(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.

Eating pizzas and pastas in between plates of chicken rice and nasi lemak is part of a typical Singaporean diet. For some in Singapore, this mixed cultural diet has even become imaginations of a new national cuisine.

Nasi lemak granola, bak kut teh pulled pork salad and hebi hiam pizzas are amongst the foods created by young entrepreneurs over the last two years. Growing up eating food from their own heritage as well as cuisines from elsewhere has informed their own formulae for cooking: combining local flavours with international food ways.

Granola was the first thing that came to mind when Chin Hui Wen wanted to produce food for sale. She instinctively gave this American snack a Singaporean twist as she was targeting the local market.

Read full story.

Every Friday, at a mosque in Roxbury, men and women covered in thawb and hijab patiently stand in line for a taste of Singapore cooked up by Madam Saadiah Hassan. Since moving to Boston three years ago, the Singaporean has been running the mosque’s café to pass her time, turning it into an informal gateway to the country where the fifty-something used to sell the very same delicacies in a food court.

Her standard staple for Singaporeans has become curious flavours for the mosque-goers who once knew little about Singapore. But Saadiah’s culinary prowess prompted them to find out more. “They tell me ‘You know mama I read about Singapore’,” chirped the lady who is popularly addressed as ‘mama’ here. “They say Singapore expensive, Singapore clean, Singapore no chewing gum.”

Saadiah is just one of many overseas Singaporeans who have created their own home outside of home through food. By cooking dishes from their home country for the locals, these Singaporeans seek to find a sense of belonging and be recognised by where they come from.

Read full story.

Chiam Hui is born in 1949 in Fujian, China, while Malcolm is born a Singaporean Peranakan almost 40 years later. These men belong to two different generations but they have the same patience for a good recipe.

In the late 1960s, Chiam Hui ate duck rice for a week so that he could spy on the adjacent stall, the famous Lao Zhong Zhong outside the old Thong Chai Medical Institution. In a triumphant voice like a prankish kid, the 67-year-old exclaims in Mandarin, “I know every single thing he put in the sauce! No big deal lah! He was mixing there, and I was eating my duck rice and watching him!”

Malcolm stalked a prawn mee hawker whose sambal he loved. By then street food sellers across the island had been moved into sheltered, open-air centres. The 31-year-old chef and owner of Peranakan restaurant Candlenut hung out at one of these centres in Whampoa until the stall closed to prepare their ingredients for the next day.

“People think we are crazy, but that’s what we are interested in. Some people just want to sit down and watch the world go by. That’s our world lor,” Malcom chirps, although he was not as lucky as Chiam Hui as the stall was too enclosed.

* * *

Their lives overlap in more ways. Both men cook at home, even though preparing food is traditionally a women’s role in patriarchal Chinese and Peranakan cultures. New circumstances permitted their offbeat behaviour.

Chiam Hui started cooking at nine years old when his mother was hospitalised, but he wasn’t the first man in his family to become a domestic cook. His father came to Singapore as a “zhu zhai”, a coolie, and had prepared meals for his co-workers and his boss’s family since he was 11. Chiam Hui had seen his father cooking at home, so dicing and stir-frying was not an awkward chore for him at all.

Malcolm was messing up his Peranakan mother’s kitchen when he was about the same age. As it was the 21st century, it was “cool” for a baba or any man to show greater interest in pounding chilli padi than in crashing toy aeroplanes. By 15 he was learning proper cooking techniques from his mother, who made no compromise to the Nonya kitchen ethics even if it was just dinner for her children. “If the shallot is not good, [we] have to buy new ones. The chickens have to be of a certain size, chopped a certain way,” says Malcolm. “Everyone is stress because we see her rushing in the kitchen as if it’s a restaurant.”

But only one between the two men became a professional cook. As for many immigrants at that time, Chiam Hui was entrusted with too many responsibilities too soon. He concluded early in life that cooking for a living was too tough.

* * *

His first job was at a departmental store in Tanglin. “An uneducated kid” like him could only move or sort out goods, a job needing no interaction with the British managers and customers. Soon after he tried to pedal a trishaw, but was terrible at balancing, so he peddled bananas instead.

At 21 he settled on wholesaling bitter gourds and chillies, a backbreaking but lucrative business that supported his then jobless parents and two baby brothers—14 and 16 years his junior. He stayed in the same job for 40 years and sent all three of his children to college.

I was one of them.

My father likes to begin his stories with a dreadful “Aiyah…” His hard work may have privileged his family to live in their own terms but every time he revisits the past, he pities his youthful self. My old man’s excessive use of profanity and hard-hearted words are not to be misunderstood as strength. Like tears, they are a release for his anger over the lack of choices he had in life.

And yet he is against dreaming in general and chefing in particular. He thinks it is an impractical pursuit. Not only is it hard work, it doesn’t pay the bills—it belongs in the bygone generations.

“I saw how your godma prepared economic rice at Peace Centre… In that tiny kitchen, there were three to four stoves ‘hong hong hong’. There is nothing enjoyable about cooping yourself in that kitchen,” he yells. “Aiyah… Didn’t you also see that? Your godma’s clothes looked as if they had been soaked in the rain. A human could shrivel in there!”

My dad’s memories that I wrote on his behalf. (Click on the image to read)

* * *

Malcolm knows how it feels to be shrivelled like a prune. He was able to choose a future for himself, and he chose to be a chef. When I bring my father’s sambal and anecdotes to him for an exchange, he concedes that his is a job that no mother, including his own, would agree to without putting up a fight.

But he is happy, and the glee in his voice is apparent when he describes the kitchen. “It’s like a cave what. We are like caveman inside who will get excited over the smallest thing. ‘Wah the dish comes out so crispy ah!’ You should see. It’s very funny. You have the whole world revolving and then here we are exclaiming something so small.”

Rather than saying Malcolm became a chef because he wanted to, he was happy becoming one. He recalls his first experience as a prep cook in Washington D.C.: “It was messy and I was new. It was stressful and all that, but it was fun. It was the first time I had so much fun doing something. You can almost say that I feel alive doing it.”

Malcolm’s memories. (Click on the image to read)

* * *

Unfortunately for him, my not so happy father was so not wrong about livelihood.

Despite the financial and personal freedom that afforded Malcolm to pursue what he likes, the demands of a family man in capitalist Singapore have caught up with him. Already, he is talking responsibilities like my old man: “In the ideal world, you are on your own, then you don’t care what. I make a thousand dollars? Fine. I can survive. But when you have a family, you have kids, then that will change how you approach things.”

Stressing him even more is the dilemma between making the best sambal, as any self-respecting chef would, and churning out maximum profit, like a businessman should. The restaurant is still surviving on the success of his catering arm. Malcolm gave himself 10 years to turn his business around. He has five more to go.

My father’s relationship with food remains simple. Since cooking is a hobby, his purpose can be about the people he cooks for and nothing else. The expensive belacan from Penang and the lavish amount of aromatics in his sambal attest to that.

Malcom’s taste buds agreed too. He did however tweak my father’s sambal before cooking with it.

* * *

Whether it is domestic or professional cooking, both men wish to be seen excelling in what they like. Modifying someone else’s food gives them legitimacy over the dishes with which they create. It is a matter of taste and also of pride.

When Malcolm first saw my father’s sambal, he said in a tone just slightly more forgiving than a critical bibik, “It’s very smooth ah. So use blender and blend one.” After tasting it, he determined it was “nice for stir-fry” and asked one of his kitchen cooks to “brighten the flavour” with lime leaves, tamarind and limejuice.

My father established superiority over Malcolm’s cooking more explicitly. He added sugar to his sambal even before tasting it. “His sambal has a very strong kaffir lime leaf aroma. We are not Thai. Some people don’t like it,” he explained. What about you? I asked. Ironically, he said, “I’m okay with that.”

He spread the sweetened sambal on a grouper he had fried for lunch, and was surprised at how salty it tasted. “Is it his sambal or my fish?” he asked. After verifying that it was the former the detective in him began investigating. At first he blamed the salt. Half an hour later he proposed a new theory. “It’s the type of belacan he uses!” Confident that he solved the puzzle, he exclaimed, “Very easy one lah! Dried chillies that he processed himself, shallots, lime leaves, lots of belacan…” He flashed a winning smile and retreated into his room for an afternoon nap.

In the end, it was Malcolm who seemed mature and practical. He was happy with his interpretation of my dad’s sambal, so while we were savouring it with grilled prawns, he said, “If your father give me his recipe I will use, I will do this dish.”

**SGX (Sambal Goreng Exchange) 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 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.

But when studied all together, the print, television (online), and blogs paints a telling picture of the dish. I analyse key phrases in the first 80 Singapore Noodles recipes that Google generates based on the keywords “Singapore noodles recipe,” and here is what I found:

Popular in the West, Except Hong Kong

• “one of the most popular dishes on any Chinese take-out menu”
• “a favorite in Chinese-American restaurants”
• “popular takeout noodles here in Australia”
• “popular dish in Hong Kong”

The media say it’s “famous” and “popular,” but is careful to set the scope within which this statement holds water. Hong Kong stands out as the only Asian city where Singapore Noodles is said to be prevalent. Whether it is Hong Kong or Australia, such specifications suggest that the writers, and possibly the men in the street of each city, are unaware of their common love for the noodles.

The media also tend to specify the food categories — Chinese take-out or Chinese American restaurants— under which this dish is a favourite, hinting at a different assessment should it be taken out of its usual contexts.

A Non-Local, But A Classic Everywhere

• “a stir-fry classic”
• “the classic dish”

How a dish of unclear origins become a classic to various cultures across the globe demands investigation. This is different from becoming ubiquitous, as merely being accessible to consumers does not guarantee itself a long-term spot in the menu.

A Cultural Orphan 

• “famous noodle dish”
• “famous fusion cuisine”
• “popular take-out”
• “a favorite in Chinese-American restaurants”
• “popular Asian dish”

The internet cannot agree on whether Singapore Noodles is Asian, fusion, or just convenience.

A Malleable History Wins Acceptance

• “Chinese through and through”
• “a Cantonese creation”
• “part of the identity of Hong Kong cuisine”
• “invented by Cantonese chefs to honour the country’s vibrant cultural mix”
• “share their name because Singapore cuisine is hot and spicy, and so are these noodles”

Could its murky origins free it for imaginations regarding its histories, thus, everyone in everywhere can claim it their own?

• “its origins are a bit fuzzy”
• “did not originate in Singapore”
• “not been able to find the true answer”
• “found in a range of other countries outside of Singapore”
• “never been heard of in Singapore”

Some media dramatise the mystery to generate interest in their stories. This tactic seem to work, partly because Singapore Noodles is already familiar to many. Little convincing is needed to sell its recipes.

• “a cross-cultural mutated freak of nature”
• “the Orient Express to dinner”
• “an oriental summer treat”
• “Asian way to clear out the fridge”

Others exoticise the dish. Even then it isn’t attributed to a certain community, and is loosely categorised as “oriental.”

Glocalising with Curry

• “Indian curry powder”
• “you need British style”
• “that cheap yellow stuff that the British invented”
• “curry is not used in the authentic recipe in Singapore
• “the cornerstone of the dish is curry powder”
• “Malaysian curry powder”
• “it’s the curry that makes this dish Singapore style”

There is no doubt that curry powder is most significant in Singapore Noodles, but it has been neglected as an evidence of localisation. Depending on where they’re from, the media disagree on the type of curry that makes the most “authentic” Singapore Noodles. If each curry is true to their own culture, isn’t the British-style noodles as legitimate as its Malaysian counterpart?

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.