It wasn’t the Chinese restaurants bringing Singapore Noodles to the locals in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, as is the case in many western countries. When in the city to visit a friend earlier this year, I didn’t see any Chinese restaurant, but there was no difficulty finding the dish.

Singapore Noodles made its way to Estonia through the “Asian” restaurants operated by the Indian and Nepali immigrants. These restaurants sell a mixture of Indian, Chinese and Thai dishes — some classics, while others unrecognisable to the members of the respective community. Plenty of dishes are named after a certain city — Shanghai Lamb, Hong Kong Chicken, Sichuan Beef — usually inventions to pique the curiosity of unsuspecting customers.

I stumbled upon one Asia Cafe and its owner Prem Karki, from Butwal, Nepal. The small outfit is a short walk from the Balti Jaam Market and the city’s main railway station. Like other Indian and Nepali immigrants in Tallinn, Prem found home in the Baltic state after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, to which Estonia once belonged. He arrived 12 years ago but most of whom he knows personally were there before him.

These immigrants, including Prem, set up restaurants but did not specialise in their own cultural cuisine. The number of spices and ingredients they would have to import from South Asia, Prem explained, would have made their restaurants cost-prohibitive for the locals. To keep their food prices low, the entrepreneurs filled their menu with Chinese dishes, which needed only “water and a few spices”.

What Prem referred to are the Indian Chinese dishes from India. I know little about this cuisine but Prem said it was very common in the bigger cities. He had worked as a cook at a few Indian Chinese restaurants in Delhi, where he lived for 14 years since 1988. It was in India where Prem and the other Nepali immigrants first learned to cook the Chinese dishes that they now sell in Tallinn.

Singapore Noodles, according to Prem, is a classic dish at the Indian Chinese restaurants. It comprises wheat noodles (instead of rice vermicelli), chicken (or lamb and fish), egg, cabbage, carrots, turmeric powder, MSG and dash of orange food colouring. There is no bean sprouts, prawns or onions as in Malaysia or Hong Kong. Such restaurants also tend to sell Indian and Thai dishes too, which explains the selection of cuisines that are being offered by the South Asian immigrants in Tallinn.

In Estonia, Prem replicated what he picked up in India. His Singapore Noodles are turmeric yellow in colour, and there was also no bean sprouts, onions or char siew but cabbage, carrots and chicken. He, however, replaced wheat noodles with flat rice noodles (as in pad thai) because he thinks it makes for a better dish.

The curry flavour of his noodles reminded me of the Singapore Noodles I had in New York, more so than the same dish in Hong Kong. Prem said he used a pre-mixed curry powder no different from what was available in Nepal or India. I assumed he meant that it was similar to what he was familiar with in South Asia. I do not think there is only one curry flavour in the region. Because of our language barrier, I couldn’t get him to elaborate.

Asia Cafe‘s main clientele are Estonians attracted to its low food prices, big portions and wide range of foreign flavours. That little tinge of spice in Singapore Noodles (5 Euros) is a welcomed change from Estonian cuisine. The dish has also been familiar food for tourists from Germany, America, Canada and Australia. Prem likened Chinese/Asian restaurants to McDonald’s — everywhere and a comforting presence to the homesick.

Previously, I understood that Singapore Noodles proliferated in the UK and US through the Chinese immigrants and their restaurants. My encounter in Estonia shows that there is a different group of people — the Indians and Nepalese — propagating their own interpretation of the dish in at least one city where they outnumbered the Chinese. I’m now curious about Indian Chinese cuisine and how Singapore Noodles wound up to be a part of it.

My favourite reading this year: Margot Finn’s Discriminating Taste. The author observed a shift in America’s mainstream food culture during periods of widening income gap, and attribute the greater attention that people today pay to food to what she calls “class anxieties”. When the middle class is doing well and the upper class isn’t claiming much of the nation’s wealth, she explains, the former could scale the social hierarchy through hard work and the money they are paid. But when the super-elites emerge and even professional incomes are not enough for “class-climbing”, the middle class rely more on cultural forms of distinction, such as the gourmet or organic food they eat. While some “foodies” may be genuinely concern about nutrition or sustainable agriculture, they are also looking to differentiate themselves from the masses.

These two arguments left a deep impression on me:

There are as many opinions about taste as there are permutations of upbringing, cultures and socioeconomic environments. Gourmet food did not become one because they are universally pleasing. They have been judged to be good taste by people, specifically the elite tastemakers, who based their opinion primarily on scarcity. This is why gourmet food are either expensive or require a very niche knowledge to access. The author has no interest in judging people who consume gourmet food to distinguish themselves, but she takes issue with those who claim that this practice is “classless”. Many food enthusiasts argue that they aren’t highbrow if they also eat lowbrow food. But gourmets eating diversely, Finn argues, doesn’t make eating gourmet food inclusive, and their ability to buy and enjoy both high- and lowbrow food only serves to communicate their privilege. Calling gourmet eating an inclusive gesture, she adds, obscures the fact that food reproduces class hierarchies.

The book also deals with the elitism of contemporary food movements. The advocates of organic, local, or slow food consider their food choices morally superior, but few have evaluated their real impact. For example, transportation contributes only 11% of greenhouse gas emissions in the total lifecycle of food supply chains, as opposed to the 83% generated during the production stage. But people are fixated on food miles and fail to consider the energy efficiency of farm operations. Few are also aware that organic certifications permit the use of organic pesticides and fertilisers, some of which are highly toxic to marine life and have caused worker injuries. Being natural doesn’t mean no or low toxicity. Supporters of these food movements pay more for “better food” without enough understanding of these things suggests that it is the idea of “virtuous eating” that they are more interested in.

This is my interpretation and it may not do justice to Finn’s arguments. Best if you read it yourself. I liked the book because I never thought to look at food trends in tandem with income inequality. Compared to the others I’ve read, the author is also more critical of the movements (some may say too critical), nudging me to evaluate the motivations behind my food choices.

Thank you for joining me this weekend afternoon. I’ll be talking about my research on Singapore Noodles, which I started in 2015. This particular dish interest me because it bears the name of Singapore yet most of us here will not consider it Singaporean. I started paying attention to it when I was living in New York. I thought it was bizarre to have something I didn’t recognise representing me and my country.

But instead of brushing it off as fake news, I wonder about the meanings it holds for the people who do enjoy it. Singapore Noodles may be foreign to Singaporeans, it is local to others elsewhere. I think this irony deserves an investigation.

What I will share today is what I’ve found so far. I am not yet done with the research. It turns out be a massive project, involving at least three variations of Singapore Noodles, many cities and immigration stories of different people. I will tell you right away, that I still don’t know who invented the dish, but the investigation has revealed many interesting themes. You’ll see how food cultures are not bounded by national borders, how the foodways of immigrants in different places interact with one another, and how one dish can embody multiple, sometimes contrasting meanings.

I am going to take you on a journey to several places.

• We will start off in the virtual world, where we’ll get a sense of who’s eating Singapore Noodles, and what it looks like.
• We then move on to Singapore, to learn how the dish is connected to the Cantonese.
• In Kuala Lumpur, Singapore Noodles contains ketchup, and we’ll speculate why.
• Next stop is Hong Kong, where curried Singapore Noodles is typical. We will find out why this version gets to be the popular one in the western world.
• We will then go to New York. Chinese immigrants there tend to work in restaurants and we’ll learn why these restaurants sell Singapore Noodles, Hong Kong-style.
• Finally, I’ll end with some words on what Singapore Noodles can tell us.

My sources include:

• Restaurant owners, chefs, academics whom I’ve interviewed
• Research papers
• Newspaper archives
• Food media and blogs. In 2015, I googled “singapore noodles recipes” and examined the first 80 results that came up.
• I also studied about 5000 Instagram posts that are hastagged “singaporenoodles”. Last month, I looked at another 120 to get an update.

What is Singapore Noodles?

If you haven’t had Singapore Noodles, this is a general idea: It has noodles, meat, at least a few vegetables, all of these stir-fried together. Most people buy rather than cook it at home. It’s an affordable, one-dish meal.

What Noodles?

Those of you familiar with Singapore Noodles would expect rice vermicelli, but there are also wheat, glass and konjac noodles.

What Meats?

Mostly chicken or beef.

What Vegetables?

Vegetables could be any kind. I’ve seen baby corn, snow peas, broccoli and even a fruit like avocado. Regardless of the ingredients, we can see that all of them are turmeric-yellow in colour.

Must Have Curry!

That is because they all contain curry powder. The media and blogs agree that curry is the key ingredient, although they differ on the style.

Who eats Singapore Noodles? According to Instagram, they are mostly Caucasians. More than half are from the US and UK, followed by Canada and Australia. If there are Asians, they tend to live in these countries too.  

About 80% of those who shared the images are women, even though the proportion of female Instagrammers is only half. This is probably because Singapore Noodles has been co-opted into several popular diets, and more women than men subscribed to them.   

Vegans, Vegetarians and…

A good number of Singapore Noodles pictures are hashtagged vegan, vegetarian and gluten free. Among these, 3 out of 10 are also hashtagged homemade or homecooked. The vegans and vegetarians use only vegetables in their recipe, but get to be creative with the noodles. The gluten free community, however, is attracted to Singapore Noodles for its rice vermicelli, one of the few noodles that agrees with them. If you google “rice vermicelli recipes”, Singapore Noodles will come up in the very first page.

Good for Dieting?

In 2015, Instagram was flooded with pictures of a ready-made Singapore Noodles newly launched by Slimming World, a weight management company based in the UK. This triggered a revival of interest in Singapore Noodles among the English women looking to lose weight. Many shared pictures of their new diet, consisting of chicken, prawns, peas, wheat noodles and curry powder.

So Caucasians, mostly women, love Singapore Noodles, because they believe it is good for health and body shape. Besides the homemade ones, where else can we find the dish?

Who Sells Singapore Noodles?

At the local Chinese restaurants and takeout.

What does that make the noodles? The media is undecided between Asian and fusion.

Others thought it’s a good idea to exoticise the dish. They call it:

Despite their uncertainty about what Singapore Noodles is, there’s one thing the media can agree on, that is the dish did not originate in Singapore:

Do we really not have Singapore Noodles here? To answer that, we have to take a look at its other names.

Other Names

星洲米粉. 星洲was a shorthand for Singapore, while 米粉means rice vermicelli in Mandarin. In Cantonese, it is also called星洲炒米, with an emphasis on the cooking method, 炒, which is stir-fry. 星洲米粉 or 星洲炒米 are not only available in Singapore, but also in Malaysia and Hong Kong. They are similar in terms of ingredients and their connection with the local Cantonese. This suggests that they are varieties of the same dish.

Singapore

Let’s start with Singapore. This is a 星洲米粉 I recently had at Circuit Road hawker centre — quite typical of the Singapore Noodles here. There are mock char siew, prawns, bean sprouts, cabbage, egg and green chillies. You can tell from the colour that there is no curry powder, and neither do the vast majority of Singapore Noodles here.

The Cantonese Connection

Today, we find Singapore Noodles mostly at zi char stalls and some Chinese restaurants. But back in the 1940s, the dish was a specialty of Cantonese cooks, who set up stalls at Chin Choo Pa Sat, where People’s Park Complex is today. That was a time when the Chinese pretty much lived, worked and ate with people of their own dialect. The Teochew hung out at Clarke Quay and ate char kway teow at the Ellenborough Market, whereas the Cantonese preferred the hor fun at Chin Choo Pa Sat.

Mr Hooi Kok Wai, here in the picture, is one of the four “Heavenly Kings” of local Cantonese cuisine. He remembers Singapore Noodles from the open-air food stalls at the market during the 1940s. These stalls, which he called “dai pai dong”, are similar to today’s zi char stalls. They sold a range of dishes to the regular folks, and operated from evenings to past midnight, some until 6 am in the morning.

The Ingredients

Their Singapore Noodles contained real char siew, which the stalls produced separately for sale. There were also prawns, onions, bean sprouts, spring onions, red chilies and 蛋皮, thin omelet cut into strips. Except for a couple of vegetables, the ingredients are almost the same as what I had at Circuit Road. Even the mock char siew hints at the 1940s version. The replacement seems necessary, since zi char stalls today don’t produce roast meats, and nothing else in their menu requires char siew.

Again, Singapore Noodles from the 40s had no curry powder. Between now and then, Mr Hooi hasn’t come across any curried Singapore Noodles, which means that the idea probably didn’t come from Singapore.

Cantonese Restaurants too

Cantonese restaurants also serve Singapore Noodles. They started doing so by the 1970s, according to Mr Hooi. This is a 1987 advertisement for a Hungry Ghost Festival menu. 星洲米粉 came in the 8^th course of the most expensive set. Like the stalls at Chin Choo Market, Lucky Restaurant was also Cantonese, selling dim sum and roast meats too. I suppose their Singapore Noodles would come with char siew.

But today, Singapore Noodles are not so commonly found, in restaurants or even zi cha stalls. At our next stop in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore Noodles is much more common, and appreciated by the locals.

KL’s Cantonese Connection

Any Malaysian who enjoys hawker food will have eaten Singapore Noodles. It is a classic one-dish meal at tai chow, a no-frills eatery much like Singapore’s zi char. Tai chow used to be on the streets, offering affordable food to the hard-working folks. The Cantonese were the main players in this business. Tai chow literally means “big fry” in Cantonese, referring to the restaurants’ primary method of cooking — quick stir-fry over big flames. Tai chow subsequently moved into the ground floor of buildings, selling more upmarket dishes to the middle class. But Singapore Noodles remained a perennial presence, so much so that some Malaysians are convinced that it was created in KL.

Once Upon a Time

One of them is Malaysian food researcher Lim Kim Cherng, who published an essay about its origin in 2006. He believes that Singapore Noodles was created in KL towards the end of WWII. The story goes that, one day, a tai chow received a customer near closing time, so it had to put together a meal with scraps. There were bee hoon, char siew, bean sprouts, egg, onion, chilli and dried shrimps. Happy with his food, the customer asked for its name. Apparently, Singapore was a more prosperous city than KL at the time, so the tai chow owner came up with 星洲米粉, to give that plate of leftovers an upgrade.

Unfortunately, this tai chow is no more. But I visited two old establishments in KL that have been serving Singapore Noodles for at least 50 years. They are Sek Yuen and Sang Kee, shown in the earlier slide. One was opened in 1948 and the other in 1955.

Char Siew is Key

Their Singapore Noodles are quite the same, and consistent with the “original” described in the story. They both have char siew, which seems to be a standard ingredient in KL’s Singapore Noodles. According to Sang Kee, tai chow in the past produced their own siu yok and char siew. This is why they could offer the roast meat in their Singapore Noodles. But skillful masters of Cantonese roast have become elusive and expensive to engage. Most tai chow today have stopped selling roast meats. Sang Kee and Sek Yuan now buy their char siew instead.

If you recall, dai pai dong at Chin Choo Pa Sat also produced char siew and put it in their Singapore Noodles. These stalls were selling the dish at about the same time when the KL version is said to be invented. It seems that the dai pai dong in Singapore, and tai chow in KL, were somehow aware of or even influencing one another, and as a result, both cities had the same dish by the same name.

The Ketchup Twist

Although they are similar, there is one differentiating ingredient between the noodles in both cities. The Singapore Noodles in KL contains tomato ketchup. According to Sek Yuan, ketchup is essential to a tai chow kitchen and was particularly popular in the 70s. It can be found in several dishes such as ketchup prawns ee-fu noodles.

But the original seasoning for Singapore Noodles was actually Worcestershire sauce, and Sang Kee still sticks to tradition. The owner, Mr Lee, told me that most tai chow were still using the sauce for Singapore Noodles up till the 1960s, but they later switched to tomato ketchup because it was cheaper. Maybe, also because it was becoming popular.

Is Ketchup in Singapore Noodles a Cantonese Idea?

Before we move on to the next city, I want to make a speculation: that is tomato ketchup and Worcestershire sauce are also a Cantonese influence in Singapore Noodles. While there were British in Malaya during colonial times, and they would have created local demand and access to these condiments, I think two different food cultures like the British and Chinese will have to have an extensive dialogue to converge. At the end of this talk, I will discuss the influence of Hong Kong’s modern Cantonese cuisine around the mid-century. Some of its hybrid dishes could give us a clue. But hold that thought for now. We will first examine the Singapore Noodles in Hong Kong.

Sold in Hong Kong’s Cha Chaan Teng

If you go to a cha chaan tng, you will find Singapore Noodles in their menu. This connection goes back to the 1950s, when cha chaan teng emerged to offer affordable foreign-style cuisine. Western food and Southeast Asian fare were becoming popular with the rising middle class, because they considered them modern and cosmopolitan.

The Foreign-Style Dishes

They consumed French toast, Russian borscht, Xiamen Noodles (left) and Singapore Noodles (right) to display their social status, and differentiate themselves from those who couldn’t afford the same. These food symbols didn’t come cheap. 星洲炒米cost $1 in the 1950s. That was three times more than the price of wanton noodle, a common local street food.

The ingredients in Hong Kong’s Singapore Noodles is almost identical to the ones in KL and Singapore. Some cha chaan tng may replace char siew with ham that they also use in their breakfast service, but that’s only because they want to keep their inventory small. That aside, I think it’s safe to say that Singapore Noodles in the three locations are the same dish.

The Curious Curry

The only distinguishing element in Hong Kong’s rendition is curry powder, which gives the noodles a turmeric yellow hue. This isn’t a surprise because Hong Kong has a love affair with curry. Curry beef brisket, curry fish balls, curry pork chop are just some of the many curry dishes popular in Hong Kong. Singapore Noodles could be part of the same trend that gave rise to these dishes.

Several authors and academics attribute the Singapore Noodles in Hong Kong to the Southeast Asians who migrated there in the 1940s and 50s. Some of these immigrants set up restaurants selling Nanyang cuisine, and that included Singapore Noodles. There’s little information about what the dish was like, and whether it contained ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. But I am certain that the curry version came about only later, in Hong Kong, since it is unheard of in Singapore and KL.

Why does the West only know of HK’s Singapore Noodles?

We already know that Hong Kong’s Singapore Noodles is the only version that became popular in the West. Why and how did that happen?

Immigration was the first thing that come to mind. When I was studying in the US, I learned that many Chinese Americans came from Hong Kong, but the bulk of them were actually born in mainland China. Hong Kong, for some reason, became a stopover for these immigrants. That reason, was communism.

Communist Effect on Singapore Noodles

After the Chinese Civil War and the victory of the communist party in 1949, millions of mainland Chinese escaped to Hong Kong. The subsequent famine continued to drive a steady flow of Chinese to the British colony between the 50s and 60s. Why Hong Kong? Because immigration was restricted by China. Other than Hong Kong, the Chinese in China could only migrate to Socialist countries such as the Soviet Union.

On top of that, few places were open to Chinese immigrants. The US, Canada and Australia had policies specifically to keep Asians out. The UK was relatively welcoming, but only to those born in British territories. In the mid 1960s, things began to change. US, Canada and Australia revised their immigration regulations and removed the entry quota for Chinese. Finally, those who had escaped to Hong Kong could move on the west. These immigrants, with some knowledge of the food in Hong Kong, would introduce Singapore Noodles to their new home.   

In NYC, Singapore Noodles was reproduced…

My research on the journey of Singapore Noodles, from East to West, is largely based on New York City. The dish is as well known to the white Americans as it is to the local Chinese. This means that the noodle was reproduced in professional rather than just domestic kitchens.

The immigrants who left Hong Kong for the Big Apple were likely to work in a restaurant or laundromat. This was a ripple effect of the discriminatory laws against the Chinese that started from the previous century. Basically, there were no employment opportunities for them, except for cooking and washing, the only jobs that the white men didn’t want for themselves, because they thought these were too feminine. Although the economic restrictions on the Chinese had eased by the 1960s, the immigrants who arrived after still turned to the restaurant business.

Why? If you’re beginning a new life in somewhere new, you will probably seek advice from people who were there before you. What else but the restaurant or laundry business could their predecessors teach them? Most importantly, waiting tables didn’t require good English. If they work in the kitchen, they didn’t need to speak at all.

Chinese = Cantonese-Style

When the Chinese set up restaurants in Manhattan they didn’t sell just any food. They served Cantonese-style dishes. This started with the earlier immigrants who took inspiration from the Cantonese cuisine of Guangzhou, and then tweaked it to suit the taste of the white Americans. These immigrants were actually Taishanese, also from the Guangdong province further down here, but their traditional diet was peasant food that would not appeal to any paying customer. So instead, they copied Cantonese food and localised it. This formula became such a success that it was replicated by the immigrants who arrived later. That is why the Chinese American restaurants in Manhattan today are mostly Cantonese-style.

Singapore Noodles in Manhattan

These restaurants would introduce Singapore Noodles to the New Yorkers. One explanation is that the post-1960s immigrants from Hong Kong put it in their menu, and it caught on. This will explain why the Singapore Noodles in Manhattan are curried. The ingredients, however, vary depending on the restaurant’s inventory. I’ve not seen one that comes with char siew. It’s usually bits of stir-fried pork or chicken. Vegetables that white people favour, like broccoli and capsicum, are common here.

While Instagram suggests that Singapore Noodles is only popular with the Caucasians, it had actually been a regular diet of the local Chinese. Chris Cheung, a well-known chef in NYC, told me it was popular with the community in the 80s. He used to have the noodles with dim sum, because it was cheap and filling. Chris also confirmed that his favourite restaurants were owned by immigrants who came to New York by route (root) of Hong Kong.

Even if not from HK

There’s another explanation to the widespread presence of Singapore Noodles in Chinese American restaurants. This is Great NY Noodletown. People on Yelp think that it has the best Singapore Noodles in Manhattan. One of its owners, Stephen, came from Hong Kong in the 70s, but the restaurant was opened earlier, in 1964, by his partner who came directly from China. By the time Stephen joined the business, it was already serving Singapore Noodles, Hong Kong-style. I asked Stephen what made his partner put it in the menu if he had no personal memories of it. Stephen said, and I quote, “When open a Cantonese restaurant, everyone will follow Hong Kong style.”

Rise of HK’s Cantonese Cuisine

I thought Stephen was being boastful, but he was right. After 1950, Hong Kong was the leader of Cantonese culinary artistry, and its take on the cuisine was an inspiration for Cantonese restaurants everywhere. It began in the early 20^th century, when political upheaval in China drove renown chefs and restaurant owners from Guangzhou to the British colony. The subsequent famine in the 1950s, cultural revolution between the 60s and 70s, brought culinary in-deavours in the mainland to a halt. While Cantonese cuisine in Guangzhou slipped into decline, Hong Kong took it to new levels.

This could explain why Great NY Noodletown, and other Chinese American restaurants, would take ideas from Hong Kong even if they had no prior relationship with the place. While Singapore Noodles does not fall into the category of modern Cantonese cuisine that Hong Kong was becoming known for, I don’t think the businesses were sticklers for authenticity. Over time, Singapore Noodles, prepared Hong Kong style, became a staple in Chinese American restaurants across New York City.

The massive number of Chinese migrants passing through Hong Kong to a better life, coupled with its culinary influence, helped propelled Singapore Noodles to global fame. But the further it travels and the more it transforms to suit local taste, the more its Cantonese roots became lost on the people who appreciate it today. This is why Singapore Noodles is many things: vegetarian, pescatarian, even fancy with a steak. The fuzzier its origins, the more people could make it their own without being accused of inauthenticity or appropriation.

Is Ketchup in Singapore Noodles a Cantonese Idea?

Before I end, I want to quickly go back to the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce in KL. I said they could be Cantonese-influenced, and that’s because the new Cantonese cuisine developed in Hong Kong consisted of these sauces. After 1900, the Chinese elites in the British colony developed a taste for Western flavours, which had been exclusive to the Europeans in the previous century. In modernising Cantonese cuisine that was fit for the new rich, the chefs in Hong Kong incorporated western ingredients, giving rise to hybrid dishes such as ketchup-flavoured sweet and sour pork and ngao yuk, steamed beef balls topped with Worcestershire.

This was the kind of Cantonese cooking that became a model for Cantonese chefs in Southeast Asia. I know that the two surviving Heavenly Kings of Singapore, Mr Hooi and Sin Leong, regularly use tomato ketchup, Worcestershire and HP sauce in their cooking for dishes such as fried garoupa and chilli crab. They told me that they were introduced to these sauces by their mentor from Hong Kong during the 1950s. I suspect that the tai chow in KL have also been influenced by Hong Kong, and that is why the same sauces are so well integrated into their food repertoire.

What can Singapore Noodles tell us

• We are more connected to the “outsiders” than we think we are. Because food travels with people, and people learn from one another all the time, we share many aspects of our culinary cultures with other ethnicities and nationalities. Because of that, using food to express an identity, that is, drawing the line between “us” and “them”, is often problematic.

• We saw many variations of Singapore Noodles. The dish is not bounded by ownerships or definitions, and has been adapted by many people. It is, today, as relevant and personal to the vegans in the US as it is to the working class in Hong Kong. Singapore Noodles may seem like a cultural orphan, but it has a place everywhere it goes. We can’t say the same for dishes that are burdened with identities and symbolisms, therefore off limits to interpretations.

My Journey Continues

There’s a lot more that I need to find out:

• How Worcestershire and ketchup ended up in KL’s Singapore Noodles
• What type of curry powder was first used in HK’s. It could be Indian, British or Chinese, and each will tell a different story about the people producing or consuming Singapore Noodles at the time. 
• I recently learned that in Estonia and places around like Latvia there is a group of Indian and Nepali immigrants selling Singapore Noodles at their Asian restaurants. This is Prem Karki, a Nepali who has worked in a restaurant in Delhi and now runs his own business in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. His Singapore Noodles also contains curry, but uses pad thai noodles. Prem told me learned to cook that in India. There seems to be a whole different immigrant story in another part of the world and I hope to investigate that.  

THANK YOU.

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.

Singapore Noodles is widely available in Hong Kong. It is also the only Asian city where the noodles is flavoured with curry powder. This means it could be where the curried Singapore Noodles in the UK, US and other western countries originated. I visited Hong Kong in May this year and spoke to few people to learn about the city’s Singapore Noodles. They were Veronica Mak, an adjunct assistant professor at the anthropology department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Vivien Chan, visiting Scholar at Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences; Mr Kwan, third generation owner of Mido Cafe; and Lan Chun Chung, owner of Lan Fong Yuen (he does not sell Singapore noodles, but has some knowledge of the dish). I summarised the key points about Singapore Noodles there:

Used to be Expensive

Singapore Noodles was available in Hong Kong by the 1940s, when it cost around $1 until at least the 1960s. Wanton mee, a quintessential Hong Kong dish, was only 30 cents during the same period.

Sold in Restaurant or Cafés

It wasn’t a street food like Malaysia or Singapore, but was sold at brick and mortar restaurants and western-influenced cafes that later became known as “cha chaan tng”. When Mido Cafe opened in 1950, it offered an international menu that included French toasts and Singapore Noodles. The latter was priced at $1. Three of the four interviewees, including Kwan, pointed out the Singapore Noodles was often sold alongside beef chow fun (干炒牛河), whether it was in the restaurants or Mido Cafe. This connection could be worth investigating.

While some dai pai dong today produce Singapore Noodles, it came about only in the recent decades. These street stalls go back to the post-war years when it was set up by people struggling to make ends meet. The British government subsequently licensed them according to food categories: congee and cheong fun, sandwich and tea, noodles, tong shui, and one-dish meals. Each dai pai dong could only sell food from one of the categories. While there were noodle stalls, the early hawkers could not have produced Singapore Noodles as the dai pai dong in those days were very short of space and simple in set-up. Roasting char siew would be impossible. Besides, made-to-order dishes, which is what Singapore Noodles is, were uncommon among dai pai dong until the 1970s. That is to say that Singapore Noodles in Hong Kong has a longer history with cha chaan tng than dai pai dong.

Ingredients

Singapore Noodles in Hong Kong are almost identical with the ones in Southeast Asia. Like KL’s, Hong Kong’s Singapore Noodles comprises real char siew, along with egg, prawns, bean sprouts, red chillies, spring onions, chives and onions. A cha chaan tng that doesn’t stock char siew would use ham instead. Kwan from Mido heard that eggs were added because the Cantonese cooks believed it would prevent the rice vermicelli from clumping together.

Curry

The key ingredient in Hong Kong’s Singapore Noodles. While many cha chaan tng buy pre-mixed curry powder from their supplier, Mido makes theirs from scratch, starting from whole spices. The cafe grinds them while aromatics like onions and shallots, and then fries the paste until fragrant — much like how we cook our rempah in this part of the world. Mido does not add coconut milk because it spoils quickly, but uses broth. Their Singapore Noodles reminded me of Tsui Wah’s curry brisket. Both curries are distinctive and unlike any (Malay, Indian or Chinese-style) curries that I’ve tasted. It also reminded me of five spice powder, and I’m guessing they used a lot of cinnamon powder. Kwan said Hong Kong’s curries tend be sweeter, but was reluctant to elaborate. The scholars I interviewed haven’t done any research on Hong Kong’s curries, but Veronica noted that there were already Indians selling curries in Central by the 1960s. I’m interested to find out if they or the immigrants from Nanyang played any role in popularising curry in Hong Kong.

Nanyang immigrants in Hong Kong

After the communist party ruled China in 1949, it called on the overseas Chinese to return home. According to Veronica, many in Nanyang responded accordingly but later regretted their decision. By the 1950s, some of these immigrants moved again but this time to Hong Kong, to which they introduced Nanyang dishes via their eateries and restaurants. I need to speak with these people to find out if they have anything to do with Singapore Noodles.

Xiamen Noodles

Also widely available in cha chaa tng, this dish is exactly the same as Singapore Noodles except that it contains a sweet and sour sauce instead of curry powder. Cha chaan tng named several dishes after cities around the world to emphasise a cosmopolitan menu, so the dish may not have anything to do with Xiamen after all. Mido Cafe has this dish since 1950 so I guess it may have an intertwining history with Singapore Noodles.

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.

Useful kitchen tools stand the test of time and new technologies. The wok is one of them.

The concaved and round-bottom utensil was designed for fast cooking as China was always short of fuel (Wilson 83). Its metal body conducts heat quickly, while its sloping sides provide a large cooking surface, producing maximum tastes with minimum fuel. The wok also sits securely atop the traditional Chinese stove, a brick- or clay-made open cylinder, but it is not always left to its own devices (Tan 8). A skillful cook likes to give it a jerk in circular motion to cook the food even faster and more evenly. Chinese dishes are by no coincidence pre-cut into fast-to-cook morsels but are designed so for the fuel-poor but food-loving Chinese (Wilson 54-55).

Before small apartments and tiny kitchens, an outdoor wok station was the standard feature in Singaporean houses (Tan and Van 36). Today, the space to wield one’s ladle may have shrunk, but the wok continues to be used in households as well as businesses, because it is versatile enough to stir-fry, deep-fry, braise, stew and steam. As some of these methods transcend tastes and cultures, so has the wok.

The most common use of the wok is stir-frying. Char kway teow and sambal kangkong are examples of local foods produced by this technique. To prevent the ingredients from clumping together or losing contact with the heat, constant stirring and spreading of the food around the wok is essential. Even a clumsy cook can pull this off as the high sloping sides will help bring the food back to the centre, not over the edge. Ingenious hawkers even make use of the heat difference in the wok to standby a few portions by the sides, while they finish up an order in the hottest centre.

To the Cantonese, a stir-fry without wok hei is like sambal without the sting. Wok hei is best understood as the breath of a wok – when the wok breathes energy into the food, giving it a concentrated flavour and aroma. It takes a well-seasoned wok and intense heat to create this prized essence. The wok’s concave shape also helps keep the hot air in, creating a harmony of taste across the ingredients (Young 26). While traditionally a Cantonese concept, wok hei is now coveted by discerning customers of other Chinese dialects, and a pursuit by hawkers and chefs of any cuisine.

A wok becomes useful for deep-frying when filled with enough oil. Compared to a flat-bottom pan, a wok requires lesser oil because its curvature creates depth. The wok maintains a high steady temperature, so that moisture stays in but oil stays out of the crispy batter of goreng pisang or chicken wings. The implement’s high sloping sides are much appreciated for minimising splatters on the stove and countertop.

With good enough depth to swim a fowl, the wok is also handy for bigger projects like a braised whole duck. This Teochew dish is less than ideal without the bursting flavours of stir-fried aromatics. One may start off with that in a wok, adding liquid and duck later, thus, avoid scrubbing several pots for just one dish (Tan and Van 142).

Switch gravy for water and the wok becomes a perfect steam room. Simply use two chopsticks to make a rack, place them above the water level and sit the plate on top. Complementary to this set up is a dome-shaped cover that ensures condensed vapour trickles down the sides into the wok rather than dripping into the food and diluting its flavour (Tan 8).

The wok has a following outside the Chinese communities too. It has been used by the Malays and Peranakans to cook sambal goreng, begedil and serundeng, while the Indians turn it upside down to efficiently sear chapati, an Indian flatbread. So widely used is the wok that each of these communities has developed its own method of seasoning this tool by applying a layer of protective coating. This is to prevent the wok – usually made of cast iron for better heat retention, or carbon steel for quicker response to heat changes – from rusting and food from sticking on it (Tan and Van 36).  The older generation of Chinese cooks like to fry a kilogram of pork fat and leave the rendered lard in the wok for days. A Malay makcik heats up coconut oil with her wok, while her Peranakan counterpart stresses on frying a bunch of pandan leaves first, adding the oil only later (Tan 8). Most cookbooks today advise just having a thin layer of vegetable oil inside the wok, and then heating it over the stove until the oil carbonises to form a layer of seasoning (Tan and Van 36; Gritzer). Repeating this process a few times will create a pitch black, well-seasoned wok – the pre-requisite for creating wok hei.

Today, the wok has many new versions: the flat-bottomed wok for electric stoves, the stainless steel wok for induction cooking, and the automated wok for productivity in commercial kitchens (Lee). However, none are as multifunctional as the traditional round-bottomed wok, which is why it still claims a place in the Singaporean kitchen.

Works Cited

Lee, Yen Nee. “Your Fried Rice’s Ready, Chef.” Today, 7 Dec 2013, https://www.todayonline.com/business/your-fried-rices-ready-chef. Accessed 4 Feb 2018.

Gritzer, Daniel. “How to Season a Cast-Iron Pan.” SeriousEats, http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/09/how-to-season-cast-iron-pans-skillets-cookware.html. Accessed 4 Feb 2018.

Tan, Christopher, and Van, Amy. Chinese Heritage Cooking. Marshall Cavendish International, 2012.

Tan, Lee Leng. “The Whys of Hys of Wok Cooking.” The Straits Times, 6 Sep 1980, p.8.

Wilson, Bee. Consider the Fork. Basic Books, 2012.

Young, Grace. “Wok Hay: The Breath of A Wok.” Gastronomica, Summer 2004, pp. 26-30.

(Left to right) Singapore Noodles in ketchup, Worcestershire and curry powder.

Singapore Noodles is replete with ironies. It is elusive in the city that it is named after, but a common staple in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. In any of these places, the dish is prepared by the local Cantonese communities, using sauces that are essentially British inventions – either ketchup, Worcestershire sauce or curry powder. I wonder if a common past among these former British colonies helped shaped Singapore Noodles into the three varieties there are. This story attempts to answer this by tracing the temporal and spatial journeys of tomato ketchup, from 18th century England to 20th century British Malaya, where the ketchup-flavoured Singapore Noodles found popularity and is still so today.

I begin by investigating how the Western condiment became a key ingredient for Chinese cuisines in Singapore and Malaysia during the colonial times. This is followed by a case study of chilli crab, a national dish of post-independence Singapore. Like the Kuala Lumpur-style Singapore Noodles, chilli crab comprises the unexpected ketchup and begs the question of how a foreign condiment came to be an essential component of a local invention. But unlike the uncertainties surrounding the noodles, at least one of the pioneers of chilli crab has been identified and is available for interview. Since the two dishes were created in similar space and time, a case study of chilli crab may be extrapolated to understand how ketchup Singapore Noodles came about.

This investigation about ketchup’s journey, from bangers to noodles, illuminates the mobility of foodways to traverse between the global and the local. Ketchup remained “English” for only as long as it took to commercialise and export it worldwide. The product then became divorced from its roots and turned into a crucial element in the Cantonese cuisine of Hong Kong. Singapore Noodles, similarly produced against the backdrop of global migrations and free trade, appears to have emerged from the dialogue of foodways that are crossing in and out of national and cultural boundaries.

Ketchup: A Local Flavour Turned Global Product

Ketchup was originally a fish sauce produced by the Chinese community in 17^th century Northern Vietnam. Its name derived from ke-tsiap in the Amoy dialect, meaning “the brine of pickled fish”. British explorers discovered it and introduced it back home. As few in England had tasted the fish sauce, British cooks and writers took great liberty to reinterpret it for their own taste, thus creating many varieties. Up till the 18^th century, ketchup referred not to a single, well-defined condiment but a category of many.

The first known English-language ketchup recipe was published in 1727. It resembled a fish sauce, with ingredients such as anchovies, shallots and vinegar, as well as spices including cloves, pepper and mace. These spices were not originally used in the Chinese fish sauce, but they were aplenty for the British via the spice trade. Soon, varieties like walnut and mushroom ketchups emerged. They became popular for gravies and stews, to which they bequeathed zest, colour and flavour. Throughout this century, ketchups were not highly differentiated and were often combined to make an “English Catchup”, which gave rise to Worcestershire sauce.

Ketchup took on a different spin in British America, after word about the savoury condiment spread to the English-speaking colonies via British cookbooks. Like their colonisers, the British Americans did not adopt a foreign food wholesale. In 1812, a Philadelphia scientist published the first known tomato ketchup recipe which involved unstrained tomato pulp and spices. More recipes for the tomato sauce were subsequently published, until it became the predominant ketchup in the US.

Photo courtesy of Francois de Halleux via Flickr.

The earliest commercial tomato ketchup in America were based on homemade recipes. Domestic-produced ketchup subsequently became an anomaly, after the condiment became increasingly affordable to buy. H.J. Heinz Company from Pennsylvania was one the most successful tomato ketchup manufacturers of the time. The company edged out several others to become the largest producer and, shortly after the turn of the 20^th century, the biggest exporter to the Asian markets such as China, Japan and Singapore – where the Western powers owned treaty ports or had colonised.

The tomato ketchup that Heinz produced, and that we know today, is thick and dense, vinegary but also sweet. This came about only in the mid-1800s when larger quantities of sugar were added to ketchups in response to the trend of sweeter flavours in American cooking. As a result, more vinegar was added to ketchups to retain a sweet and sour balance – quite remote from the tangy fermented condiment that it started out as.

The new flavour profile of tomato ketchup coincides with that of Cantonese cuisine, the diet of the people in Canton as well as those who migrated to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The Cantonese immigrants, I recently found out, were the earliest purveyors of Singapore Noodles whether in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore or the US. This warrants a study of their cuisine and its relationship with tomato ketchup, so I turn my attention to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong was the mecca of Cantonese cuisine around the mid-20^th century. Its Western-influenced Cantonese cuisine was looked upon by chefs in Singapore and Malaya as the standard par excellence for modern Cantonese cooking. While the large number of European residents in this region helped exposed the locals to imported tomato ketchup, the frequent usage of this condiment in local Chinese cuisines may have more to do with Hong Kong’s culinary influence.

Hong Kong: The Rise of Ketchup-Flavored Cantonese Fare

Hong Kong, once a British colony, has been a major node for people, goods and cultures for over a hundred years. Up till 1900, however, its Chinese and European residents lived in different worlds, as the two races were separated in business, residence and entertainment, by design of the colonisers to emphasise ethnic distinction and hierarchy. The separation also prevented the Chinese from having access to Western foodstuffs, or eating at restaurants located within the European districts.

Things began to change after 1900, as Chinese merchants took over the failing businesses of the Europeans and established trade with China. New economic opportunities afforded these merchants wealth and material access to Western foodstuffs that were previously reserved for the Europeans. Western-style restaurants catering to the new elites were also established, gradually blurring ethnic boundaries.

Meanwhile in China, wars and political upheavals throughout the first half of the 20^th century drove new waves Cantonese immigrants from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. The restaurateurs and renown chefs among them started food businesses and laid the foundation of Cantonese cuisine in the colony. But their food did not stay the way they were in China. Instead, they converged with Western foodways that the Chinese elites in Hong Kong now had access to.

Two types of hybrid dishes were produced: Western fare with Chinese influences and Cantonese dishes comprising Western elements. The former consists of steak marinated in soy sauce, while the latter include ketchup-flavoured sweet and sour pork and Worcestershire-marinated steamed beef balls (ngao yuk kau). It was the second type of hybrids that would later be emulated by Cantonese chefs everywhere.

The significance of such dishes is both race and class. In Hong Kong during the 1800s, race determined power and influence. The ethnic Chinese, regardless of their affluence, were considered second class residents. “Sih yuah sai chaan” or “soy sauce Western food” could be read as an attempt to disrupt the imagined superiority of the Europeans and their foodways, which the Chinese had been deemed unworthy of. The other type of hybrids, between Cantonese dishes and Western condiments, also contested the existing social hierarchy – although incorporating Western foodstuffs to command respect for Cantonese cuisine risk reinforcing Western “superiority”.

Colonial supremacy did eventually erode after the British’s defeat in World War II. This catalysed Hong Kong’s culinary amalgamations throughout the post-war industrial boom. Hybrid dishes became the mainstay of its food scene, as the new leisure class grew more aware of foreign foods and considered them a symbol of modernity. Over time, Hong Kong replaced Guangzhou as the centre of Cantonese culinary artistry. Following the communist rule in 1949, the Great Famine in the 1950s and Cultural Revolution between the 1960s and 1970s, Cantonese cuisine in the mainland slipped into decline, thus making way for Hong Kong’s hybrid variation to be the model for Cantonese chefs far and wide, including those in Malaya and Singapore.

Before moving on to chilli crab, I must highlight that it was hardly new to combine Western and Chinese foodways when Hong Kong did it in the 1900s. Chefs in mainland China were already doing so by the previous century, and might have even contributed to the development of Hong Kong’s hybrid dishes. If this is true, the history of globalisation and localisation that cumulated into chilli crab in Singapore is more extensive than it first appears.

After the end of the Opium War in 1842, the British established a treaty port in Canton. The growing number of foreign merchants in Guangzhou spurred an emergence of European fare in the city, as well as the local interpretations of these cuisines to suit the Chinese palate. Meanwhile in Shanghai, which had been divided into several foreign concessions, local cooks became well-versed in European and American cuisines. These mainland Chinese with prior knowledge in Western foodways were among those who migrated to Hong Kong in the 20^th century. They are possibly the source of inspiration for Hong Kong’s hybrid dishes, or even the very people who created them.

Moreover, China was one of the first countries to which Heinz exported its tomato ketchup by 1907. I have no information on their regional destinations, but a reasonable guess would be the port cities that had been ceded to Western powers, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai. If there was indeed a transfer of foodways from Guangzhou to Hong Kong via immigration, then it could very likely encompass the Cantonese application of tomato ketchup.

Chilli Crab: Ketchup’s Place in Chinese Food of Singapore

Tomato ketchup has a wide presence in the food that Singaporeans eat today. Home cooks and chefs don’t bat an eyelid when they mix the condiment with Chinese soy sauce or sambal, a Southeast Asian chilli paste. Local dishes using tomato ketchup include fried garoupa, mee goreng and the world-famous chilli crab. This section examines chilli crab and the extent of Hong Kong’s influence on the dish. A substantial number of Cantonese immigrants in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur became cooks to make a living. Singapore Noodles is believed to be created by one such cook in Kuala Lumpur around the mid-20^th century, a time when Hong Kong’s Cantonese cuisine began to gain clout. How tomato ketchup became an essential component of chilli crab may tell us the same about its journey into the Kuala Lumpur-style Singapore Noodles.

The origins of chilli crab are well reported. There are at least two creators who did so separately. One of them is Cher Yam Tian, who is the founder of the now-defunct Palm Beach Seafood that was in business from the 1950s to 1980s. Her version of the chilli crab when she invented it in the 1950s comprises tomato ketchup and chillies, not quite the same as the rendition consisting of sambal and egg white that Singaporeans today are familiar with. This other version was invented by local culinary legend Hooi Kok Wai, who was apprenticed to a masterchef from Hong Kong in the 1950s. I focused my investigation on Hooi and his chilli crab since it closely resembles what is eaten today, and because the chef has a relevant culinary background.

Chef Hooi he is not, but the chilli crab is on point. Photo courtesy of Bob Walker via Flickr.

Ketchup-flavoured cuisine was introduced to Singapore around the 1950s, after hotels in Singapore began hiring chefs from Hong Kong. Among them was the Cathay Hotel, whose Cantonese–Shanghainese restaurant was the finest in town during the mid-century. Chef Luo from Hong Kong took the helm and recruited four apprentices – Hooi, Sin Leong, Thum Yew Kai and Lau Yoke Pui. A couple of decades later, the four men would make a name for themselves and be crowned the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Singapore’s culinary scene.

In April 2018, I approached the 81-year-old Hooi and 91-year-old Sin (Thum and Lau have passed on) at their Chin Swee Road dim sum restaurant, Red Star. The chefs were serendipitously having pork cutlets in a ketchup sauce comprising green peas and button mushrooms for lunch, as if inviting me to cut to the heart of the matter. “How come there’s tomato ketchup in what you cook?” I asked.

Tomato ketchup, the chefs replied, is one of the several Western condiments, such as Worcestershire and HP sauce, that they use. These were introduced to them by Luo when they were apprenticing at Cathay. The condiments were often mixed together, said Sin, to make gravies or sauces for plenty of dishes, including sweet and sour pork, fried garoupa and ketchup prawns (har lok). Sin does not recall seeing Western condiments in local Cantonese dishes before the 1950s. If his memory served him well, it diminishes the likelihood of a direct transfer of hybrid Western-Cantonese cooking from Guangzhou to Singapore by the earlier Cantonese immigrants.

Chef Hooi Kok Wai in 2013. Photo courtesy of Tiantianchi.

Chef Sin Leong in 2013. Photo courtesy of Tiantianchi.

It is not hard to imagine why Cantonese cooks newly introduced to Hong Kong’s culinary ideas were open to adding tomato ketchup into their traditional diet. The condiment emulates the classic sweet and sour flavours of Cantonese cuisine. Before tomato ketchup was available, said Hooi, people in Canton often mixed rice vinegar with sugar to produce that flavour combination. I have also heard of fruits like hawthorn and plum being used in the past. Since the “Heavenly Kings” were trained to cook Hong Kong style, they turned to tomato ketchup as much as they did to soy sauce.

While the chefs picked up the Cantonese application of Western condiments, they inherited none of the symbolic baggage that the condiments carried in the early 20^th century Hong Kong. Instead, Sin likes using the condiments simply because of their tastes, and considers tomato ketchup a “改良” or “an improvement” to the traditional mixture of vinegar and sugar. I don’t speak enough Cantonese to have him explain why, but some facts about these condiments will: Tomato ketchup is rich in umami. This intense savoury taste comes from the tomatoes, which adds body to gravies and make them more enjoyable. Umami is not found in vinegar or sugar, but Cantonese chefs have continued to use to them with ketchup to take its sweet and sour flavours up a notch. Together, the condiments refresh the palate and sustain one’s appetite for oily food.

In Season 3 of Japanese anime Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, tomato ketchup is employed as a secret ingredient for the main character’s “gyoza wings”.

The uncanny marriage between tomato ketchup and Chinese cuisines is not lost on popular culture. This anime is spot on about the role that ketchup plays.

Convinced of tomato ketchup’s flavour enhancing quality, the “Heavenly Kings’” inclination for the condiment exceeded their employment with Cathay, which ended in the 1960s. Even as they sought creative breakthroughs outside of their Cantonese training, tomato ketchup was pivotal to their new creations, such as Hooi’s chilli crab.

Up till the 1940s, there were limited styles of crab dishes eaten by the Cantonese community. Crabs were either steamed with ginger and scallion, or with fermented black beans, said Hooi. But by the 1950s, he observed a desire for more robust flavours, as customers at Pearl’s Market – a Cantonese enclave where People’s Park Complex is today – started dipping steamed crab into a garlic chilli sauce “quite like the one for chicken rice”. Meanwhile, a dish of crabs stir-fried with tomato ketchup was also gaining popularity at the market.

These inspired Hooi to create a crab dish that delivered both flavours. In 1963, he concocted a fiery sambal with chillies, garlic, shallots, dried shrimps, belacan, and made it more amicable with the sweet and vinegary tomato ketchup. He also added an aromatic ginger flower native to Southeast Asia, and finished the sauce in classic Cantonese style: After stir-frying steamed crabs with the sambal sauce, he drizzled egg white for a silkier mouthfeel, a technique known as “wat dan”.

The chilli crab was born. It is a sweet – and spicy – balance between Hooi’s Cantonese roots and Southeast Asian sensibilities. By the 1950s, Hooi told me, Cantonese in Singapore had adapted to the native flavours, veering away from the taste preference of their counterparts in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. To resolve the gap between their ancestral and adopted cultures, Hooi and his colleagues often took ideas from Indonesia and Malaysia to put a local spin on their heritage cuisine. One may, therefore, regard chilli crab as a palatable reconciliation between the Cantonese and Malayan identities that Hooi and many other immigrants had to juggle.

I believe tomato ketchup became a flavouring for Singapore Noodles under similar conditions. Cantonese-run tai chows were the earliest businesses that sold Singapore Noodles in Kuala Lumpur. Recalling Hong Kong’s culinary clout at that time, it isn’t surprising if many of these businesses picked up the application of Western condiments from its hybrid dishes. These condiments then became essential to the Kuala Lumpur’s Cantonese kitchens, at first for the classics, but eventually to zest up new experiments too – like the oily, fried Singapore Noodles.

Asian Brands and Their Influence on Singapore’s Ketchup Use

Restaurants weren’t the only ones incorporating tomato ketchup into Chinese dishes. Hawkers at Pearl’s Market, as mentioned earlier, had been selling ketchup crabs by the 1950s. The affordability of imported foodstuffs after World War II encouraged the usage of tomato ketchup among Chinese hawkers who charged low prices. But the products that this community ended up purchasing weren’t necessarily the most well-known. The Chinese-language newspaper are the best indicators of the brands that hawkers would have used. It was the main source of information for the ethnic Chinese who tended to be proficient in Chinese or its dialects. The advertisements in or absent from the papers are, hence, telling of the products that were appealing to this particular group of consumers.

While American and European tomato ketchup were exported to Singapore in the early 1900s, the non-English speaking residents were not their target consumers until after the 1950s. Heinz, then the world’s largest tomato ketchup producer, consistently advertised in the English-language Straits Times during the first half of the 20^th century. However, its advertisements didn’t show up in the database of the Chinese-language Nanyang Siang Pau until 1956. At 40 cents a bottle in 1906, Heinz tomato ketchup was out of reach for the common folks (an apprentice clerk made $10/month while a rickshaw coolie made 50 cents a day in 1900). Up till the 1950s, imported food was a luxury available only to the Europeans and English-proficient local elites.

Even as the affordability of food imports improved in the post-war years, tomato ketchup manufacturers from the West were never as interested in the ethnic Chinese consumers as they were in the English-speaking elite. Heinz frequently promoted its tomato ketchup in The Straits Times up till the early 1960s, but it rarely put an ad in Nanyang Siang Pau even after the mid century. When it did advertise, the company contextualised its tomato ketchup within the realm of Western cuisines. Other brands such as HP and Alymer from the UK and Canada respectively, also invested their marketing dollar in the English paper.

Heinz’s advertisement in 1905.

Be it in 1939 (left) or 1953 (right), Heinz’s advertisement in The Straits Times maintains the visuals of Western dishes.

Except for some slight changes in facial features and hair colour, Heinz tomato ketchup was contextualised for Western cuisine in both their advertisements for The Straits Times (in 1953) and Nanyang Siang Pau (in 1956).

Tomato ketchups from Asia would have been preferred by the ethnic Chinese hawkers. Hong Kong- and Shanghai-manufactured tomato ketchup were available in Singapore as early as the 1930s. In 1938, Maling’s “tomato katsup” from Shanghai cost $3.60 for a box of two dozens, which works out to be 15 cents a bottle. Considering price inflation, this was a fraction of what Heinz would cost in the same period. The Asian brand is thus more likely to attract the average local Chinese and popularise its use within the community.

After the war, tomato ketchup became commonly used in Chinese households. Besides greater affordability, more printed recipes incorporating the condiment for Chinese dishes also spurred its domestic usage. Nanyang Siang Pau began publishing such recipes by the 1950s. Ketchup prawns (茄汁虾球) and fried chicken breast (番茄鸡) are just some of them. As these recipes were more attuned to the traditional Chinese diet compared to The Straits Time’s recipes for veal galatine and mushroom au gratin, they were more likely to convince home cooks to add tomato ketchup into their pantry.

Maling “tomato katsup” from Shanghai. Advertisement published in Nanyang Siang Pau in 1941.

My attempt on ketchup prawns, which includes ginger and soy sauce, the Chinese contributions to this dish.

By 1954, local food manufacturer Yeo Hiap Seng (known as Yeo’s today) introduced its own line of tomato ketchup, suggesting a healthy demand for the condiment. Considering also the advent of ketchup-flavoured Cantonese fare in the local restaurants, the mid-20^th century marked the turning point for tomato ketchup in Singapore. From a foreign import used largely in Western cuisines, it was becoming a standard flavour in local Chinese dishes.

Despite the strong influence of Hong Kong-style Cantonese cuisine, it did not singlehandedly introduce tomato ketchup to the Chinese in Singapore. When one thinks about Chinese-Western food in Singapore or Malaysia, the Hainanese comes to mind. Starting from the late 1800s, immigrants from Hainan worked as cook boys for the British Army as well as European households, from whom they learned Western cooking and ingredients like tomato ketchup.

But unlike the Cantonese in Hong Kong who produced two types of hybrid fares, the Hainanese in this region mostly produced Chinese-style Western dishes. Pork chop and chicken pies, which combine soy sauce with either Worcestershire or tomato ketchup, are some of their best-known interpretations of Western dishes. Between the 1930s and 1990s, the Hainanese dominated the coffee shop and coffee house businesses, through which they introduced western dishes and culinary techniques to the masses. The pork chop that I saw the “Heavenly Kings” eating resembled the Hainanese’s take on the dish. I am not surprised if it was indeed Hainanese-influenced, since Hooi and Sin have shown to be very willing to learn from the non-Cantonese.

But that does not discredit the Cantonese’s role in promoting the consumption of tomato ketchup among the Chinese in Singapore. By normalising the use of the condiment in a Chinese cuisine, it effected a more lasting appetite for tomato ketchup than Western and Hainanese-Western cuisines did.

The “Heavenly Kings'” ketchup pork chop.

The Global–Local Food Cultures

In today’s globalised economy, cities regard food cultures as capitals to assert their uniqueness and authenticity for economic advantages over one another. Through this method, Hong Kong and Singapore have successfully distinguished themselves as destinations for tourism and commerce. But sweet and sour pork and chilli crab, as this study has shown, are not as remote from one another as their advertisers have us believed. Their Cantonese roots and common use of tomato ketchup highlights that food more often blur than define the line between “us” and “them”.

This is different from claiming that globalisation has turned the world into one homogenous culture with the same taste for food. Tomato ketchup did not popularise Western diet in Hong Kong or Singapore. Instead, the condiment has been assimilated into the respective local cuisines to serve different purposes. While it is typically used in Cantonese dishes to achieve a sweet and sour flavour, it serves to balance the spicy sambal in chilli crab as well as mee goreng.

In fact, foodways can’t be successfully global without first becoming a local institution for people of different places and cultures. Had the imagination of tomato ketchup remained in the realm of French fries and barbeque ribs, it could not have been as well received in Asia as it is today. Likewise, if Cantonese cuisine hadn’t been adapted to suit the American palate, it would not be as popular and ubiquitous as it is now in the US.

Modern Cantonese cuisine, chilli crab and perhaps even Singapore Noodles, emerged from the globalisations and localisations of several foodways, facilitated by the movements of people and trade during European colonialism. This period produced many unexpected but delicious cross-cultural hybrids, which were eventually accepted into the “local” domain. The breaking down of spatial and cultural barriers do not destroy local cultures, but create future iterations of them. Chilli crab contains ingredients from multiple origins, yet it did not stop Singaporeans from identifying themselves with it today.

These concepts will lay the foundation of my upcoming investigations about tomato ketchup, Worcestershire and curry powder in Singapore Noodles. I believe these foreign condiments, all British inventions, found their way into the dish in the same way tomato ketchup became a logical companion to sambal belacan in the Singapore chilli crab.

References

General

1. The Future as Cultural Fact (Chapter 4 & 9)
2. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Introduction)

Ketchup

1. Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment
2. The Ketchup Conundrum, The New Yorker

Hong Kong

1. Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond (Chapter 10)
2. Eating Hong Kong’s Way Out (pp. 16–26) in Asian Food, the Global and the Local
3. Would a Dish by Another Name Taste as Good? Western Dishes in Cantonese Cooking (pp. 371–377). In Food and Language: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking 2009
4. China and Treaty-Port Imperialism
5. The Cultural Revolution: All You Need to Know About China’s Political Convulsion, The Guardian

Singapore

1. Interview with Hooi Kok Wai and Sin Leong in April 2018
2. Roland Restaurant, ieat ishoot ipost
3. Advertisements, The Straits Times
4. Advertisements, The Straits Times
5. Guang gao, Nanyang Siang Pau
6. Au gang suan la da wang liang cheng ji, Nanyang Siang Pau
7. Untitled, The Straits Times
8. Marie Cough on Food, The Straits Times
9. That Little Extra Something, The Straits Times
10. Qie zhi peng xiao xia, Nanyang Siang Pau
11. Jia ju mei shi, Nanyang Siang Pau
12. Yang xie cheng jiang you chang ju xing lian huan cha hui, Nanyang Siang Pau
13. Yang xie cheng jiang you guan tou, Nanyang Siang Pau
14. Hainanese Cooking, With Its Fusion of Chinese and Western, The Straits Times
15. Hainanese Community, Infopedia
16. Selling Dreams: Early Advertising in Singapore, National Library Board exhibition

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.

Pearl’s Market in 1964, from Zaobao.sg

Singapore Noodles or 星洲炒米 isn’t as prevalent as hor fun or economic bee hoon in Singapore today, so I’ve been wondering if this dish even has a local history. Turns out that it does.

Singapore Noodles was a common sight in Singapore’s Chinatown during the 1940s, according to Hooi Kok Wai, an 81-year-old Cantonese chef and one of the four “Heavenly Kings” of the local Chinese culinary scene in the 1960s and 1970s. He revealed this when I interviewed him about the role of tomato ketchup in Cantonese cuisine, which I took an interest in because the Singapore Noodles in Kuala Lumpur is flavoured with the sauce, and the earliest tai chow that offered this dish were mostly Cantonese-owned. I will elaborate on my ketchup findings in the next post. I also focused on the Cantonese community because a curried version of Singapore Noodles is widely available in Hong Kong, a Cantonese-majority city. The connection between the noodles and this dialect group was apparent, and Hooi just confirmed it.

The hawkers who sold Singapore Noodles in colonial Singapore were Cantonese, he said. They congregated at the now defunct Pearl’s Market, where today’s People’s Park Complex is. The market was tucked within the Cantonese enclave, and was operated and visited by people of that dialect. Back in those days, the Chinese lived, ate and worked with people of their own dialect group. While the Cantonese hung out around Temple Street, the Teochew, for example, set up home at Clarke Quay. The latter ate char kway teow at the Ellenborough Market (at today’s Clarke Quay Central), whereas the Cantonese swore by the “dai pai dong” at Pearl’s Market, where they devoured hor fun and Singapore Noodles.

These da pai dong, or open-air cooked food stalls, are similar to today’s zi char stalls in terms of price point and food varieties. They sold affordable meals to men on the street, and usually operated from evenings to the wee hours of the morning, said Hooi. Most da pai dong offered Singapore Noodles, and based on Hooi’s descriptions, they were very similar to the ones I had in Kuala Lumpur. Firstly, there were char siew, one of the hallmarks of Cantonese roast meats. Char siew was included in the repertoire, Hooi explained, because da pai dong also roasted meats for sale — the same reason why tai chow in Kuala Lumpur added char siew to their Singapore Noodles, although the stalls these days buy ready-made ones instead. Hooi rejected my suggestion that the roast meat in the noodles was a leftover. “It was intended for good taste,” he said in Mandarin.

Besides char siew, the other similarities with the KL-style Singapore Noodles are onions, bean sprouts, cut red chilli, scallions and eggs. But unlike most Singapore Noodles today where the eggs are scrambled directly into, Hooi recalled omelettes or “蛋皮” being prepared separately and then sliced into thin shreds. The shredded omelette went in last, after the noodles were stir-fried with the other ingredients. There was no tomato ketchup or curry powder, he said.

Malaysia-style Singapore Noodles.

Hooi did, however, recall seeing curried Singapore Noodles here in Singapore in the 1970s, but it was so rare that he believed it was an anomaly. Until I told him about Hong Kong’s Singapore Noodles, he didn’t know that his chance encounter was actually the standard elsewhere. By the 1970s, the curried version was already available in the American Chinese restaurant I interviewed, so I supposed it wasn’t invented in Singapore, or it wouldn’t be so unusual at the time when Hooi discovered it. What he saw could be copied from America or Hong Kong, where curried Singapore Noodles continues to be the norm today.

Curried Singapore Noodles from Great NY Noodletown in Manhattan.

Pearl’s Market was destroyed by fire in 1966 and most, if not all of its da pai dong have closed for good. Over the years, Singapore Noodles became more elusive in Singapore, even among the Cantonese-owned zi char stalls today. Some Chinese restaurants began to offer the dish as part of their set menus around the 1970s, Hooi said, but that did not help increase its popularity among the wider Singaporean Chinese. I have seen the dish in a 1987 advertisement for a Hungry Ghost Festival dinner menu, but that restaurant in Toa Payoh is no more. Today, Singapore Noodles is a surprise rather than a staple in the local Chinese restaurants.

After establishing this connection between Singapore Noodles and the Cantonese communities in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, there is more reason to zoom in on Cantonese cuisine and its influence on the dish. We already discussed char siew. I’m excited to move on to the less obvious — the tomato ketchup, a western condiment that somehow became a differentiating ingredient of the Malaysia-style Singapore Noodles. This investigation, which the “Heavenly Kings” also contributed to, will reveal how Singapore Noodles was an accumulation of centuries of culture exchanges, even before the dish found its place in the Chinese restaurants of every continent.

References
Interview with Hooi Kok Wai and Sin Leong on 17 April 2018
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_734_2005-01-24.html?s=chinatown
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_116_2004-12-14.html

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.

Bluder cake as shown in NerdBaker.

More than 50 years ago, a local Eurasian kitchen would get busy and greasy with the making of cakes and jellies for Christmas, days before the family would have a feast. One of these desserts was blueder, a rich, golden brown ring cake that was dense like a bread from the use of no less than 30 egg yolks. The cake originates from the Netherlands, and is enjoyed by people with Dutch colonial links, such as the Sri Lankan Burghers and the Malaccan Eurasians. They refer to their localised interpretations as breudher and kueh bluder respectively.

A bundt pan likely inspired their names. Both cakes are moulded into distinctive ring shapes with either straight or swirling ridges. “Breudher” and “bluder” sound like anglicised “brood-tulband”, which is how the Dutch refers to all ring cakes. “Brood-tulband” literally means bread-turban, because they associate the swirls on bundt cakes with the winding headwear.

Bundt cake. By Betsy Weber via Flickr.

Turban. By mukerjichinmoy via Flickr.

In Malacca, kueh bluder (pronounced blue-der) belonged to the Dutch-Eurasians but was enjoyed by many others. The Portuguese-Eurasians baked and ate the cake too, while the Peranakans learned from their Eurasian neighbours and passed it down along with their own recipes. After these communities moved south to Singapore in the late 1800s, blueder became one of the many mixed-heritage flavours in the multi-racial colony. But Singapore’s relentless development soon caught up with the cake, even before coronary heart disease could. The absence of a key ingredient, after the authorities decided its people didn’t need, forever changed bluder in Singapore.

Toddy is an alcoholic drink associated with the Tamils in Malaya, but it is also key to the making of kueh bluder and breudher. The drink became an ingredient probably during the Dutch rule in Ceylon between the 1600s and 1700s. Dutch ring cakes till today make no use of toddy, but the drink has long been a tipple for the common man in Ceylon, and is even used to leaven a local pancake there called kallappam. This method became central to the making of breudher in Sri Lanka and kueh bluder in Malacca, both born from the marriages of the colonists and their subjects in the respective cities. Today in Malacca, where there’s easy access to toddy, the Dutch-Eurasians taste the same bluder their grandmothers ate. But not for those who have moved south to Singapore.

Toddy comes from the sweet sap of coconut flower that blossoms in a tropical climate. The sap is “mild as mother’s milk” at first, but ferments into “a man’s drink” in the sun. It is the intoxicating beverage that has been tightly controlled in Singapore. In 1979, a dispute between the only remaining toddy contractor and his tappers spiralled out of proportion into a nationwide ban. Ever since the last toddy shops closed, people have not been able to buy the beverage in Singapore. Nor can kueh blueder be made with toddy again.

Published in The Straits Times in 1975.

Like kueh bluder, Singapore’s toddy story developed with colonialism. It was introduced by the British after they founded Singapore, just a few years following Ceylon’s surrender to the colonist. The British came to know of Ceylon’s toddy like the Dutch before them, but they did not acquire a taste for it. Instead, toddy-drinking became a unique habit of the Tamil coolies in Singapore’s rubber estates. Toddy shops were typically located near the coolie’s living quarters and they multiplied as the rubber industry thrived. In the 1930s, when rubber plantations occupied 40% of Singapore’s land area, there were over 30 government toddy shops and many more run by the estates.

In the early 1900s, toddy was a contentious subject frequently debated among the European planters. Those who called for toddy shops to close believed it would put an end to the unruly behaviours problematic for the estate managers. Many complained about “drunken coolies on the road” and their consequential deaths from pneumonia. Some coolies also fell ill from tampered toddy, prepared by toddy shop licensees pushing for more profits. These planters were not so much concerned about the coolies’ well being as they were about their investments in these human assets.

The proponents of toddy had similar practical interests but a different approach. They argued the need to ensure good quality toddy so that the coolies would not turn to more potent and harmful illicit alcohols. The estate-run toddy shops provided legitimate yet more affordable toddy that also helped discourage the workers from stealing rubber to barter for booze.

The pro-toddy arguments prevailed but the toddy shops would be strictly regulated to contain both toddy drinking and the drinkers. While whisky and brandy were sold at any bar or provision stall, toddy was only available at toddy shops, limiting the public spaces where Tamil coolies could enjoy this affordable pleasure. All toddy shops were licensed by the colonial government, as were the coconut plantations producing the alcohol. To contain public disturbance should it occur, patrons were required to consume within the toddy shops. Women and children, assumed to be most susceptible to disobedience through fault of their own or others, were not allowed in these premises.

As Singapore developed economically in the postwar period, toddy demand declined alongside the diminishing need for coolies. This trend continued post independence. Only four toddy shops remained in the 1970s and together they catered to a daily crowd of mere 300. The disappearing estates was a setback for the toddy industry, but the wider public—of growing affluence—wasn’t embracing the stigmatised beverage either. Even though the beverage hardly posed the same risk to society, tough regulations were inherited from the British and imposed by the new government of Singapore.

Toddy was prohibited at a time when consumption was at its minimum. The authorities cited many reasons, such as black-marketeering and adulterations, but these problems existed since colonial times. What stood out as new was their plan for urban renewal, and their laments about the lack of a suitable replacement site. In 1979, when the sole remaining toddy contractor ran into trouble with his tappers, the authorities found their chance to solve their problems all at once. Acting upon the recommendations of the National Wage Council, the tappers demanded a pay raise, but the contractor did not oblige. The Customs Department, which regulated toddy productions and sales in Singapore, turned down the contractor’s request to raise the tender price of toddy, which he had hoped to use to finance the demanded raise. By the end of the year, most of the tappers resigned. Receiving no toddy from the contractor, the Customs Department revoked his license. That was the last time the government issued a toddy license, and the drink was never again produced or sold in Singapore.

A toddy shop before it shut down in 1975.

Without toddy, any kueh bluder produced in Singapore is missing a chapter of history. Its combination of a South Asian tipple and a Dutch ring cake manifests a cultural exchange between the coloniser and the colonised. The cake also testifies to the resilience of indigenous ways in the face of western domination—although this hinges on the tolerance of the latter. In Singapore, toddy survived the British rule because it was allowed to. The colonisers despised the beverage, but they also saw its benefits to the lucrative rubber industry. Toddy was likewise subject to the ambition of the post-independence government. Since it was deemed unfit for Singapore’s modern, high-value economy, its entire industry was rooted out, and the traditions around it had to be reimagined.

While toddy was becoming out of reach, bluder was also grappling with Singapore’s new economic reality. The cake typically took two days to bake. On top of the hassle to acquire toddy, the batter comprising egg yolks, flour and butter had to be fermented overnight in an earthen jar. Sometimes a blanket was used to keep it warm and cozy for toddy yeast to grow. Baking must wait till the following day after the batter had risen. When Singapore industrialised in the 1970s, more married women went to work and few had the time or patience for any laborious cooking. Even when toddy was still available, bluder was disappearing from homes, which were becoming sites for consumption rather than production.

But changing social mores is nothing like a toddy ban that gives the Eurasians no choice to perform their tradition. For people who produce bluder to express and preserve their underrepresented identity, the end of Singapore’s toddy industry may feel too personal.

That doesn’t mean that a culture completely disappeared. It evolved, instead, to adapt to changing circumstances, but still telling the stories of surrounding people and places. Just as toddy is important to witness bluder’s historical passage from the Netherlands to Ceylon, its absence traces the ensuing voyage down south and contextualises the cake within Singapore’s politics, market and economy. When developing a bluder recipe for his cookbook NerdBaker, Christopher Tan responds to the lack of toddy in Singapore with a mixture of coconut water and instant yeast. This recipe pays homage to the cake’s heritage, but also hints at Singapore’s pragmatism: what is incompatible with the state’s master plans is not important for anything else. The new bluder has an unsentimental touch, and it is Singaporean no doubt.

This story is based on my research for a Channel 5 programme about vanishing foods. Not all of my work made it into the half an hour episode (below), especially the parts that I find interesting. This is for the other geeks out there.

References
http://routecochin.com/work/breudher-story/
http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/bundt-it-like-breudher/article19593548.ece
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19730513-1.2.53.1
https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/dna/habitats/details/15
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/maltribune19290509-1.2.6
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/maltribune19310502-1.2.16
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singfreepressb19380603-1.2.58
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19320912-1.2.39
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singfreepresswk19290227-1.2.54.1
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/newnation19791108-1.2.12
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/maltribune19180701-1.2.60
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19290216-1.2.74
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singfreepressb19140119-1.2.48
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19171222-1.2.49
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/newnation19791127-1.2.15
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19791128-1.2.61
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19791109-1.2.34
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/newnation19781213-1.2.39.1
http://www.iremember.sg/index.php/2016/03/a-customs-officer-remembers-toddy-in-singapore/
http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/oral_history_interviews/record-details/ec29abf4-115f-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad?keywords=toddy%20bludder&keywords-type=all
Tan, Christopher. Nerdbaker, pp. 53-56.
Interview with John Conceicao, a local Dutch Eurasian
Interview with Mary Gomez, a local Eurasian cook
Interview with the Singapore Malayalee Association

Sang Kee restaurant

There are three types of Singapore Noodles—Singapore-style, Malaysia-style and Hong Kong-style. Finding Singapore Noodles is easier in Malaysia and Hong Kong than in Singapore. This includes Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. There, one will find many Chinese restaurants at the street level of buildings, and they are selling a wide variety of dishes meant for communal eating, in unembellished but sprawling set-ups. They are known as tai chow, similar to zi char restaurants in Singapore, and where the Malaysia-style Singapore Noodles is usually sold.

Through the recommendation of a Kuala Lumpur food researcher and author Lim Kim Cherng, I came to know of two of the oldest tai chow in the city. Between 2015 and 2017, I visited Sang Kee (1955) and Sek Yuan (1948) to speak with their respective owners Lee Kah Loon and Pang Kien Cheong. There are many overlaps between their noodles and stories, bringing me closer to understanding the significance of Singapore Noodles to the Malaysians.

Singapore Noodles is just one of the many noodle dishes available at any tai chow. What makes it Singapore Noodles, and not something else, is its unique combination of ingredients. A Singapore Noodles must have diced char siew, scrambled egg, julienned onions and shelled baby prawns, says Pang. Everything else are vegetables, either including all of, or revolving around napa cabbage, bean sprouts and spring onions. Among the ingredients, char siew has the most to tell about the historical link between Singapore Noodles and tai chow in Kuala Lumpur.

The Cantonese immigrants were the main players of the tai chow business. The name “tai chow” itself is Cantonese for “big fry”, which describes the business’s primary method of quick stir-frying over big flames. But the Cantonese are also experts in roast meats, and most tai chow in the past produced their own roast duck, crispy roast pork (siu yok) and glazed barbecue pork, which is char siew. Leftover char siew were chopped up and reimagined in other dishes—like Singapore Noodles. Because of a shortage of skilful roast masters and the high salary to engage one, Sang Kee, Sek Yuen and most other tai chow have stopped roasting meats and are instead buying char siew from elsewhere.

This concept of putting leftovers into good use is consistent with Lim’s Singapore Noodles article published in 2006. Like many food of murky origins, Singapore Noodles was said to be a concoction of scraps put together hurriedly. One day in the 1940s, a tai chow received a customer when it was about to close. For fear of offending a customer, the cook gathered scraps like char siew, bean sprouts, onions, chillies, egg and dried shrimp and stir-fried them with vermicelli. The customer liked it. When asked for the name of the dish, the cook made up xing zhou mi fen （星洲米粉）, because back in those days, Lim wrote, xing zhou, or Singapore, was a more prosperous city than Kuala Lumpur. The cook branded it as such to create an image of legitimacy, class, basically everything but scraps.

It is hard to verify this story since Lim learned about this from an article whose writer has passed. He also doesn’t know who that cook is. While I seek to find more people old enough to remember when and why tai chow started selling Singapore Noodles, I try to put the dish into context, by examining its contents.

Sang Kee’s Worcestershire Singapore Noodles

Besides char siew, the other ingredients also paint a picture of the people cooking Singapore Noodles. I briefly considered onions to be a Western influence after the noodles became available in cities like New York and London (an overseas Singaporean interviewed by the newspaper thought so too),  but according to Pang and Lee, onion is a regular feature in Cantonese cuisine. I should have known, because it has always been there in sweet and sour pork, my favourite Cantonese classic.

Sek Yuen uses baby prawns, but Sang Kee doesn’t, although it used to add dried shrimps (like the “inventor” in Lim’s story) until they became “too expensive for an economical dish like Singapore Noodles”, says Lee. It’s too early to tell if prawn is critical to the Singapore Noodle story, but I know something else is.

A differentiating element in the Malaysia-style Singapore Noodles is ketchup. But I learn, after speaking to Lim (the researcher) and Lee (of Sang Kee), that the original flavouring may have been Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. 68-year-old Lee says his father, an immigrant from Heshan, Guangdong, had been adding Worcestershire to Singapore Noodles since the restaurant’s early days in the 1950s. He attributes it to British influence during the colonial period, and recalls the other tai chow using the condiment too. While Sang Kee keeps this tradition, he says, many others have switched to ketchup because it is cheaper and sweeter.

Sek Yuen, and the New Sek Yuen which Pang opened in 2016 after parting ways with his uncle, are examples of restaurants adding ketchup to Singapore Noodles. Born in 1976 and the third generation of the Sek Yuen family, Pang is too young to tell me if his grandfather and granduncles ever used Worcestershire, but he believes the restaurant was already using ketchup by the time he was born. Then, he brings up an important point: although the tomato sauce is often associated with American food, tai chow isn’t a stranger to the condiment since it has been used in several other dishes. Items like ketchup prawns with ee-fu noodles (ketchup 虾球炒伊面), he says, were trendy in the 1970s and 80s, and his new restaurant still gets requests for these dishes from the old timers.

I was expecting New Sek Yuen’s noodles to be red like mee hoon goreng where ketchup is also added, but it was comparatively pale in colour. Turns out that much lesser ketchup is required for Singapore Noodles. Everyone else’s ketchup Singapore Noodles, says Pang, looks just like his. Sang Kee’s noodles, on the other hand, is red like it has ketchup in it, but Lee says only Worcestershire is added. It also tastes a little bit tangy. Despite their differences, both condiments hint at early western influences in the Malayan kitchen, which I shall investigate in the future.

New Sek Yuen’s ketchup Singapore Noodles.

It is also important to discuss what Singapore Noodles means to the people of Kuala Lumpur, in order to track how this changes as the dish travels to different cities. Lee mentioned two ingredients—dried shrimp and Worcestershire—that have been eliminated from the original repertoire to cut ingredient costs. Singapore Noodles needs to be kept affordable because tai chow serves mainly the regular folks. While there are well-to-do customers, the restaurants have been accessible to the working class since their humble beginning as roadside stalls. Singapore Noodles, comprising a morsel of meat and cheap vegetables, costing between RM8-12 today, is no different.

Yet it is not a staple. “When people don’t want to eat rice, they will order noodles for a change,” Pang explains. Like any good carbohydrate, vermicelli satiates the stomach so that everybody leaves the restaurant satisfied—regardless of their budget, or the lack thereof, for the more expensive meats and seafood. Precisely because Singapore Noodles is economical, says Pang, it is never served at wedding or birthday banquets where the food usually speaks wealth and fortune. More sumptuous options like seafood ee-fu noodle are eaten instead.

In Kuala Lumpur, Singapore Noodles presents a plate of vermicelli containing char siew, baby prawns, eggs and onions— distinctively flavoured with either Worcestershire or ketchup. It is food for everybody (in the Chinese community), for any regular day, when rice is not desired. However, over the years, this noodles is losing its appeal even as an everyday meal. Lee and Pang observed its demand in decline, which Pang says is the result of frequent menu updates at tai chow restaurants to attract novelty-seeking customers. With more varieties than the appetite for noodles, classics like Singapore Noodles are becoming neglected.

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.

Singapore’s and imported vermicelli at a local supermarket.

Who buys raw vermicelli?

Mostly hawkers, said Goh Soon Poh, of Par Corporation, which supplies broken rice to vermicelli manufacturers in Singapore. This has been the case since the industrialisation of the local vermicelli industry in the 1970s. At home, people tend to cook rice, while vermicelli is saved for special occasions such as house parties and Taoists prayers. (Temples are also one of the frequent buyers of  vermicelli, says Goh.) No wonder Singapore Noodles is usually bought, not cooked at home.

The hawkers, especially those selling noodle dishes, usually offer vermicelli as an alternative to the traditional choices of noodles. Think kway teow soup, prawn mee, curry noodle and lor mee. These dishes are originally made with either yellow wheat noodles or flat rice noodles (kway teow), but may be switched for or mixed with vermicelli. I like my prawn mee mixed with vermicelli, because the thick wheat noodles are too heavy to eat a full portion of.

Prawn mee and bee hoon (a little harder to spot)

Even in zi char restaurants, where the Singapore-style (non-curried or ketchuped) Singapore Noodles is usually found, vermicelli is a possibility rather than a rightful staple of any particular dish. Hor Fun is a plate of eponymous flat rice noodle, known as “hor fun” in Cantonese, stir-fried with beef, pork or seafood. However, the noodle can be replaced with vermicelli or e-fu noodles. It is expected at zi char restaurants that one can mix and match ingredients and noodles and cooking methods. Singapore-style Singapore Noodles could be just one of the many permutations. This is why Goh insisted that Singapore Noodles is not a dish, not anymore so than prawn bee hoon or lor bee hoon. But it is still mystery why Singapore Noodles’s ensemble–of char siew and baby prawns–isn’t replicated with other noodles.

The only hawker food, it seems to me, that can’t do without vermicelli is economic bee hoon, just as its name suggests. This item has been one of the cheapest hawker food, which is why it is “economic”, said Goh. “When I was a kid in the 60s, economic bee hoon was the cheapest to buy. With simple ingredients like sweet soy sauce, tau kee (beancurd skin) and hae bee (dried shrimp), a plate cost only between 30 and 50 cents,” he reminisced. This is still true today. A plate of economic bee hoon with two side dishes may cost just $2, but a fishball noodle or chicken rice usually starts from $3.

If vermicelli is a mere substitute for other noodles in dishes like prawn mee, while economic bee hoon must be stripped to the bare bones to qualify as economic, then Singapore Noodles couldn’t have come from the same stalls. A likelier food business to have created Singapore Noodles would be a zi char restaurant, which is really defined by the wide variety of noodles it offers, and its flexibility in the mixing of the noodles with different proteins and vegetables to make a one-dish meal. Zi char prices have also been one notch above the other hawker foods, affording a proprietor to add multiple ingredients to one plate of noodles, as in the case of Singapore Noodles. Of course, the more expensive Chinese restaurants with similar variety of ingredients in their pantry would be another food business category to consider.

I already know that a tai chow, a Malaysian equivalent of zi char, is where one will find Singapore Noodles in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve also learned from a Hong Kong-born professor that Singapore Noodles is sold in Hong Kong’s cha chaan teng, a similar establishment that sells a wide variety of meat, vegetable, rice and noodle dishes to the common folks. A pattern in the kind of food businesses that sell Singapore Noodles in these three cities is showing and needs to be investigated in due time.

Meanwhile, as I’ve been to Kuala Lumpur twice in the past year, I had the opportunity to explore their Singapore Noodles. In my next post, I’ll be talking with two tai chows to find out what Singapore Noodles means to the Malaysians and how ketchup became a part of it.

This story is a part of my research about Singapore Noodles’s origins and how it has impacted the lives of those who eat it and also those whose identities it has been associated with. Other related stories can be found here.