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 I didn’t expect to find, while browsing old newspaper archives, sambal recipes that call for, separately, binjal, salted fish roe, and banana flower. While a quick search online gave me little leads about the first two renditions, I found contemporary recipes for banana flower sambal—many from Sri Lanka, and one by renown Singaporean cookbook author Sylvia Tan. The old recipe that I found was published in The Singapore Free Press in 1912. It was among three sambal recipes all of which written in both English and Malay. Interestingly, the recipes had a preceding story describing the festivities of Hari Raya. There was no byline, although I speculate that the writer was a British, because he or she made a reference to the old Oxford saying “Fingers were made before forks” when describing the Malays’ preference to eat with their hands. The writer also drew a parallel between the sambal-curry and the English roast beef-Yorkshire pudding relationships.

What is Banana Flower Sambal?

The banana flower sambal recipe (jantong pisang sambal) caught my eye because it was made by boiling banana flowers, cucumber, and chilli in coconut milk. Boiling as a method of combining the ingredients is rather unusual since the sambals that we come across today are typically stir-fried.

Screenshot of Singapore National Library Board’s newspaper digital archive

Sylvia Tan’s recipe was strikingly similar, although she referred to it as a salad. She did not cook the ingredients in coconut milk but treated them separately and then poured the heated and lightly salted milk over. I would love to test this recipe, but if leaves (laksa, curry leaves) are hard to come by in New York, I’m not positive about flowers.

The Sri Lankan Sambola

What comes as a surprise is that the Sri Lankans also have their own version of banana flower sambal, which they call kesel muwa seeni sambol/sambola. In several recipes, banana flower is stir-fried with chilli and other ingredients like saffron powder and curry leaves. Now, if sambal (both the name and the condiment), as I boldly assume, is of Malay origin and is common only in Southeast Asia, the Sri Lankan’s rendition of this dish and the similar sounding “sambol” or “sambola” is a case for study.

When I Googled “sambola Tamil” to find out if “sambola” could be Tamil, one of the languages spoken in Sri Lanka, it brought me to an interesting discovery—a journal article that discusses the origins of many Ceylon (old name for Sri Lanka) dishes. A man named Louis Nell wrote an article titled “The Archeology of Ceylon Eurasian Gastronomy” to debunk a Dutch man’s earlier claim that dishes like tempradu with ghee and onion (soup mixed with onions cooked in ghee), empada (pie), and lateria (threadcakes) were of Dutch origin. Nell made a convincing argument that these foods were actually Portuguese, introduced to Ceylon when it was Portuguese colony, even before the Dutch arrived.

The Dutch man also tried to claim “sambola” as theirs, which led Nell to make the following argument:

Screenshot from The Orientalist Volume 2-3

Unfortunately Nell did not explain how “sambola” was “clearly Malayan,” or when and how the Dutch (or Portuguese, who also landed on Indonesia before the Dutch did) introduced sambal to the Ceylonese. The opposite could have happened. Sambal could have travelled from Ceylon to Southeast Asia through the colonists.

The Sri Lanka-Southeast Asia Food Connection

The etymology of sambal reveals, in The American Heritage Dictionary, that the word had came from sambhar, a Tamil word for a lentil-based broth, which in turn originated from the Sanskrit sambharayati. Dictionary.com also traces back to the same Sanskrit word although the evolution took a different route, through the Marathi sabhar (a seasoning) and the Tamil campal (another seasoning). Sambharayati, according to both sources, means “causes to be brought together.” This makes sense if we think about how making sambal requires combining various ingredients.

Sanskrit was not only used in South Asia but also in most of Malay Peninsula and Indonesia during the Srivijaya dynasty. This means that the travel of sambal between Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka could have gone either way.

Of course, there is more that one can do to determine the “creators” of sambal, but it will be a meaningless pursuit. Most cuisines in the world have elements borrowed from somewhere else. While the study of food history reveals the interconnectedness of global cultures, an obsession to claim ownership of a certain food only draws divide. In the spirit of sambharayati, to bring together, I content myself with concluding at the sambal affinity between Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.