statistically average chicken curry
Jess asked if I have a recommendation for a Singaporean cookbook.
I do — you should get a copy of South East Asian Food, by Rosemary Brissenden. It’s a doorstop, it’s old, and it has no pictures. Brissenden was not a cook — she was an academic. It’s not even specifically about Singapore, which is lumped together with Malaysia in a cookbook which covers the region entire. These are all assets.
Brissenden wrote the first edition in the 1960s, which were a complicated time for the region.
On the first research trip I flew into Jakarta during the Gestapu Coup. I was heavily pregnant, there was no public transport, no phones, and all of my contacts - most were in the diplomatic corps — were unreachable. I managed to get out of the city to the mountains and began researching there. From Indonesia, it was on to Malaysia and Thailand to watch people cook.
Can I take a moment here to marvel at how intrepid she must have been?
She could only cover the three countries in the first edition, because there was a war on in the rest. At the time, she was a researcher in international relations. Her introductions to the recipes discuss everything from diplomacy between Malay kingdoms in the 15th century to archaeological studies of the daily diet in the kingdom of Sukhothai. They are not breezy or encouraging. They do not suggest ways to make a dish your own or kick it up a notch, or have this on the table in 30 minutes flat. And yet she writes like a born teacher.
I believe cooks feel most comfortable when they know something of both the culinary and cultural contexts of the food they are preparing. Many find pretty pictures of prepared food daunting unless they are aware of its ‘surrounding logic’.
When Brissenden revisited the region in 1993, the Asian miracle had brought the population into the cities and women into the workforce, and she found the culinary traditions that had captured her imagination crumbling. The revised edition of 2003 (the one I have and the only one you’re likely to find today), reflects her awareness of this change. There is an urgency to the book, and a level of care that comes from the sense that something precious might soon be lost.
I feel very sad if traditions are lost, and if people don’t know the history of what they eat. That has driven me to write as I do, it is important to present a complete picture of a cuisine in its social, historical and cultural context, lest they all meld into one.
The emphasis is mine. The melding happens.
Every cuisine in Singapore includes a dish that in the west would be called chicken curry — Indian, Malay, Chinese, Peranakan, Eurasian. Most cuisines have more than one. The dishes are similar, but that doesn’t mean they ought to be the same. There is no point in cooking the average of five different chicken curries.
Yet the tendency, without a reference like South East Asian Food, is regression to the mean. People cook less, taste memories are lost, reasons get forgotten. Every household in Singapore makes their chicken curry slightly differently. Cooks measure in ricebowls and teacups, if at all. The variations bleed together.
The importance of Brissenden’s book is not that it records recipes. Recipes are mirages. What she recorded was intentions, philosophies, and histories. The showy fastidiousness of Peranakan cuisine, the simplicity of everyday Malay cooking, the transformation that the spice trade brought about. These ideas, more than measurements or proportions, keep the threads in the culinary tapestry distinct.
Yet the recipes serve an important function, beyond providing the reader with a starting point in the kitchen. They illuminate each other. You can read the recipes for rendang as it is cooked in Sumatra and in Negri Sembilan and gain some inkling of what differentiates Peninsular Malay cooking from that of Indonesia. You can taste the sour, spicy fish stew that appears in every cuisine in the region; follow the journey that turns Singaporean otak, into Thai ho mok and eventually Cambodian amok; trace the line between fish sauce and shrimp paste. And you can do all this through the eyes and voice of a single remarkable woman.
This isn’t a cookbook. It’s an education.
And a couple of honorable mentions…
Fire Islands by Eleanor Ford looks like a highly promising Indonesian cookbook. Indonesia isn’t Singapore, but the ingredients and techniques of the Malay archipelago underlie a great deal of Singaporean cooking, and Ford’s book is an excellent introduction to those. I haven’t cooked from it, only read it, but it documents the cuisine with the careful, holistic approach that characterizes Brissenden’s writing. Nearly every other writer from outside South East Asia writes as though it is their personal relationship with the cuisine that gives it meaning (thanks, y’all). Ford is one of the few who doesn’t. The US edition comes out this November.
Bekwoh by Bryan Koh probably shouldn’t count, because it’s not about Singaporean food either, but it is so charming in every possible way that I had to mention it. It’s about the food of the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has strikingly little to do with the kinds of Malay food prevalent in Singapore. Singaporeans to whom I show this book generally ask, “Is this really Malaysian food?”
Koh is another fastidious researcher, and writes with brio.
Twigs of shredded dried cuttlefish can be found in Asian grocers or markets. I do not recommend buying whole ones and cutting yourself unless you are bored and long for pain. The best way to sliver the mangoes and cucumber for this is with a crinkle-edged peeler sold at Thai specialist shops. It’s cheap, easy to use, and makes what is usually a dreadful chore oddly pleasurable.
I don’t think there are presently plans for a US edition of the book, but it is being imported by Kitchen Arts & Letters.
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best,
tw
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