Winner of the Design-A-Tee contest (picture from Channel News Asia)
An illustration of 71 dishes and drinks depicting Singapore’s iconic food culture wins MediaCorp’s “Design-A-Tee” contest. The comments following the Facebook announcement—as with many users comments on various online platforms—are brutal but insightful. While some Singaporeans give the thumbs up for the design, there are complaints that generally fall into three categories:
Before going to Mexico City, a friend reminded me to get a bottle of tequila from its birthland. This friend, like most regular drinkers, regards tequila the national tipple of Mexico. But lesser known to them is the rustic, smokier cousin called the mezcal that has taken Mexican city dwellers by the storm in recent years.
Mezcal traces back to the Hispanic period when native agave plant met Spanish’s age-old distillation know-how. But the drink had been considered a poor man’s quaff produced in backward villages. It was also deemed too potent and unrefined for hotels’ liquor menu. Today, because the Mexican government granted it the appellation of origin in the mid 1990s, and the new appreciation for handcrafted, small-batch products, mezcal can stand on its own merits. Along any hip and trendy boulevards in the capital, one can easily spot a bar that specializes in mezcal.
I found El Palenquito in an Art Nouveau neighborhood called Colonia Roma, the place to live for famous artists and politicians up until the 1940s. The bar wears a rustic tavern look with dangling roof tiles, 100-year-old adobes, and a massive stone wheel used to crash harvested agave. Its owner, Aláu Ibarra Espriu, owns three mezcal bars in the city, but only El Palenquito devotes its entire menu to one producer.
photo by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner via Flickr
As more Singaporeans receive higher education and prefer comfortable working conditions, foreign labors play significant role in producing material objects such as buildings. Things get complicated, however, when they also become an important source of labor for the production of cultural objects, such as food.
Because foreign laborers have not participated in Singapore’s social life, they do not possess the same taste for food as Singaporeans. Common complaints about cooks from China are that their versions of local delicacies such as char kway teow and chap chye peng are too salty. This is common in commercial kitchens helmed by immigrants. Think about Japanese and Korean cuisine prepared by Latinos in the United States.
Singaporean food bloggers living overseas share mostly recipes of what Singaporeans eat. There are FEAST to the world and Mummy, I can cook!.
Feast to the world’s popiah entry in June 2012
Mummy, I can cook’s satay entry in July 2011
Singaporean food bloggers at home, such as ieatishootipost and camemberu, in contrast, rarely bestow culinary wisdom. They review restaurants, hawker stalls, and sometimes businesses remotely relevant to F&B, like airlines. Overseas and domestic Singaporeans cover different aspects of food because the further one drifts away from home, the hazier the idea of “Singaporean” becomes. Continue reading
HAVANA — You run a restaurant famous for its pork chop. But there’s none in the fridge. You check the pantry only to find that salt is also running low. You call your local store and they inform you that the entire city is out of these items. The replenishments will arrive two days later.
This scenario is reality for restaurateurs in Havana. To invigorate the struggling economy, the government loosened the regulations on private restaurants in 2010, but food shortages and rationing persist in the country. “It is still hard to find ingredients we need,” says Enrique Núñez, owner of La Guarida, one of the longest established and most reputable private restaurants here. “This has nothing to do with the restrictions. You simply cannot find them in Cuba.”
Continue reading my Boston Globe story here…
Food is a popular choice of gifts amongst Singaporeans. Local snacks are a common souvenir from overseas trips, festivities are celebrated by the exchange of boxes of pineapple tarts or kueh bangkit, and what better way to build fellowships than stabbing one’s fork into a colleague’s food?
For many Singaporeans, food has also become a great introduction to their country. This is how it often goes: “You know chili crab, chicken rice, or laksa? Well, they come from Singapore.”
A tiny problem is that food is an imposing and intrusive gift. Sharing the joy of food or the concept of one’s culture is great, but pressurizing others, by ways of social etiquette, to literally digest them is not. As much as chili crab is great, people like variants of them, or for some, not at all.
A recent trend in Singapore’s design scene offers a solution. Food has become a popular subject matter for local designers: From kueh tutu erasers by Winston Chai and Yong Jieyu, to Lee Shu Han’s noodle poster, and the nonya kueh sticky notes by the Singapore Souvenirs collective—there is now a spread of delicious food-inspired design products available for consumption.
image from shuhanlee.com
image from farmstore.sg
While these cannot be eaten like the real dishes, they are functional as vehicles for conversations with foreigners over what these food are and the relationships Singaporeans have with them. If it’s with a fellow Singaporean this conversation is to be had with, not a word is needed to strike a chord with that person.
At the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) Annual Meeting & Conference this month, I presented a paper on the feminization of the early 20th century Chinese men in America, and how it led them to accept the traditionally feminine task of domestic cooking. The following is an adaptation of my five minutes speech. I have added more information for a more complete picture of my research.
I have always wondered why in my family, it is my father and my grandfather who cook. Now, we are not Americans, we are Singaporean Chinese, but like the story of many Chinese in the United States, my grandfather and his kinsmen from South China sought jobs in a foreign land. Women didn’t tag along, so the men cooked for themselves.
I wondered if this was the case for the American Chinese. Indeed, this was what sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed in her 1956 study on the marital relations of Chinese families in San Francisco. She noted that the husbands brought home groceries and taught their wives cooking. This was unthinkable in a patriarchal Chinese society.
Well, the men in America were no typical Chinese. They came to the United States in their youth and reached adulthood without too much womanly concern for their welfare, until the US government loosened its grip on Chinese immigration in 1947. Prior to that, the Chinese were the most hated community in the United States, because of reasons illustrated in the following picture. They were perceived as economic enemies who monopolized the industries, leaving the white men jobless. The results were institutionalized discriminations that I argue attributed to the egalitarian division of labor in Chinese’s marital homes as observed by Lee.
A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)
In 1882, United States enacted the Exclusion Act to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. Prior to that, the Chinese community was already a predominantly male society because Chinese female immigrants were thought to be prostitutes, and therefore denied entry. Married Chinese men had little chance to reunite with their wives, while the bachelors could not start a family. Because these men could not demonstrate heterosexual norms, there were doubts on their sexuality. The early Chinese immigrants in the United States sustained the image of lesser men.
Brassard and her son Johnson
Dalton Johnson eats vegetables only if they are raw. He won’t touch mustard, mayonnaise, and other bottled sauces. Deli meats and American cheese are avoided like a plague.
The 18-year-old keeps this routine not because he’s observing a trending diet, but because he has autism. This gives his mother, Susan Brassard, a caterer and culinary instructor, a tougher cooking job at home than at work.
Because Johnson doesn’t like processed food in general—SpaghettiOs and Macaroni and Cheese that every American kid is supposed to be mad about only drive him mad—Brassard makes his food from scratch. Corned beef, grilled chicken, and his favorite chop suey fly off their home kitchen on a regular basis.
Although, Brassard cheats a little when she’s pressed for time. She adds self-pureed vegetables to store-bought spaghetti sauce to disguise it as homemade. “He doesn’t know,” she said triumphantly.
Boston University announced last month that it would add 15 new Chinese dishes to its residential dining menus. But the dishes did not impress the very people the dining services were courting.
In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”
Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.
Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”
In Cantonese opera, men and women spar over love, money, and politics. A similar drama unfolded in my grandparents’ home, but the topic that triggered it was cooking. My grandfather liked to brag about his mastery in cooking. While sitting cross-legged on a single-seat sofa, with a cigarette between his fingers, he cried, “Your grandmother doesn’t know a thing!” Then he let out a chuckle.
My grandmother uttered a feeble “humph,” but she was no docile sheep of a woman as many in her generation were expected to be. One day, when I asked her to teach me how to make ngoh hiong, a Hokkien meat roll that was the mainstay of our dwindling family dinners, she took the opportunity to show her husband of 60 years who called the shots in the family. To demonstrate how she would marinate the ground pork, she got my 86-year-old grandfather walking up and down the kitchen to fetch her ingredients. When he looked uncertainty, she belittled him mercilessly. “Of course you have to wash the bean curd! Where is the oil? What are you looking for? The bean curd skin is right here!”
My grandfather spewed a couple of Hokkien vulgarities—he could cook himself and was the master of vegetable stew and pig’s stomach pepper soup. But he was accommodating, so my grandmother marinated the meat, texturized it with chopped water chestnuts and shallots, and rolled it in bean curd skin. Seven minutes later, the meat roll emerged from the steamer in one piece. Was this a metaphor for their marriage?