Afforded too little time of their own, salarymen/women may forgo breakfast or eat on the go. The length of their lunch break determines where they eat, what they eat and with whom. If working hours exceed dinner time, the boundaries within which they exercise individual preferences further constricts. These conditions affect salaried workers everywhere, all but one character in “Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman”.

Amentani Kantaro, a sales representative of a publishing house, rushes his sales trips to pay visits to nearby dessert gems, which he writes about in his blog. He tells no one about his sweet escapades, and pulls it off because he is efficient at his job. But the constraints on a salaryman remains, so he skips places with long lines and limits his orders to what he can eat within the short time he stole from work. Confined to corporate conditions, Kantaro violates a few rules to make room for a personal interest, but is largely obedient so that he keeps his job.

There will be no need to rush if one has controls over one’s own time like businessman Goro Inogashira in “The Solitary Gourmet”. Inogashira’s business brings him to clients all over Japan and he always finds good (and real) places to take lunch. Without strict office hours to follow, he reads the menu back and forth, orders to feed more than a normal appetite, and admires the food’s glow and shine before dissecting tastes and textures. If you watch him over lunch, you’ll be done before he is. Inogashira is never short for time to savour, although the clients’ locations predetermine his food options somewhat.

When none of these work arrangements are available, a salaryman may only countdown patiently to retirement. Takeshi Kasumi in “Samurai Gourmet” is a recent retiree who has a lot of time on his hands and spends it on food adventures. While he sometimes walks into new places, he often revisits nostalgic eateries and memories that he, as well as many others, put aside for a hectic corporate life. Kasumi has an alter ego, a boorish samurai who teaches him to break the shackles of conformity for spontaneity, such as skipping the last train home for a late night snack outside the city. As Kasumi only needs to pace his life against his homemaker wife’s, he goes wherever he wants for food and takes his time to do just that.

Now, if only all bosses are like these men, appreciative of food and the joy they bring, then we can perhaps be afforded to eat proper meals of delicious foods, appropriate to our body and mood, even on days when we are supposedly subject to corporate needs and profits .

“Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman” and “Samurai Gourmet” are available on Netflix. “The Solitary Gourmet” can be watched on popular streaming sites.

SINGAPORE — Fish, meats, and even fruits are drenched in a riot of flavors wherever you eat in Singapore. Spicy, sour, and pungent tastes, like sisters, may fight with one another, but they can also be so perfect together.

This island city-state of more than 5 million people, with an economy driven mainly by financial services, has a tiny aquaculture industry but a great variety of affordable crustaceans imported from Indonesia, Thailand, even Norway. Serving raw or simply boiled-and-chilled seafood, as many restaurants in the United States do, demands pricier catches and particularly stringent handling practices. So food hawkers…

Continue reading my Boston Globe story here…

Rebel With A Course reads like an ah chek regaling with colourful tales of the good old days prior to the hawker centres and HDBs. Except, Queen’s English rolls off the author’s, Damian D’Silva’s tongue, and the slightest details that usually escape one’s mind embellish his stories — “The wet market had two rows of food stalls at the front, selling a host of dishes from the different Chinese dialect groups. There was you char kway, lor mee, yong tau foo, chwee kueh, and our favourite, mee pok tah.”  I am captivated and almost convinced that the past was better than the present. Perhaps, heritage dishes, like he says, should be preserved the way it was.

But I’m afraid D’Silva and the many else of his generation are the only ones who truly appreciate heritage dishes. They have had their fair share from the street peddlers, or have been forced to help cooking some at home. Pleasant or not, these experiences in their formative years shaped their preferences. Today, where the flavours of the past are no more, they yearn for the old and lambast the new.

Preserving heritage dishes becomes a tricky business, because the subsequent generations have developed a taste for what D’Silva calls the “bastardised version.” While hawker centre fare are more prominent in their lives, the bygone foods live only in the memories of an older person. They are murky, unattainable, thus, always beckoning envious “likes” should their pictures occasionally appear on one’s Facebook feed.

If by any chance the new generation finds their way to a hawker adhering to old methods of cooking, or they travel to Malaysia where more of such person exist, it remains a question as to whether they would appreciate the food in its previous, supposedly better life form.

I grew up eating factory-made muah chee and had liked its firm and chewy texture. A few years back my ex-boss, a man also belonging to an earlier generation, proudly introduced me to a hawker believed to be the last man making muah chee by hand. I had wanted to like it, so that I can claim connoisseurship of hawker culture.

But the handmade muah chee was limp and lifeless in texture. It was not what I had indulged my schoolgirl-self in, along with ramly burgers and Taiwanese sausages from the pasar malams.

Most Singaporeans today prefer crispy to the gooey or luak. They also like their wanton mee with chilli sauce, instead of just soy sauce, lard, and broth. In both cases the latter is traditional. Evidently, staying traditional doesn’t guarantee popularity across generations. Otherwise, the versions we know today wouldn’t have become the norm.

Since heritage foods are irrelevant to the younger generations, for whom are we preserving them?

Practicing traditions builds a community and perpetuates one’s identity; it is important that they are handed down. But it is impossible to replicate wholesale. All traditions practiced today are interpretations of the past, with modifications to suit the present. If we had expected all sambal to be prepared with a mortar and pestle, the condiment would not be as ubiquitous as it is today.

Traditions have to change for them to stick around for a long time, so instead of lamenting the inevitable, facilitating it can ensure that the outcomes stay culturally relevant.

D’ Silva also emphasised the importance of methodical cooking. I think heritage can be more meaningfully preserved in terms of methods than dishes. This is so that when creativity strikes, chefs and cooks will look within, instead of looking out, to the French, the Japanese, or the modernists, as they do now, for different approaches to familiar foods.

In passing on traditions, some will be lost. The best we can do is to make sure not all will.

Put An Egg On It

Image from Put An Egg On It

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

Remedy

Image from Remedy

Like the previous magazine it has many food memories to share, except that they each come with a recipe. By inviting you to taste their food, the writers are inviting you to partake in a moment of their lives.

Cereal

Image from Cereal

I don’t care for the Kinfolk-like aesthetic but I appreciate the anthropological and historical approach in their food features, like addressing how carrots hadn’t been prominently orange before the 16th century, and discussing maize’s domestication and cultivation in Mesoamerica. It has since rebranded, now a “travel and style” magazine, but you might still find its older issues in magazine stores.

Meatpaper

Image from Meatpaper

A magazine of art and ideas about meat. It compared old and new school butcher shops, interviewed the designer who sewed Lady Gaga’s meat dress, and in its final issue in 2013, discussed about the future of meat with a food historian. Yes, this magazine publishes no more. I include it here to establish that there is much about meat to talk about — at least 20 issues-much.

The Art of Eating

Image from www.inheritanceshop.com

It is most similar to the mainstream food magazines but it has none of the product placements and chichi dining recommendations. Instead, there are more musing on the different styles of New England baked beans or the superiority (or not) of cultured butter.

Modern Farmer

Image from Modern Farmer

I laughed at their handcrafted sleds and German-made leather tool case features, but their how-to guides (how to chop a stack of wood, how to build a backyard farm) are quite an eye-opener. That said, I wouldn’t rely solely on their words if I really want to build a farm.

Cherry Bombe

Image from Cherry Bombe

It is run by women and it tells stories about professional women in the industry. It has extensive interviews with famous food personalities such as writer Ruth Reichl (above), and Judith Jones, ex-vice president of Knopf Publishing who batted for Julia Child’s manuscript that became the famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest of the magazine is of the same spirit: celebrates women who grow, make, style, and enjoy food.

Sugar & Rice

Image from Rice & Sugar

A magazine about Houston through the eyes of people who live, eat and breathe food. Every issue revolves around a theme, such as migration, which covers a resident’s discomfort with the term “ethnic food” that usually describes cuisines of non-white people, a story about the Vietnamese immigrants’ struggle for better lives in the Gulf Coast’s shrimping industry, and a photoessay of Houston’s Chinatown. It is both personal and technical — my preferred recipe for a food magazine.

The Gourmand

Image from The Gourmand

I tend to save the best for the last. This is a London-based magazine that focuses on the role of food as an art form for social criticism. It features the works of artists like John Baldessari who, through a series of food-selection exercise, question the concept of taste, and in a different project, cuts out the heads from the images of people breaking bread together, to draw attention to their body languages and the gender politics taking place. The Gourmand also did an interview with Milton Glaser about his food column in the 1960s, and publishes commentaries on recent food events such as horse meat eating. The magazine predictably stylised foods like chicken feet and chocolate, sometimes involving cats, but like a Dadaist artwork, some of them do provoke new perspectives of these everyday objects.

Image taken from Amazon.com

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

Smog Tasting by The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

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

Image from The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

Sharing Dinner by Marije Vogelzang

The artist intervened the way a group of people interacted over a Christmas dinner by getting her participants to eat through the same tablecloth that extended from the table top and over each person’s head, leaving holes for the head and the arms. As each could feel if the tablecloth was pulled, this dinner enforced an attentiveness and intimacy between the diners.

Image from Marije Vogelzang

Image from Marije Vogelzang

Self Made by Christina Agapakis & Sissel Tolaas

Many of the stinkiest cheeses are hosts to species of bacteria closely related to the bacteria responsible for the smells of human armpits or feet, so the duo asked, “Can knowledge and tolerance of bacterial cultures in our food improve tolerance of the bacteria on our bodies?” They inoculated swabs from human hands, feet, noses and armpit into whole milk, curdled the milk, and then pressed them into eight cheeses varying in texture, colour, and odour. The cheeses, which reflected “an individual’s microbial landscape,” challenged the observer “to confront the microbiological aspects of their food and their body.”

Image from agapakis.com

Ridley’s Restaurant by The Decorators & Atelier ChanChan

An architect and a design studio in London collaborated to create a barter-based restaurant to revitalise a historical but forgotten market. Visitors would go to the market to purchase one of several ingredients laid out on the restaurant’s daily shopping list. They would then deliver these ingredients to Ridley’s, where they could be exchanged for a cooked lunch. The produce collected at lunch was used to cook dinner. To eat dinner at Ridley’s, customers paid £15 for their meal, and receive £5 back in the form of market voucher. The money made at dinner was used to buy ingredients for next day’s lunch, and the vouchers brought people to the market long after the pop-up restaurant had ended.

Image from popupcity.net

Image from popupcity.net

Meat Helmet/SWAMP

The artist created a helmet that forces the user to chew at specified intervals and length of time. It is an art vehicle to expose fast food eaters to the pains of enjoying the ‘luxury’ of such foods. The helmet is controlled by a computer programme that calculates the amount of chewing time required to burn off the number of calories of these foods. In case you are wondering, it takes eight hours of chewing to burn off a Big Mac that is 560 calories.

Image from SWAMP

“Good Fruits and how to buy them” is not only a point-blank title for a book but also its authors’ blunt statement about people’s level of ignorance of an everyday know-how. Many consumers have a clearer set of logic for clothes shopping than for fruit picking, even though the latter would have greater impact on their lives. It doesn’t help that fruits these days are uniformly looking by design, giving shoppers the impression that there is no meaningful difference from one orange to the next. But according to the authors, who published the book in 1967, there are telltale signs of a sweet, ripen fruit even amongst the uniformity. The book teaches about more than 20 fruits available in the U.S., but remembering the characteristics of just seven that are common in Singapore would be a good start.

Avocados

Avocado skins may be smooth or leathery or rough, depending on the variety. The authors found no relationship between skin texture and quality of the flesh. “Select heavy, medium-sized avocados with bright fresh appearance and which are rather firm or which are just beginning to soften.” Softening may be hastened by placing the fruit in a warm humid place. Inversely, softening may be delayed by keeping the fruit in cool dry place. But not below 5.5 degrees C, as low temperatures will turn the flesh black and ruin the flavour. Therefore, don’t buy avocado which the grocer had refrigerated.

Bananas

Only buy bananas that were mature — stopped enlarging but not yet ripened — when picked. There is no way of telling whether a banana was mature if it is all green, so buy those with green tips, and the remainder a light yellow colour. A fruit picked before it was mature will never fully ripen. Banana should be kept at room temperatures until fully ripen. The best time for eating is when the fruit have speckles on their skin. Some people think speckled bananas have gone over the hill but it is actually a sign that fruit has reach a stage when it contains the lowest starch and highest sugar content. Bananas cannot be stored below 13 degrees C, which means they have no place in the fridge.

Oranges

They look all the same on the rack so the trick is to feel them in your hands. A good orange should be heavy. Light-weight citrus fruits means “there is air where there should be juice.” An orange that is a little green is probably one that grew on an inside branch. Since it didn’t get as much sunlight as the ones that grew on outside branches, the flavour will be poor. If the oranges came from Florida a thin skin is a good index of quality. However, the Californian varieties are usually thick-skinned but still taste good.

Grapes

Judge the grapes by their stems. Dry stems indicate that the fruit has been out of storage for two to three days when it should be kept at about 0 degrees C. I used to buy grapes that have fallen off the stems because it would saved me the trouble of plucking but it turns out to be a sign that the fruit has been held too long in storage. Avoid dull, lifeless, and sticky grapes because they have suffered from freeze burn.

Cantaloupe

Buy cantaloupes with no stem attached.

Cantaloupes with whole or half stem attached are rated poor because they were picked before they fully matured. Melons in general ripe at full slip which means that the fruit is mature enough to detach itself from the vine without taking a part of the stem with it. This, however, does not apply to watermelons. Place purchased cantaloupe in room temperature, not in the refrigerator. A pleasant aroma indicates that the fruit has developed its full flavour. At this point it may be refrigerated before serving, but not for more than 48 hours.

Pineapples

If you love your guests cut the pineapple lengthwise. If not, serve the top few rings as shown on the right.

As with other fruits, pineapples must be mature when harvested, indicated by a green and firm skin with eyes that are plump. Reject those that are purple and with eyes that are sunken and dull. Bruises, discolouration, watery eyes or at the base of the fruit are signs of decay. When pineapples are ripened, it developed full colour and aroma. Note that the fruit ripe from bottom to top, which means that it is sweetest in the lowest part. It is best to cut it lengthwise into wedges, so that everyone sharing the fruit gets both the sweet and the acidic ends.

Watermelon

This fruit has few external marks of quality; difficult even for an expert to select. But there are three things to watch out for. Firstly, select a melon that is uniform in shape. An oblong melon indicates an ovary this is not completely pollinated. Then select a heavy melon. The heavier it is, the more juice it contains. Finally, the underside of the melon, the part that rests on the ground, should be slightly yellow rather than pure white.

Image from The Search for General Tso

Why is Chinese food in America so different from what we see in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong? The film, The Search of General Tso, provides an insight to this phenomenon as it traces the history of a dish particularly popular with the Americans — General Tso Chicken. The film brings its audience to Hunan, China where the namesake is from, and to Taiwan to locate the creator of those sweet-spicy deep fried chicken. What at first looks like a superficial quest to ascertain the ownership of a dish turns out to be a bigger story about Chinese American history.

Since the late 19th century, Chinese labours in the west coast experienced severe social and economic discriminations. Many Chinese Americans are in the laundry and restaurant businesses today because those were the only jobs that the white Americans wouldn’t do and breaking into those industries required little capital and English. Despite hating the Chinese, whom they previously accused of monopolising industries and later, during the Cold War, for essentially being Chinese like Chairman Mao, Americans loved Chinese food. The American Jews (and the Christians who happen to hate spending time with their family) ritualistically order Chinese takeout during Christmas; in Sex and the City, Miranda has a Chinese take-out on her speed dial, and Carrie dates Mr Big in a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food in America is for special occasion and for everyday meals.

Winning a nod from a largely unwelcoming society would not have been possible if the Chinese in America had not cooked what the dominant population liked, for example, sweetness. Alterations of any cuisines, often seen as a betrayal to long standing cultures, have frequently been dissed, but as this film rightly points out, General Tso Chicken and the rest of Chinese American cuisine are testimonies to the Chinese’s resilience and adaptability. Chinese American cuisine is not bastardised Chinese food but another of its renditions (along with Southeast Asian Chinese or Taiwanese food) that reflect the unique social and cultural conditions in which the food producers live.

(image from School of Visual Art’s Container List)

The items found in New York City’s Chinese groceries today, I can imagine, are baffling to Chinese and non-Chinese alike. What is one to do with a whole packet of duck tongues, black fungus, and dried bean curd sticks? (Answer: braise it, stir-fry it, and stew it, respectively) The very same items in the 1970s, a time when Chinese and all things about them were very much considered exotic, would have been deemed mysterious, or even dangerous, and required a caption to go along for the uninitiated. Perhaps seeing a need there, Milton Glaser, the man behind the overly adapted I love New York logo, created a chart-like poster to guide one through a Chinatown grocery. It explained items like preserved celery cabbage, thousand-year eggs, and even provided instructions for calculating with an abacus.

Commissioned by the International Design Conference, the poster was created in 1972—the same year Nixon went to China after decades of hostility and distrust between the two nations. Then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai hosted a meal in Nixon’s honour and the live broadcast sparked off an explosion of interest in Chinese food. Prior to that, during the Cold War, communist and Chinese were synonymous to the Americans and so was their hatred towards them. Therefore, only in 1972 and the subsequent years would Glaser’s poster be of use to the mainstream Americans.

Book: The Food of Singapore
Distributed in: United States
Year: 1995
Author: Lee Geok Boi (Singaporean Straits Chinese)
Editor: Wendy Hutton
Recipes by: Djoko Wibisono and David Wong, both chefs at The Beaufort Sentosa (now known as The Singapore Resort and Spa Sentosa)

Short chapters on Singapore’s immigrant history, the nation’s kopitiam culture, and the characteristics of each ethnic food precede the recipes. Even though the author breaks down the cuisine into Indian, Chinese, and Malay, she makes sure to highlight the interactions of their techniques and ingredients in dishes such as Indian rojak and satay bee hoon. Insightful observation: the main difference between Malay and Indian curry is that the former tends to include galangal and lemongrass, while the mainstays of the latter are coriander, cumin, and fennel powder. The author also points out that Indian restaurants, even those own by Hindus, do not serve pork. This is because, she explains, the Muslim Mughal Empire once extended to a large part of the Indian continent. Therefore, Indian restaurants all over the world tend not to serve pork even though only beef is forbidden by Hinduism.

Book: Southeast Asian Cooking
Distributed in: United States
Year: 1987
Author: Jay Harlow for the California Culinary Academy cookbook series

Like many cookbooks dated this far or further back, it features extensive instructions on techniques, including how to bruise a ginger. Sounds like ABC to a seasoned cook but it is downright strange to those who are not. I don’t remember knowing that it means whacking the food until a cookbook I came across was decent enough to explain. Anyway, this author also teaches one how to create kecap manis with soy sauce and molasses—very useful if you are living in the states where the sweet and dark soy sauce is hard to come by. Most recipes also do not explain how to produce coconut milk, least to say the proportion of coconut shavings to water. This book suggests 1:1, a good place to start until one finds the perfect ratio for the desired thickness. If you prefer to use canned coconut milk, which is typically thicker than the freshly squeezed one, the author also suggests ways to thin it or to extract the cream from it. Again, this book reflects the author’s personal preferences; it is not a bible. Not especially when the author says satay “is probably derived from the English word ‘steak’.” Unsupported claims and untested recipes irritate like nails on chalkboard, but they are not uncommon, so it’s always wise to compare with other sources when you’re not sure.

Book: The Pleasure of Chinese Cooking
Distributed: United States
Year: 1969 (first published in 1962)
Author: Grace Zia Chu (Shanghai-born culinary instructor and author)

Grace Zia Chu is one of the authors credited for introducing Chinese cooking to America. The first quarter of this book, which Craig Claiborne wrote a foreword for, explains how one should hold the chopsticks, use a Chinese cleaver and wok, and where to buy Chinese produce in the major cities. (Check out the promotional video for her book.) Her explanations on why Chinese cut the meats and vegetables into small pieces before cooking are insightful. She says Chinese cooks had to collect fuels such as wood, charcoal, twigs, and leaves for cooking. The smaller the food, the faster they cooked, thus, the lesser fuel it took. Another reason because Chinese eat with chopsticks, and we all know it’s easier to pick up strips of meat than, say, a steak with two sticks.

The author also enlightens us on oblique cutting, which creates many exposed surfaces on the vegetables to help them absorb the flavourings and also to cut off the stringy fibres. This is achieved by making a slant cut, and then rolling the vegetable until the cut is facing up before making another slant cut.

Feast to the world’s popiah entry in June 2012

Mummy, I can cook’s satay entry in July 2011

Singaporean food bloggers at home, such as ieatishootipost and camemberu, in contrast, rarely bestow culinary wisdom. They review restaurants, hawker stalls, and sometimes businesses remotely relevant to F&B, like airlines. Overseas and domestic Singaporeans cover different aspects of food because the further one drifts away from home, the hazier the idea of “Singaporean” becomes.

Screenshot of Camemberu’s blog taken in August 2014/

When at home, everyone knows who we are, where we go to school, where our accent comes from. Outside home, we become nobody, unless we perform our identity. Often, people who live overseas wear food like a badge of nationhood. Eating and cooking food that we believe says who we are is an act of defiance against those who confuses us with others, and those of whom we’ve been confused with. For us Singaporeans who are so in love with and defensive of our food, the choice with which to commit this act is a no brainer.

While creating a sense of belonging, these bloggers also inform others about their home through recipe-sharing. Lee Shu Han of Mummy, I can cook! preludes her ngoh hiang recipe with an introduction of five spices powder, which is added to what she calls a “Straits Chinese’s answer to sausages.” Jason Ng of FEAST to the world reminisces about cincalok and explains its difference from the Filipino bagoong, before he presents the Peranakan recipe for cincalok omelette. Clearly, their audiences are the unacquainted.

Others’ uncertainty of our identity can get to us sometimes. Moreover, meeting the Chinese from China or the South Asians reminds us that we straddle two cultures—the longer established ancestral culture that we don’t fully identify with, and the hard-to-grasp “Singaporeanness”. Food offers some clarity and solace. Mee siam and Hainanese chicken rice are proofs that we belong to a culture, even though we have not fully understood what it holds.

The scarcity of Singaporean food in countries outside Southeast Asia, because of the relatively smaller overseas Singaporean populations compared to other foreigners from bigger nations, forces overseas Singaporeans to learn how to cook if they didn’t already know, and hone their skills if they already could create the flavours of home. Their success in locating lesser known ingredients and overcoming different conditions wins them bragging rights, and, more importantly, render their information valuable for future outbound Singaporeans.

Bloggers in Singapore, on other hand, have cheap hawker food at their backyard, near their workplace, and right at the MRT stations. Except for a few like ladyironchef who blog full time, most have other jobs. Thus, like many Singaporeans, they eat out more often than they do at home, because it’s cheap and convenient. They know where to find the best bak kut teh better than they know how to cook one. These bloggers also have the privilege of being invited to restaurants’ media launches. They are the gateway to the latest, if not the most impartial F&B news.

Screenshot of Ladyironchef’s blog taken in August 2014

Which type of food blogging is better? It depends which aspects of food we want to enrich. While recipes are records and step-by-step instructions for culture preservation, reviews make an adventure out of dining out and invigorate the food industry. It becomes a concern only when one type of content is disproportionately bigger in numbers than the other, since a diverse food conversation makes for a broader minded, more introspective, thus healthier society.