Not the Usual Food Magazines

These magazines show that recipes need not come from famous chefs to command interest, or that an invitation to think about food doesn’t necessarily mean to think about eating it. It was magazines like these that piqued my interest in food writing — how boring to describe tastes, and what a challenge to illuminate cultures with the food people eat! Some of the topics are so niche that you wonder how the magazines survive. A few have indeed closed shop, but I hope the others will beat the odds, for they expand our imaginations of what food can mean. It can be a weapon to protest against status quo, it can be an entry point to discuss inequalities, or it can be just food, ordinary in taste but rich in memories.

Put An Egg On It

Image from Put An Egg On It

Image from Put An Egg On It

Now in it’s ninth issue, this booklet-magazine contains short pieces of food memoirs. These are stories of people whom the conventional food magazines consider as the nobodies — the ordinary men on the street — but the emotions in each piece are so raw and so riverting. While there may be a couple of heart-wrenching read, be prepared for a good laugh at some of the hilarious food memories.

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How a Chef Turns Discards into Family Meals

Every day at about 4 pm, the chef deviates from the list of “projects” he needs to complete for service, and mixes ingredients that don’t belong together according to his menu. He scoops up the discards on the cutting boards before they get tossed into the bin, and what doesn’t end up as trash becomes food for his staff at the restaurant. These foods are called the “family meal,” or just “family” at Fung Tu, the Chinese American restaurant where I stage. One hour before service starts at 6pm, the front- and back-of-the-house help themselves to the food. For most of the cooks in the restaurant, including the chef Jonathan Wu, family is their first, and sometimes the only meal of the day. If they are not done prepping for service, they will eat while whipping mayonnaise, or wrapping egg rolls.

Not every ingredient for family comes from scraps. Chef stocks up bucatini pasta, chickpeas, and sweet Italian sausages specifically for family, because, he tells me matter-of-factly, they have longer shelf life. But his main aim is to minimise food waste, so he works mostly with the leftovers, the despised animal parts, and the sad-looking vegetables. Bak choy is ever present because only half the batch has the perfect curves to be customer-worthy. On Tuesdays, the first working day of the week, there is always leftover chicken from the Sunday-only menu. Since family corresponds to what the restaurant serves its customers, when a new season arrives, or on special days like the Jewish Passover, the members of the family find new foods in their plates too.

Chef was peeling prawns at noon. After that he made a stock out of the shells and cooked sweet Italian sausages in it, along with shallots, green and red peppers, the outermost, imperfect layers of Brussels sprouts, and unwanted coriander stems from which I had plucked nice green leaves for garnishing. Everything went on top of a bowl of corn grits.

Chef was peeling prawns at noon. After that he made a stock out of the shells and cooked sweet Italian sausages in it, along with shallots, green and red peppers, the outermost, imperfect layers of Brussels sprouts, and unwanted coriander stems from which I had plucked nice green leaves for garnishing. All went on top of a bowl of corn grits.

14/3: Tortilla with mashed chorizo sausage, steamed potatoes, and kale stems that are too thick for Stir-Fried Side Greens.

Tortilla with mashed chorizo sausage, steamed potatoes, and kale stems too thick for “Stir-Fried Side Greens.”

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It is Not Just Love that Puts Food on the Table

Because I like to see how food transform from one thing to another, and because I have a bank account that hasn’t seen big deposits for a while, I have been cooking at least six days a week in the past two years. Half of the time I live with my boyfriend and I cook for us. Friends interpret our meals, after seeing their pictures on Instagram, as the “labour of love.”

Yes, love drives me to cook twice a day—lunch and dinner, but love is just a motive. It was my knowledge, values, diligence, prudence, and power that shaped and constructed those meals. To attribute love, and only love, for the transformation of beef to steak is to turn a blind eye to the other capabilities demanded of a home-cook to put food on the table, day after day.

Duck breast, beet salad and potatoes cooked duck fat. #idontlikeitsimple

A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on

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Tiong Bahru Market Directory: Q&A with Bravo

Image from tiongbahru.market

Image from tiongbahru.market

Hawker centre is culture, is history,  is charming, is Singaporean, and it is real. “Cool,” however, has never been in the vocabulary until local design studio Bravo creates an animated directory for the Tiong Bahru Market. The online directory shows an illustrated aerial view of the hawker centre—including tables and chairs, patrons, and cigarette smoke wafting in the smoker’s corner. When you roll your mouse over the numbered stalls, their names, opening hours, and illustrations of their foods pop out. The meticulous designers captured the nuances of the colours—the yellow of the fish ball noodles is more fluorescent than the egg tarts’—and whet my appetite with their beautiful renditions of peng kueh and ming jian kueh. They even included the tiffany-blue and marigold plates—the defining characteristics of the hawker food presentation. If you have food selection disorder, like I do when faced with more 80 stalls, the website’s “generator,” essentially a jackpot machine, will help you decide what to have for mains, drinks, and dessert.

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What the Chinese Newspapers said about 星洲米粉

Nanyang Siang Pau 24 January 1966, print screened from NewspaperSG

Nanyang Siang Pau 24 January 1966, print screened from NewspaperSG

The first mention of 星洲米粉 as a dish in local Chinese newspapers was in 1966. (Previously, the term referred to uncooked rice vermicelli manufactured in Singapore.) It was a feature article on the Tunku Abdul Rahman Park in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The writer described the park, named after Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, as the perfect place for dating or to find a date, and for parents looking to spend a day with their children. There was a food court in the park that sold Ipoh hor fun, Penang laksa, and 星洲米粉. Although the writer did not describe the dishes, so we don’t know if it was flavoured with ketchup, we at least know that by 1966, a dish known as 星洲米粉 was already available in Malaysia.

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Experimental Eating

Image taken from Amazon.com

Image taken from Amazon.com

A meal can simultaneously be good to eat and good to think (words borrowed from Levi Strauss), as I learnt from the recently published Experimental Eating. It is a book that compiles more than 60 food-based creative projects across the globe, most of which intersect with art, design, and science. They push boundaries on how we understand, relate, and experience food, and also call attention to neglected topics, either related or tangential to food. To induce salivation and considerations at the same dinner table is no small feat, given that few will voluntarily ponder over climate change and slavery when presented with a plate of tantalising fish steak. As the book’s authors, The Center of Genomic Gastronomy, writes: “Contemporary art is an essential domain of experimentation and research, because art still makes room for unpopular views, freedom of expression and non-instrumental research.” Let’s digest some of these projects…

Smog Tasting by The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

An egg-whipping performance that made smog visible and tastable. During the performances, egg whites were whipped at traffic junctions and on rooftops to harvest air pollution. As egg foams are up to 90 percent air, smog from different locations could be tasted and compared in the form of polluted meringues. This project urges us to think about the relationship between food, the environment, and our body.

Image from The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

Image from The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

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Singapore Noodles: Once a Reference to Made-in-Singapore Rice Vermicelli

Image taken from Cliff Richard official website.

Image taken from Cliff Richard official website.

When British pop star Cliff Richard announced he was going to cut a new album in Chinese in 1989, he made a point to inform the journalists that he loved everything Chinese, including his favourite food, Singapore Noodles.

The Straits Times 15 January 1989 report. Print screened from NewspaperSG.

The Straits Times 15 January 1989 report. Print screened from NewspaperSG.

Imagine the underwhelming reaction from Singaporeans at that time. If the pop star had listed bak kut teh or Hainanese chicken rice, many Singaporeans would certainly glow with pride. But the mentioning of Singapore Noodles would only yield responses that I imagined went something like this:”He loves Singapore Noodles? Eh… Yeah! But what is that huh?”

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What 100 Years of American Menu Designs Reveal About U.S. History

Neil Tavern, 1945, courtesy of Cool Culinaria

Neil Tavern, 1945, courtesy of Cool Culinaria

If you read them correctly, restaurant menus tell you more than just what’s on offer from the kitchen. Look closely and you’ll spot unwitting details of the era in which they were made. And if you have access to a choice collection of them that spans decades, they’ll actually tell you the story of America’s history (and make you pretty hungry, too). Oftentimes, you don’t even need to look beyond the artful covers to form an idea of the bygone days…

Read the rest of my story for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) here.

Singapore Noodles, A Work in Progress

Curried Singapore Noodles from Great NY Noodletown in Manhattan.

Curried Singapore Noodles from Great NY Noodletown in Manhattan.

The first time I had Singapore Noodles was in 2007. I was a news intern in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the Chinese restaurant near my hostel, called the Golden Dragon, was my go-to place for quick and cheap meals. Despite calling itself a Chinese restaurant, it offered none of the Chinese foods that I had known. Singapore Noodles, it turned out, was a plate of yellow noodles stir-fried with a mixture of different vegetables and maybe some big chunks of meat. And oil. Lots of it. I learnt later in 2013, after moving to the US, that what Golden Dragon had on its menu were more accurately American or Western Chinese food.

Singapore Noodles is a staple in Manhattan’s Chinese restaurants. On the menus, it will appear with Chow Mein and Lo Mein. It comprises rice vermicelli (although chow fun/hor fun may also be used), bean sprouts, char siew, shrimp, onions, bell peppers and/or other vegetables. Its iconic turmeric-yellow comes from a generous scoop of curry powder. I find it fascinating that something not known in Singapore is named Singapore Noodles, and the thousands who love and cook it are anyone but Singaporeans, so I begin my investigations about this dish.

It is important to know that most of these restaurants belong to immigrants from Guangdong, most of them Taishanese, but there are also Cantonese from other parts of the province, as well as from Hong Kong. Taishanese were the first Chinese to arrive in the US during the 1800s, and the first to set up Chinese restaurants in Manhattan. However, the surviving Taishanese-owned restaurants do not serve Taishanese but Cantonese food. According a Taishanese immigrant who had lived in Manhattan Chinatown for decades, Taishan was a poor village where people ate peasant food like yam with rice. No way the Americans would patronise a restaurant that sold such food, he said. I assume Singapore Noodles is one of the many adaptations from their Cantonese counterparts.

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The Taste of Contentment

A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on

I’ve been thinking about death lately. I am afraid, yet hopeful, about the prospect of consciousness after life. I will like a chapter two to my brief humanly existence, but I also fear, that in this sequel, I will be written into a new plot with completely different characters. I appreciate personal accounts of impending death, be it of one’s own or of the loved ones, as I wanted perspectives, preferably one that can help me see the silver lining to the eternal separations with my parents and my soon-to-be husband. If that’s not possible, at least I wanted to know how others deal with the pain.

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