(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.

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.

Drying beehoon under the sun in 1956, print screened from National Archive Singapore.

Before “星洲米粉” (xing zhou mi fen) referred to a dish in Singapore’s Chinese press,  it was a term for Singapore manufactured rice vermicelli. I wondered if Singapore Noodles was named 星洲米粉 because Singapore’s vermicelli was key to the making of Singapore Noodles in the earlier days. To find whether the made-in-Singapore vermicelli was any special, I spoke to Goh Soon Poh, general manager at Par  Corporation, a trading house that since the 1970s has been supplying broken rice to  local vermicelli manufacturers, and also consulted the Singapore Noodle Manufacturers’ Association 20th Anniversary Celebration Souvenir Magazine published in 1990.

Singapore began to produce vermicelli around the 1920s, and the industry was pioneered by immigrants from Fujian in Southern China. While the Northern Chinese commonly consume wheat noodles, the Southern Chinese, favour rice noodles such as vermicelli. Within Fujian, rice vermicelli dishes from Fuzhou and Putien stood out, says Goh.

Vermicelli productions took place in kampungs, mostly in Changi, according to the noodle association’s magazine. The producers worked with archaic tools such as stone mills and charcoal fire, to grind rice and steam vermicelli respectively, before taking it out to dry in the sun. Based on my earlier findings, there was competition from China as early as the 1940s, and local vermicelli producers never became powerful enough to edge out the imports. By the 1970s, during Singapore’s massive physical development, less than 10 surviving producers relocated their businesses to industrial estates such as Defu Lane. These businesses eventually automated their processes and exported their higher outputs.

1956 beehoon factory in Singapore. Notice the kampung setting in the backdrop. Print screened from National Archive Singapore.

1956 beehoon factory in Singapore, print screened from National Archive Singapore.

All the founders of today’s five remaining manufacturers —People Bee Hoon, Chye Choon, Saga, Eng Bee and Hock Hin—have Fujian roots. People was established in 1943 and is the oldest among them, says Goh, but the business was sold to another family some years ago. Together with Eng Bee, they are the only ones still manufacturing their vermicelli in Singapore, while the others have moved their operations to cheaper neighbouring cities in Vietnam and Indonesia. While these Singaporean companies have been producing their vermicelli with rice—even while many regional manufacturers have turned to wheat and corn starch to cut cost—their products are not exceptional.

“Singapore’s vermicelli was never special,” says Goh, nor is it distinctive like Taiwan’s Hsinchu vermicelli or Xinghua vermicelli, whose environment imparts unique tastes and textures to it. Based on the previously mentioned 1948 news report, the quality of Singapore produced vermicelli was unspectacular and did not match up to the imports from Xiamen, supporting Goh’s claim. Singapore’s vermicelli also never dominated the domestic market, which by 1965 was still largely dependent on imports from Thailand and China.

Knowing where Singapore’s vermicelli stood during the mid century is important because Singapore Noodles could very well be developed in that period; the earliest media mentions of Singapore Noodles in Singapore and Malaysia were in the 1960s. But the lacklustre quality of Singapore’s vermicelli diminishes the possibility that it was indispensable to the making of Singapore Noodles or critical to its naming.

If not the Fujian immigrants’ vermicelli-making skills, could their culinary methods have inspired Singapore Noodles? Fujian-style vermicelli dishes aren’t the norm in Singapore or have resemblance to how we eat our vermicelli today. Although Xinghua vermicelli is well-known in Singapore thanks to the successful expansion of the restaurant, Putien, the noodle’s unique ensemble of prawns, clams, pork and peanuts is only sought upon by non-Putien Singaporeans in the recent 10 years. Xiamen vermicelli with cabbage, carrot and canned stew pork ribs, another common dish in Fujian, is also unusual in the hawker and restaurant scenes here. Most importantly, none of these vermicelli dishes share the same set of ingredients, flavour profile or cooking method with any of the three types of Singapore Noodles.

The next important question to ask Mr Goh is the social significance of vermicelli to the people of Singapore. This will explain why Singapore Noodles is cooked in professional rather than home kitchens, and why it is mainly sold at zi char and restaurants. It may even help me narrow down the types of food businesses where Singapore Noodles is likely to come from. My analysis in the next post.

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.

MUSEUM OF EATING
Eating is a universal act. The ways we eat, however, are cultural and personal. Where we consume our meals, who we chat with over lunch, and what we use to put food in our mouths all affect how we think about our food. In the Museum of Eating, we go beyond the typical foodie conversations about chefs, ingredients, and tastes to look at the designs and techniques used to cook, contain, and carry food in Singapore.

Consider the Wok
Kitchen utensils are common across the world, but look closer and you’ll find variations born out of cultural differences. Singapore hawkers have fed many generations with their good, quick meals. These dishes and the tools to prepare them have persisted despite the onset of modern industrial cooking. But to feed a larger and an increasingly time-starved population, hawkers have had to devise better ways to use or even re-design these age-old tools. Whether it is a wok or a scoop, these kitchen utensils have not just enabled faster and better cooking, they also record the craft and considerations these hawkers have put into perfecting their dishes.

PERFORATED SCOOP

Popiah is a spring roll filled with stewed turnip that is delicious when moist but not soggy. Glory Catering is well-known for such mouth-watering popiah, and they can consistently produce them thanks to a perforated scoop designed by the owners, the Chin family. A typical scoop tends to pick up too much turnip juice, and that aluminum tool falls apart when the cook presses down on it to drain out the liquid. The stew cannot be drained beforehand either, because it’s what keeps the turnip juicy and tasty. Glory’s inventive tool comes with more than 400 perforations to drain more quickly, and its trough shape lets the staff scoop the exact portion of filling, in a shape that is easy to fold into a roll. Truly a handy way to capture Glory’s craft in making popiah.

The back of the scoop fits nicely into the trough – both made of hardy stainless steel – to squeeze out excess juice.

Mr Chin Der Ann is the eldest of the four siblings who run Glory Catering.

S-HOOK

Wee Nam Kee cannot cook chicken rice without the S-hook, says owner Wee Liang Lian. For this Hainanese chicken rice seller, the S-shaped tool works like an extension of the chef’s fingers, handling up to 100 braised, poached, and deep-fried chickens a day. The tool is everywhere in their Marina Square kitchen: used to hang-dry raw chickens above the burning flame, to anchor boiling chickens to the rim of the pot so their delicate skin stays intact, and finally, to show off their spotless, tan, and unblemished fair skins in the store’s window display.

S-hooks enable large-scale cooking in a small space. They hook onto each other, so at least 30 chickens can hang above the stoves, in a space barely wider than a metre. This allows the flames to parch the chicken skin, so it will crisp better in the hot oil.

Mr Wee Liang Lian, the second generation owner of Wee Nam Kee Chicken Rice.

WOK, FIRE & SPATULA

Speed literally helped char kway teow seller Ng Chang Siang cook up this set of tools. The anxious cook sped up “like a Ferrari” whenever a line began to form for his noodles, and his forceful strokes gradually filed an edge off his iron spatula. But he noticed the more the tool had given way, the less strenuous cooking became, because his arm and wrist could now align. From then on, Ng got a supplier to custom-make angled spatulas for him. He also had a shallower wok made to his specifications to complement the new tool. This way he could accommodate a big batch of pre-cooked noodles and fulfill an order in just about 30 seconds. He simply needs to separate a serving from the pile and finish it off with the other ingredients. To ensure quality was not compromised with this cooking method, Ng even concealed some of the burner holes so that the reserved noodles do not overcook. These tools and methods have been passed on to the younger Ng, who continues his father’s tradition of dishing out plates of the famous Hill Street Fried Kway Teow in seconds.

Because the edge of this angled spatual conforms to the surface of the wok, the cook’s wrist can stay straight, and safe from the laborious repetition of stir-frying.

The strokes required to serve up a plate of char kway teow are repeated some 300 times a day: spattering an egg over the wok; pushing out a serving of pre-cooked noodles over it; shoving the noodles to the left, flipping it over to the right; scooping the sauces and swinging them across the noodles; then more stirring until the dish is ready.

Ng Yeow Kiat, the second generation owner of Hill Street Fried Kway Teow.

Customer: “One kangkong.”

Server: “With minced garlic or fu yu (fermented bean curd)?”

Customer: “Fu yu.”

Server: “How about soup?”

Customer: “Okay.”

Server: “Fish head, bitter gourd or salted vegetable and tofu? Take fish head. The fish is really fresh today.”

Customer: “Okay, fish head then.”

There was no printed menu. Customers usually had an idea of the types of food—meat, seafood, vegetables, soups or noodles—they wanted, and servers would then suggest the possible flavours and styles of cooking, a conversation that led to a dish.

It was not uncommon for servers to rattle off names of dishes because a zi char restaurant then seldom had more than 20 dishes to offer. It helped that many customers were regulars who could easily order off the top of their head. At some places, cut out, rectangular pieces of vanguard sheets with names of dishes were pasted across the wall as a kind of public menu, but that did not work for every patron. “Many people in those days were illiterate. They couldn’t read. We had to tell them,” said Lam Yau Hoe, whose father founded the zi char restaurant at Toa Payoh, Hong Sheng, in 1968.

Kok Sen, which has the entire coffeeshop at Keong Saik to itself, keeps the practice of displaying menu items on the wall. Others that rent only a stall at a coffeeshop don’t have this kind of space to do so.

Lao Ban Niang at Joo Jiat Road showcases some its staples on acrylic boards.

JB Ah Meng at Geylang lists its menu on styrofoam boards.

This is unlike today when almost all Singaporeans can read—not only in their mother tongue but also in English. But a bigger reason behind the now widespread use of printed menus in no-frills zi char restaurants is the rapid expansion of their repertoire.

From just 20 dishes before 1990, Hong Sheng now offers 87 items to its customers. Same goes for long time zi char spaces such as Keng Eng Kee at Bukit Merah, and Kok Sen in Chinatown, which have both seen their offerings more than doubled between the 1970s to 1990s. While such restaurants may have once started specialising in just one type of Chinese cuisine, by the 1980s, they were expanding their menus in response to a more demanding clientele, explains Keng Eng Kee’s owner Kok Liang Hong. More Singaporeans were eating out, and with that came an expectation of greater choices from a single restaurant. Fuelling this consumption was the growth in women entering into Singapore’s labour force. Eating out became a convenient alternative to cooking at home and something more could afford as household incomes rose.

As zi char restaurants tried to outdo one another, cuisines from different regions were mixed and matched. In the 1990s, Cantonese establishments like Hong Sheng added Hokkien specialities, like ngoh hiang to their repertoire, while its pai kwat wong also began appearing in the menus of other restaurants. Restaurants also cooked up new-fangled creations in order to stand out from the rest. More often than not, popular dishes were soon copied by others and added onto their menus to ensure they could satisfy all kinds of tastes. For instance, the then recent creation har cheong kai made its way into Hong Sheng’s offerings even though its main ingredient, fermented prawn paste, was considered too “pungent” for its customers just a decade ago. Even the Southeast Asian ingredient, sambal, eventually became a staple in Hong Sheng, which by the 1990s had a printed A4-size menu as the number of dishes it offered became too many to be remembered by heart.

Besides competition, the cooks in zi char restaurants were also being replaced by a new generation from neighbouring Malaysia as Singaporeans turned their backs to being food producers, preferring office jobs instead. Many of these cooks were Cantonese from Ipoh who had also worked in cities like Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru at the equivalent of zi char, known as tai chow.

Wong Foong is one such cook who arrived in Singapore in 1984. He recalled reproducing his employer’s signatures, but also started introducing dishes he prepared back home. Over the years, he has kept in touch with friends and fellow cooks across the border, whom let him in on new dishes to import to Singapore. Cereal prawns and san lou mi fan are just some of today’s zi char staples that are believed to have come from Malaysia. When I phoned Wong for this interview, he was in Johor catching up with friends chefing there, learning new dishes he could bring in to now his own zi char business, JB Ah Meng, at Geylang.

The printed menu of zi char restaurants is a product of changing times and an answer to changing eating behaviours. Spanning from a single A3 sheet to a A4 file, these menus can accommodate—better than a human memory—the insatiable appetite of consumers. They make any zi char restaurant accessible to everyone, especially first-time customers, whom restaurants are welcoming in bigger proportions than before. Thanks to the constant buzz about the latest and the “tastiest” in traditional and social media, consumers in Singapore are constantly on the move to somewhere new.

A sentimental attachment to the familiar and an empathy for those who toil for our food are hardly the qualities of today’s zi char customers. In place of the absent food memories and relationships developed from these sentiments, are the fuss-free menus more palatable to the consumers of the digital age.

PART II: What’s on a Zi Char Menu?

Restauranteurs play with ink colours, type sizes, and omit the dollar sign from their menus to coax diners to spend more. Zi char restaurants don’t attempt such sophisticated engineering, which is why their menus aren’t typical of a restaurant, and are even unique to this category of eatery. A collection of these menus informs the idiosyncrasies of both the businesses and their customers. The generic food pictures, the correction stickers, and the laminates suggest that zi char are shoestring operations that tend to attract people who are more concern about how their fish is steamed than whether their table is cleaned.

Protein categories

Most zi char menus are categorised by protein type—meats, seafood, and the affordable tofu and eggs. The last category may seem odd to the uninitiated, but in the hands of a skilful zi char chef, eggs or tofu can stand on their own as a dish. They adequately replace the more costly meats and seafood, to make a communal Chinese meal with vegetables and rice.

A zi char dinner may go even cheaper. In the 1960s and 70s, when most Singaporeans ate their meals at home, zi char was a luxury. A plate of rice or noodles—another menu category—stir-fried with meats or seafood and leafy vegetables was the only thing most could afford. Hor fun with beef and kai lan, bee hoon with char siew and cabbage, and fried rice with salted fish and diced carrots, are just some iterations of the one-dish meal that have come to define zi char restaurants. Suitable for one or to share, they are what make an eatery “zi char” instead of a seafood restaurant, which tends to offer similar mains.

Yet the most expensive dish from every category combined can raise the profile of a zi char meal. Like many others in the 80s, Keng Eng Kee, previously at Havelock Road, served modest dinners to families. But come midnight, big spenders like nightclub patrons and bookies made up the majority of its clientele. “The hostess would bring the towkays or Japanese tourists,” says owner Kok Liang Hong. “When there were women around, these men ordered excessively—abalone, shark’s fin, crabs, and prawns.” Many more zi char patrons today can afford these foods, but Kok notes that the 21^st century well-to-dos look out for good tastes rather than exclusive ingredients.

Laminates

Most zi char menus come in laminated sheets of A3 paper. The plastic protection allows the restaurants to wipe off food stains and water without damaging the paper. This is where zi char and regular restaurants are markedly different. The former is fuss-free and customer turnaround is at lighting speed. Often, the next customers are seated before the tables are cleaned. When they have been cleaned, it is usually with a damp cloth in a few zigzag motions, and the tables are still wet when the menus are placed on top for the next customer. Laminates maximise the lifespan of the menus and still allow the businesses to continue their harried service.

Generic photographs

Food pictures mean good business, and zi char owners know that, which is why they blow up images of their best dishes. But most would rather use generic photographs (sold to them by signboard makers) than to have pictures of their own labour taken. “We advise our clients to shoot or to use their own signature food images, instead of the usual stock images,” says Justin Lee of Phocept, a company that makes signage for food stalls. “Then again, business owners tend to have their own considerations, usually the cost and logistic issues.”

The option to use stock photographs proves two things. One, zi char restaurants offers similar food. In fact, one can hardly call itself a zi char if it doesn’t offer the usual repertoire, which include, among many others,  prawn paste chicken, cereal prawns and pai kut wong. What’s left for a zi char restaurant to pit itself against the others are its cooking skill and the quality of its ingredients. This brings us to the second point about zi char restaurants—they compete by cooking better, rather than cooking different.

Hong Kong Street Sum Kee at Ang Mo Kio (left) and Hong Kong Street Chun Kee at Bukit Merah (right)

Correction paper

Not only do zi char restaurants serve the same food, they also rarely change their repertoire. We see menus covered in white correction papers, and the new food prices scribbled on top. This is especially so among the older establishments. Lai Huat Seafood’s menus are more than 10 years old and each of them has almost a hundred correction stickers, informing the updated prices of “sambal balachen pomfret”, “drunken live prawns” and many more.

That said, some restaurants, especially those that have been taken over by the second generation, are introducing new dishes on a regular basis. Their menu, consequently, come in different formats to accommodate the ever expanding repertoire. Instead of A3 laminated sheets, these restaurants use A4 files with plastic pockets. Many items can be displayed on one A4 sheet, otherwise, a new dish needing publicity may have an entire page to itself. Most importantly, these menus can be produced with home printers, allowing the restaurants to make changes cheaply and instantaneously.

Icons

Menus have replaced servers as reliable sources for information about a zi char’s repertoire. Besides the dishes available, the restaurants rely on their menus to communicate other details. We see chilli icons that warn about spiciness, while there are chef hats, and more recently Facebook ‘like’, to guarantee tastiness. In the last 15 years or so, logos of television programmes and magazines emerged, to nudge customers into ordering dishes endorsed by the media.

Greater reliance on menus for communication suggest a few things. Zi char customers are not patronising the restaurants enough to know their servers or their food. Had they been a regular, they would not have to find out, from a menu, what’s good or not. Either they would already know what to order, or the servers would like them enough to suggest. But Singaporeans today have too many dining options, and they also eat out too often to want to dine at the same few places.

A menu also gives a false idea that the dishes and recommendations are set in stone. Anyone who has eavesdropped on a conversation between a regular patron and his server would know that eating zi char is anything but. Pepper crab may be popular, and is stated so in the menu, but prawns could be exceptional that particular day. Ingredients can likewise be negotiated in or out of a dish. These will only be known to diners who engage their servers in a conversation.

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.

Cambodian Noodles from Bo Ky Restaurant in Manhattan Chinatown, and its pretty legit Teochew braised duck.

A middle-aged server with harsh facial features turned his gaze upon me. I held up the menu to signal him to back off, while I scanned it the fourth time for a sign of familiarity in the unfamiliar “Cambodian rice noodle or egg noodle soup.”

Fellow Singaporeans on Yelp, an online review site, told about a taste of home that could be coaxed out of this seemingly foreign dish. The noodles of a Sino-Cambodian restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown, said Natalie L., was “secretly mee pok.” One need only ask for the linguine-like egg noodles, and the soup to be served separately, not forgetting to add the chilli sauce provided on every table, to create the elusive (in New York City and some say United States) mee pok tah.

People who live abroad are known to practise traditions from home to create familiar situations in new and unfamiliar environments. Overseas Singaporeans in New York City are no different, except that they adapt from the “others” to remember Singapore. These Singaporeans hold fluid ideas of the Singapore identity, which allows them to re-interpret its meanings and practices, thus keeping it alive even in new times and spaces. This is unlike subscribing to rigid rules of classifications, such as “Chinese eats rice,” or “Eskimos live in igloos,” which limits an identity’s presence to very specific, usually local conditions.

There is no Singaporean in New York City running a restaurant specialising in Singapore-style hawker foods. The most obvious alternatives for a taste of Singapore, because of shared histories, are the Malaysian-owned restaurants. Singaporeans turn to these establishments, although they also appropriate their foods — adding sweet soya sauce to chicken rice, and demanding for cut red chillies for hor fun — to build a home away from home.

Even the Singapore Consulate in New York City relies on Malaysian-owned restaurants to construct Singapore’s nationalism. When the consulate organises the annual National Day reception to inspire a sense of nationhood amongst its citizens abroad, it caters dishes like satay, chicken rice, and Hokkien mee from these restaurants.

To those who believe that only cultures from within a nation can truly inspire national identity, a nationalism constructed by the “outsiders” will seem unreal or inauthentic.

But this wrongly assumes the singularity of the Singapore identity.

National identity, some believe, is a sense of belonging shared amongst the nation’s entire population, but is in fact a personal construct based on the individual’s social experiences. In other words, there is not one but many meanings to being a Singaporean.

For the Singaporeans in New York City, or in anywhere abroad, an invaluable aspect of the Singapore identity they often felt indebted to is the nation’s historical connection with cultures from all over. It enables them to recognise themselves in “others,” and most importantly, to feel recognised despite being away from home.

When the Teochews emigrated from South China to Southeast Asia in the 19th century, they spread their culinary gospels to Singapore as well as Indochina. When one of them from Cambodia opened the said restaurant in New York City in the 1970s, it became an outpost of home for the Teochews, Cambodians, and, I would find out first hand, a notable number of Singaporean immigrants.

I had trouble asking for the changes that would transform “Cambodian noodles” into mee pok tah. “FLAT egg noodles,” I said at first. The server furrowed his brows. I pinched my fingers to gesture “flat”, but the furrow only sank deeper. I desperately did not want to end up with mee kia, which was easily available, so I blurted, “Mee pok!”

The stern-looking man suddenly turned bright-eyed and exclaimed, “Singapore!”

“Singaporeans” are more befittingly the colours of what they eat, rather than the colours of their skins. This is because food colours express what skin colours do not: shared history, intercultural exchanges, common understanding of tastes, and love for the same food. In this poster, which expresses the intimacy between people in Singapore using the colours of their foods, the introduction reads:

“People have been contemplating similarities and differences with one another based on the colours of their skins. What it means to be black, white, or yellow is derived not from the essence of these colours, but from the shifting relations between the people born with these colours. Even though the consequences of being one race and not another changes with time and space, skin colours stay the same and fail to reflect these realities. The colours of one’s food, however, are testimonies to these changing conditions. They bloom and fade with the rise and fall of the native eaters, and they transform as the foods plunge into a melting pot of other world’s cuisines. What we are looking at are the colours that connect the Chinese, Malay, Indians, and other races in Singapore. Their foods are predominantly red and brown in hues because of the mixing of immigrant and native cultures and ingredients—an intercourse brought about by necessity, but has since developed into a common love for soy sauce, rempah, and sambal. “Singaporeans” are more befittingly the colours of what they eat, rather than the colours of their skins.”

Idea & Process

This idea to colour code hawker dishes found in Singapore came about because I was curious if it was possible to make conclusive statements about Singapore hawker food based on their colours. Following the advise of a designer friend, Shanyang, who runs a visualisation design studio, I trawled through Instagram for pictures of hawker food. These pictures could be taken in Singapore, Malaysia, or Indonesia, and there was no way to determine unless the person who took the picture indicated so. Knowing that there are slight variations (in terms of ingredients and even garnishing) in some dishes in these three countries, I picked the ones that were most representative of the styles commonly seen in Singapore. For example, I chose a picture of a bowl of wanton mee that was visibly yellow, rather the ones doused in black sauce, a version popular in Kuala Lumpur. While I do have a personal preference for charred char siew and poached chicken rice, and I did choose pictures that piqued my appetite, it was not my intention to assert that the colours collected from these pictures were the most “accurate” or “representative” of hawker food in Singapore, if accuracy and a representation were even possible.

After gathering pictures of more than 50 hawker dishes, Shanyang wrote a programme to identify the colours and generated a colour chart (below) of each dish. The colour ratio was based on the proportions of the ingredients. However, because of the different lighting conditions under which these pictures were taken, this programme sometimes identified two or more shades on the same ingredient. For consistency, we manually removed the colours that did not look like what we saw in the pictures, so that one ingredient only had one colour in the chart. But of course, the ingredients could be so well mixed, like in epok epok, that there was only one colour for all the ingredients.

Rationalising the Colours

What I ended up having were 54 colour charts. I attempted to make sense by categorising them according to race and food types (eg. seafood VS meat or noodle VS rice), but in none of which a pattern emerged. Besides, to label satay “Malay” even though many satay uncles are Indian Muslims, and despite that the Chinese has their own version, simply did not sit well with me. So instead of seeking differences, I looked out for similarities. When I gave up classifying these foods, it became clear to me that their affinities were more revealing than their disparities. These foods are predominantly red and brown in hues, and it is because Singaporeans share a love for sambal, chilli, soy sauce as well as its derivatives like kecap manis.

Design Concept

This poster was the creativity and effort of Sher Chew, a Singaporean graphic designer whom I was fortunate to be acquainted with in New York. Because the colours were not supposed to state a fact but to inspire a perspective, Sher did not present them as an infographic. Instead, she came up with a design good to think with and also to be admired for its aesthetics. In the previous versions, the colours were presented in pie charts. But Sher thought the circles looked isolated, and they didn’t convey a sense of connection between the dishes — a message that we had wished to bring across. Hexagon, on the other hand, suggested possibility of unification. Yet, Sher left gaps between them, to remind that there is room for greater intimacy.

Poster version 1.

What it would have looked like without engaging professional designers. A foolish attempt to manually colour code all my meals during the early stage.