(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.

Sambal tumis telor.

Aida texts me a few hours before I’m due to meet her at her sister’s flat. She has already cooked the sambal for the exchange with Rose, because it is also for her lunch with her sisters and their mother.

I arrive at 4 p.m. to find a household full of young and older women. There is Aida, two of her older sisters, their mother, her niece and her niece’s toddler, and her young nephew — the only opposite gender who can be home on a weekday afternoon.

The sambal tumis for Rose is already packed in a plastic container. I ask to take pictures of it, so Aida scoops another portion into a pretty glass dish found in many Malay kitchens. There are pots of leftovers on the stove, including a fermented durian (tempoyak) curry. There is also a box full of cempedak that they plan to fry for dinner.

After taking pictures of the sambal over their rose-patterned placemat, I ask if I can taste it. Aida and her sister end up bringing me also the tempoyak curry, several slices of tempeh, and even a homemade ice-blended minty lime juice.

Aida plates her sambal while her mother and sisters watch television in the living room.

What they had for lunch and what they offered me later, including tempoyak curry, tempeh, and the sambal tumis.

Aida decides to read Rose’s memories while I tuck in, but she checks on me every now and then. “Is the sambal too sweet for you?” She asks. The homemaker learned to cook sambal tumis from her mother and sisters, but instead of using just dried chillies like they did, she mixed in the fresh ones to brighten the colour. She also added quail eggs into the sambal, so that she didn’t have to cook another dish for lunch. She asks her mother, who’s watching television, if she likes her take on the sambal tumis. The older lady maintains a poker face, and says something to the point of “ok lah”, much to her daughters’ amusement.

Aida’s mother has been a homemaker and she makes different sambal for different dishes: one for sotong, another for brinjal, and yet another for chicken. Back when she was still a child, Aida picnicked with her mother’s nasi lemak and sambal tumis at the beach. Her mother also cooked laksa to supplement their income, but only when her father was back from sailing to help peddle it in the kampongs.

Her mother still cooks, and Aida likes having her in the kitchen because she finds it “assuring”. She says, “If I hardly cook that dish, and I want it to taste exactly like my mum’s, I will ask her for her opinion on the taste.” As with today’s tempoyak curry, a dish from her mother’s birthplace in Terengganu, Malaysia, Aida prefers to play the assisting role.

Before I leave with their sambal tumis,  I ask to what style it belongs. The Muda sisters burst into hysterical laughters, the kind that suggests they have had earlier jokes about it. “Malay and Indian,” one says. “My father is Indian,” Aida informs. “Indian use a lot of onion. Malay use sugar, to make it sweet,” her sister adds.

She reminds me to bring her sambal to Rose as soon as possible because the eggs can’t keep too long.

A scanned copy of Aida’s memories.

Name: Aida Muda

A bit about yourself: I am 47 years old Malay homemaker with 3 kids

Type of sambal: Sambal Tumis with Quail Eggs

Level of spiciness: Hot!

Special ingredient(s): Fresh Red Chilli

Your sambal memories:

I love my mom’s sambal tumis. Be it with prawns, quail eggs, ikan bilis. Usually I’ll eat sambal tumis with steaming hot white rice and especially when my mom cooks nasi lemak. I learnt to cook sambal tumis from my mom but I improvised it adding fresh red chilli to brighten up the colour. Sambal tumis reminds me when I was younger when my family frequently arrange a family get-together picnic at East Coast and Changi Beach. Its one of my favourite dishes.

To your sambal recipient:

To Kak Rose, thank you for your delicious sambal Mak Kasek, its very nice. We plan to eat it with white rice or stuff in our roti “bun” freshly baked bun. We will definitely try your recipe.

When the Sambal Tumis Telor is delivered…

While reading Aida’s memories, Rose realises she has forgotten to put on her tudong for phototaking. She drops the letter and gets changed.

“Very nice isn’t it?” says Rose, after reading Aida’s memories. Rose also used to picnic, along Katong and Marine Parade, and Aida’s letter reminds her of her own beach outings. People in the past, she says, could not afford Tupperware, and plastic containers were not common either. To bring food to the beach, her family, and most others, had to lug their pots and pans. “I still remember the bus that goes there. Bus number two. I think it still goes,” she chirps.

Rose heats up Aida’s sambal over the stove and tastes half a spoon of it. “There’s a lot of sugar in there,” she says. “My husband has diabetes so I try not to add sugar to my sambal.” Like Aida, Rose is concern about the side effects of sambal, although they identify different culprits. She quickly assures me that it not an issue, as everyone has their own food preferences. Neither does it dampen her enthusiasm to experiment with Aida’s sambal.

Without realising it herself, Rose turns the sambal into food suitable for picnics. First she cooks it with scramble eggs. Then she stirs another spoonful to an equal amount of mayonnaise. She spreads the mixture on a sliced bread and then stacks tuna, cherry tomatoes and the sambal scramble eggs on top.

Sambal tuna sandwich, and more sambal menu in the making.

Just as how she was when she cooked her own sambal to exchange with Aida, Rose goes into details like she’s hosting a cooking show. She tells me later she’s teaching me like she’s teaching her own daughters.

Rose doesn’t eat any of what she has made. She’s not hungry, she says, because she has eaten her lunch. That said, she carries on making more food.

This time she spreads the sambal on a piece of bread, adds the quail eggs that she has sliced beforehand, the cherry tomatoes, and then gives me “the honour” to add as much grated cheddar as I like. After a few minutes in the toaster, a sambal pizza is ready.

Aida’s sambal tumis telor (top right) and Rose’s interpretations of it.

Apart from the original sambal tumis, Rose makes me pack everything home. Maybe because the sambal has more room for tweaking, so that her family, especially her diabetic husband, can enjoy it too.

Read about Rose’s Sambal Mak Kasek and Aida’s response here…

**SGX facilitates an exchange of sambal and related memories between two strangers. Our participants live in different times, different social, political and personal circumstances; their experiences with sambal are diverse. Together, their stories form a patchwork of memories across communities — a Singapore story of another kind. A food exchange creates spaces for personal memories to unfold beyond one’s own mind and private life. Because cooking or eating another’s sambal builds new memories upon the old, the food can become enduring testimonies to their lives.

Sambal Mak Kasek

Rose takes a while to open the metal gate. When she appears from behind a wooden screen, which blocks the view of her flat from the corridor, she’s in tudong and home clothes. The mismatched outfit suggests she has gone to cover herself after I knocked on the door. The moment we’re in the dining area, she takes off her tudong. I remind her that I’ll be taking pictures, so she puts it back on, along with a nice set of baju kurung.

While she’s changing in her room I notice the ingredients on the dining table. A shallot is frozen in a half cut state, while a tablet continues blasting euphoric American-accented commentaries.

Rose prepares the sambal on her dining table. She practised cooking it three days before this shoot, and she gives me bread to try it with while she tells her story.

Rose exudes qualities of a cooking host. She talks about different types of sambal and the beautiful flavours they can achieve, while finely slicing several chillies. When she explains how caramelised sugar rounds off the spices, she reminds me of lamblike baby care instructors. Food, in her view, is to be treated with tender too.

My host tells me her mother died when she was only seven, so she learns cooking from anyone who has a recipe to offer. When I ask her for permission to give away this recipe if anyone asks, she says yes immediately: “This shouldn’t stop with me. Furthermore, it should be according to your taste. Any recipe, any cooking should be according to your taste. You might not like the way I cook this. You want more sugar, add more sugar, then it will be the best sambal for you.”

She makes sure to explain every step: reusing the oil that has cooked the ikan bilis will give the sambal more flavour, while adding enough oil to drown the sambal will extend its shelf life — a critical quality since I’m only exchanging it with another sambal cook a few days later.

Rose hasn’t cooked this sambal in 20 years, as she has been trying new recipes and have forgotten about it, until she’s approached for this sambal exchange.

To ease her into writing her sambal memories, I recount the stories she shared moments ago. She decides to draft a response before writing on the questionnaire I will deliver along with the sambal. She writes carefully, like a schoolgirl taking her first written test, but suffers no writer’s block. Her memories are vivid, including one of her grandmother throwing out a fishing line from their stilt house.

She stops writing all of a sudden and she looks at me. “It brings tears to my eyes you know?” She says. It turns out she has not even told her children of these stories before.

She has two pages-full of memories to share — even after leaving out some details in her first draft.

A scanned copy of Rose’s written memories.

Name: Rose B. Rusdi

A bit about yourself: A 57 year old Baweanese homemaker with 5 children.

Type of sambal: Sambal Mak Kasek

Level of spiciness: Hot!

Special ingredient(s): Gula Melaka

Your sambal memories: Earliest sambal memory was when I was about 3 years old having lunch on the steps of the small jetty near my house clad in a homemade underwear and singlet (my mum sews).

I was eating rice with mussel sambal on a chipped metal plate. Most delicious sambal meal ever. I can still hear my mum laughing with my grandma, saying that whenever they finished cooking, I will appear (by the way my mum cannot cook, she only assists her mum).

I remembered my grandma cooking with my mum helping prepare in an old kitchen area grinding chilli with the old ‘batu giling’ and cooking over the wood fire. We lived in a house on stilts and I can see the sea from the gaps in the wooden floor. When we wanted to cook fish we just threw out a line out of the window and cook whatever we caught.

My mum died when I was 7; so I was not able to learn cooking from her, not that she could cook anyway. Therefore I had to learn by asking and observing people around me. Especially from my aunts when they helped to look after us.

That was how I came across this recipe, “Sambal Mak Kasek.’ Mak Kasek was a distant relative. My aunt was taught to cook this particular sambal by Mak Kasek’s daughter Cik Ram. Apparently her sambal was unique at that time and my aunt felt privileged knowing this recipe.

People then are secretive about their special family recipes and would not share. But this lady was generous, and thus, I benefitted from her generosity. Moreover, at that time, in the 1970s I recalled, those that had tasted this sambal were very interested in the recipe.

To your sambal recipient:

The original sambal has cane sugar instead of gula melaka, I tweaked it a little because I find that gula melaka works better for my sambal. I realise that this sambal evokes memories of sharing, generosity of knowledge and love. Sharing of this recipe, hopefully, will encourage continuity of memories and maybe this recipe can evolve further as more people can learn to cook this particular sambal.

When Sambal Mak Kasek is Delivered…

Aida reads Rose’s memories. They didn’t know each other until this sambal exchange.

Aida Muda, and her maiden family, receives the sambal with curiosity. They take turns to peer into the plastic container and poke their noses into the half-opened lid. One nods her head, so does the next person, until everyone in the living room agrees the sambal smells right.

Aida opens the envelop and reads Rose’s memories out loud.  She giggles at the part about the fishing line. Her sisters and mother have their eyes glued to the television, paying no attention to her.

She feeds her mother a spoonful of Rose’s sambal.

“Sedap!” One sister says after she takes a spoonful of Rose’s sambal. She turns to her sisters, anticipating similar responses. Not long after, one exclaims, “pedas!” So Aida asks, “Did she add chilli padi?”

At first, they ask only about the sambal. “Pound ah? Blend? Ketok?” One sister quizzes. “How about the cili kering?” Aida follows up. “Bawang? Garlic?” They make sure no ingredient is left unmentioned.

When nothing is left to ask about the methods of cooking, they begin to wonder about cook. One of Aida’s sisters asks for Rose’s name and neighbourhood, as if the answer to the latter would give her an idea of the person.

After trying the sambal, her nephew picks up Rose’s letter to read.

Aida goes on to ask who Rose lives with, as she wonders what people, of what age, can take such spicy sambal. Even Aida’s young nephew, who has told his mum he likes Rose’s sambal, quietly picks up her letter to read, while the adults are still debating on her style of cooking.

“But, but, but. There’s a but,” says Aida’s sister.  “The oil,” referring to the additional oil Rose added to help the sambal last longer, “we are very particular about that.”

Sambal may have been a common language in many households, but it is also very personal.

Since the family have already eaten their lunch, they plan to eat the rest of Rose’s sambal on another day. Most likely with plain rice, they say. Or with the bread their sister has baked, to make roti sambal. “Take out the oil first,” they emphasise.

Read about Aida Muda’s Sambal Tumis and Rose’s response here…

**SGX facilitates an exchange of sambal and related memories between two strangers. Our participants live in different times, different social, political and personal circumstances; their experiences with sambal are diverse. Together, their stories form a patchwork of memories across communities — a Singapore story of another kind. A food exchange creates spaces for personal memories to unfold beyond one’s own mind and private life. Because cooking or eating another’s sambal builds new memories upon the old, the food can become enduring testimonies to their lives.

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.

In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”

Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.

Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”

The university’s particular interest in the Chinese students was also a reaction to their burgeoning population in recent years. China was the biggest single-source country of BU’s overseas students in 2013, representing 35 percent of the university’s international student body. Taiwanese students, comprising four percent, was the fourth largest foreign contingent.

BU is one of the many universities across the United States that are becoming more ethnic aware and responsive about varying student needs, according to John-Eng Wong, visiting scholar in ethnic studies at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. At the University of California Santa Barbara, there are various ethnicities represented in the cafeteria menu. The Rhode Island School of Design added Korean dishes to cater to its significant Korean student population. “I would say that it’s a good thing that universities try to respond to the evolving character of their student bodies. It wasn’t always that way,” said Wang.

But BU’s grasp of Chinese food falls short of its desire to win over the Chinese population.

Ten Chinese students interviewed said they wouldn’t call the 15 dishes Chinese. Among them, “steamed orange white fish with baby bak choy and rice noodles” received the most objections. “No, we don’t use fruits in our cooking, maybe only pineapple,” said Qi Suo, president of the university’s Chinese Student Association and a senior from Beijing. “Steamed orange white fish? I don’t think any part in China cooks fish with orange,” said sophomore Jing Zhen Zhang, another Beijing native.

In addition to inaccurate cooking techniques, the dishes also incorporated Japanese and Vietnamese ingredients, such as udon and pho. Americans always mix various Asian elements, said Zhang. “Chinese food here is fusion,” He said. Shanghaiist, a China-based blog that publishes Chinese-related news and commentaries, picked up the story on BU Today and pointed out that the university had homogenized various Asian cuisines in the dishes. “Aside from lumping all Asian cuisines together,”said the website, “the 15 new Asian dishes on their menu seem just as bastardized as the aforementioned American-Asian food…”

To make matters worse, the dishes do not represent the regions of china where most of BU’s Chinese students are from. Huaiyan Wang, owner of Beijing Café, a northern Chinese restaurant at Commonwealth Avenue popular with local students, said that most of the dishes are Cantonese. “Bak choy, we never say that, we say napa. That is very typical Cantonese. Like hoisin, people from the north never use that. Egg noodles, people from the north never eat egg noodles,” she said.

The gravitation towards Cantonese cooking, also evident in Chinese restaurants across the United States, has a lot to do with the first large-scale Cantonese migration to the country, said Merry White, a BU anthropology professor. “But the food Chinese workers cooked for others was an invention. Chow mein, chop suey, and egg foo yung had antecedents in China but were invented here,” she said. Homogenizing various Asians and their cultures, White explained, is a propensity the Americans picked up from the British to mean “a geographical entity, a cultural form, a racial category, and a culinary template.”

But not all Chinese favor Cantonese cooking, said Wang. “I’m Chinese. When I stayed in Guangzhou, I got stomach upset. The food is good, they’re fresh. Just the way it’s cooked, and my stomach doesn’t like that.”

According to BU’s Chinese Student Association, most of its members are from Shanghai, Beijing, Sichuan, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. (Suo believes there is also substantial number of students from Guangzhou, but they tend not to join the association because they do not speak Mandarin, the language of most members.) Each of these cities has its characteristic cuisine. Zhang said that the Chinese food in America was too sweet for his liking. “I’m from northern China. Our food is salty and with heavier flavors,” he said.

Taiwanese food is an entirely different cuisine. “Because Taiwan was ruled by Japan for 50 years, Taiwanese cuisine is an amalgamation of Chinese and Japanese techniques. Taiwanese food is more light-handed with the seasonings compared to Chinese food in general,” said David Huang, president of BU’s Taiwanese Student Association. To illustrate the difference between Taiwanese and Cantonese cuisine, he added that Taiwanese’s preferred noodles are rice vermicelli, cellophane noodles, and rice flour noodles (also known as rat noodle because of its shape), none of which were included in the 15 dishes. Another Taiwanese student, Kevin Huang, said he hoped to see the iconic scallion pancake, salt and pepper chicken, and Taiwanese beef noodles in the university’s dining menu, but he might be disappointed.

“It’s very difficult for us as a dining service to meet the needs of every student on campus. The variety of food from the regions is so different. What’s available, how they cook, what they have had at home…” said Christopher Bee, BU dining services executive chef. “The cooking style is different as well. Our kitchens aren’t really equipped to move forward with high heat cooking, very rapid pace cooking.” All except three of the 15 dishes, Bee said, were developed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for which BU’s caterer, Aramark Holdings Corporation, was the official catering service provider.

That said, Bee emphasized that the 15 dishes were not a be-all end-all offering to the Chinese students. “This is new for us. We put this together to begin a process. The continuing development of this thing is what’s really important to us. As we do more research, as we speak to folks to get some feedback,” he said.

To get the ball rolling, White suggested, the university could refrain from blending various ethnic cuisines into one. “Just because there are Pan Asian, or fusion restaurants doesn’t give the kitchens a free hand to misname things. Since students will care. Why don’t they hire Chinese cooks to make ‘real’ dim sum, if they want Cantonese specialties? Or get a noodle chef to pull noodles?” she asked.

Then again, some students didn’t mind eating fusion dishes. Suo said she was open to all kinds of dishes because she “loves all Asian food”.

Shigang Zhu, a junior at the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “I can’t really distinguish authentic Chinese or Asian Chinese food. If the food tastes good, I’ll eat.”

*Written for Sheryl Julian’s food writing class at Boston University, where I am pursuing a MLA in Gastronomy.

The operatic sounds of boisterous voices, and rice bowls jingling as chopsticks dig in.

The ceramics clanging in the hands of acrobatic servers, among the familiar din of a Chinese restaurant

that comforts a lonely sojourner.