even hawker food began in home kitchens and to this day many hawkers still prep at home. You can try to canonize a vernacular cuisine, as the many shrines to pasta around the world have done, but at what point does the search for authenticity slip into the writing of fiction?

Maybe it’s not so bad that our food remains ours in this way. That it’s such a pain in the arse, that it has to be sold so cheaply, that in spite of Bourdain it still requires so much explanation, that no one other than Singaporeans actually wants to make and serve these dishes. To be too difficult for anyone else to bother with is a sort of external validation too.

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