MY “STALL” SELECTIONS
I was fortunate enough to dine at People’s Park the first time with Violet Oon, the Julia Child of Singapore. She was an absolutely fabulous host, and she knew her way around the Singapore food scene and was game for trying everything. We ate fantastic frog porridge and slurped pig soup filled with all the different parts of the pig: liver, heart, lungs, and so on. Grandma is in the back of the stall, stirring ten-gallon pots filled with soup made according to a generations-old family recipe. The pig soup broth base was top-heavy with sweet spices like cinnamon and star anise, ginger, lovely braised greens, and a hint of fresh lime juice to lighten it up. The soup also incorporated melting bits of braised pork rib and shoulder, and paper-thin slices of pig heart, tongue, liver, and other organs. I know that might not be up everyone’s alley, but don’t knock it till you try it.
Violet and I picked some dishes from a duck stall where you can get wings, tongues, split roasted heads, and sliced duck breast. We also devoured the classic Hainan chicken, which is a steamed bird that tastes like no other chicken you’ve placed in your mouth. It’s the way chicken used to taste everywhere, I imagine, and the better hawkers purge and then gorge their birds on a diet designed to increase the brittle nature of the skin and the meat’s fat content. They drizzle the cooked poultry with an aged, thickened, sweet soy sauce and serve it with classic Singaporean-style fried rice. People’s Park was just a phenomenal experience.
Andrew’s Tips on Eating Street Food
~Eat local. Eating the American-style tuna salad at the hotel buffet in Marrakesh is less safe than eating the goat’s head soup in the Djemma el Fna in the same city. It’s a good rule of thumb to remember. In general, when you are in Beijing, don’t eat the burgers at a Hard Rock Cafe. Chefs practice smarter food handling of familiar products, so in China I eat Chinese food, in Italy I eat Italian, and so on. Also, remember that going local means saving money as well.
~Follow the happy face rule. Always eat from the stand with customers, lots of happy customers (bonus points if there are lots of locals). I simply sit on a street and slow down enough to observe which places had the most diners with smiles. It’s an easy trick and you’ll rarely be disappointed.
~Safeguard your stomach. Eat hot food hot and cold food cold, especially in foreign countries. Food safety means more to me when traveling, when I can’t afford a down day due to discomfort. Washing hands, using antibacterials, and other commonsense practices are musts.
Violet turned my crew and me on to a place called Tian Jin Hai Seafood Restaurant. Tian Jin Hai is the brainchild of Francis Yeo, who ran a successful seafood hawker stall for ten years.
Yeo earned a reputation for incredible chili crab at his stall. Chili crab, the Singaporean national dish, features giant mud crabs with thick shells and stout claws. He offers eight or nine different varieties on his menu—black pepper, rice wine, black bean, and the traditional sweet chili, just to name a few. The crab is broken apart and lightly steamed so it just holds together. It’s cooked again in chef Yeo’s killer sweet chili sauce. It’s a great dish to pick through, spending some quality time cracking and working the meat out of the crab’s nooks and crannies. You suck on the thick, sweet chili paste that gets all over your fingers and your face. It’s probably the only time that making a huge mess is encouraged in Singapore. After I tried chili crab a couple different ways, I cleaned up with some hot towels and moved on to Yeo’s newest creation: steamed shark’s head.
This is a dish that Yeo claims he invented and, interestingly, it’s a dish that has no meat on it at all. Singaporeans, like the rest of the world outside of our country, eat from snout to tail, using every part of the animal, because they have never lost connection with the idea that they should never waste a thing. Finances dictate it, as does culinary ideology. Yeo noticed this was not the case with shark—the heads always went to waste. He experimented with the shark’s heads and ended up with a novel dish you’re not going to find anywhere else.
He starts by stripping down the skin, trimming the head, and cutting out the gills. You’re left with a pointy, triangular piece of bone with thick slabs of what look like pale, gelatinous tendons hanging from it. These are the connective tissues that make the jaws of the animal move up and down with such mind-boggling strength. Yeo makes lateral incisions perpendicular to the bone so that all these big flaps of cartilage protrude like fingers. He steams the shark’s head in light sweet soy sauce and rice wine, which removes the pungent (and often nasty) off flavors typically present in fish heads.
After four hours of steaming, those gelatinous pieces of cartilage will melt in your mouth. Next, Yeo puts this head on a platter, drizzles it with a sturdier soy sauce, and finishes it with shaved ginger and scallion. You pull off these little bits of cartilage from the head and eat them. The texture reminds me of perfectly cooked sea cucumber, yielding a slight crunch as you sink your teeth in but melting away after just a hint of pressure. The rich, buttery flavor reminds me of bone marrow. This is one of the most unusual dishes I’ve ever had, but trust me, it’s absolutely addictive. It sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie, but the flavor, texture, and novelty simply blew me away. It’s certainly not the type of thing anyone would ever order on his own, but it’s worth a try if you get the opportunity.
LITTLE INDIA
Just across the city is a completely different food experience. I toured Little India with Anita Kapoor, a local Indian woman who works as food writer and TV host. She is superbly knowledgeable and understands the food scene in Singapore, especially in her neighborhood.
The highlight for me was the Banana Leaf Apolo. This is an Indian restaurant that, though not responsible for inventing fish head curry, takes credit for making it globally famous. We sat down in this cafeteria-style eatery where you eat from banana leaves in the traditional style, ordering rice, some condiments, and bowls of curried fish heads. These aren’t tiny fish heads, either, but are taken from giant red snapper with enough of the neck in place to provide ample meaty benefits in addition to little tasty treasures like the cheeks, eyes, tongue, and bits of skin.
When cooked correctly, a fish head offers so much tender and delicious meat. Frankly, I get bored with mildly flavored, everyday fillets, so every once in a while a more aggressive fish concoction just hits the spot. The spicy curried broth loaded with root vegetables, greens, onions, and tomatoes is the perfect partner to a fish head. You scoop the broth and bits of the fish head onto your rice and eat everything by hand. Never use your left hand at the table! Indian culture reserves this hand for more personal bodily functions.
A MEDICINAL MEAL
I was then back with Violet Oon, who introduced me to one of the most interesting approaches to cuisine I’ve ever experienced. The Imperial Herbal Restaurant in VivoCity, located on beautiful Harbourfront Walk, specializes in TCM, or Traditional Chinese Medicine. The restaurant sets out not only to nourish, but to cure whatever ails your body. The menu is chock-full of exotic ingredients: antelope horn, dried sea horse and cordyceps (a fungus), deer penis—nothing illegal, mind you. Once we arrived, we sat down with Dr. Fu, a TCM physician.
He took my pulse, examined my tongue, and checked my body by prodding and poking me all over with his fingers. He did a lot of staring at me. The consultation ended with a prescription for particular foods to cool down my body parts that had gotten overheated, warm up my parts that had gotten too cold, tone down my yang, replenish my ying … You aren’t required to undergo the medical examination in order to eat at this remarkable eatery, but I don’t understand why you wouldn’t. I suppose many customers, especially locals, already have an herbalist prescribing food for their health, so they just go in and enjoy the fabulous cuisine.
THE EARLIEST CHINESE CUISINE
No trip to Singapore would be complete without eating at a Peranakan restaurant. This was the stuff I was most eager to try. Peranakans are also known as Straits Chinese, named after the Straits Settlements, a group of
territories created by the British in Southeast Asia in 1826. Basically, the term refers to people in the region of Chinese descent.
Peranakan is old-school Singapore and refers to the earliest Chinese who immigrated there and intermarried with Malays, giving rise to a unique culture and cuisine. Singapore’s Katong district is the place to see and experience this culture in action. The historic neighborhood houses a famous spice garden containing more than one hundred different spices that grow abundantly in Singapore.
THE BUA KELUAK NUT
It was there that I met up with a young chef named Ben Seck who comes from a family that specializes in Peranakan cooking. He introduced me to one of the strangest fruits I’ve ever encountered. The fruit, which grows on giant trees, contains a black nut known as a bua keluak. What’s bizarre about this nut is not its flavor necessarily, but the fact that it is extremely poisonous. Detoxifying the nut is a tedious process (which I am baffled that someone ever managed to figure out in the first place), beginning with breaking the fruit open and picking out only the seeds. Next, the seeds get buried in volcanic ash for a hundred days. After the nuts are dug out of the ground, they are soaked in water for three days to wash away the ashes. After all this, each nut must be smelled before it is chopped up to ensure it hasn’t gone bad. Just one bad nut will spoil an entire dish, making it toxic to consume. Once you’ve culled the good nuts from the bad, you can begin to work with them.
COOKED FROM MEMORY
The Seck family restaurant, True Blue Cuisine, is extremely popular in Singapore. Ben shares the cooking duties with his mother, Daisy Seah, who is arguably the most famous Peranakan chef in the country.
The restaurant is located in a restored two-story town house, and walking through the front door is like stepping back a hundred years. What’s special about the food is that the recipes are not written down. Rather, they’ve been passed from generation to generation. Mother and son created some of the most interesting, authentic dishes using the bua keluak nuts, including a duck soup that was just absolutely glorious with the cooked fruit. The paste from the nut smells like coffee and dark chocolate, almost like a fermented mocha with elements of burnt caramel and bitters. The paste works on the plate much like a condiment, and once you crack open the cooked nuts, you can spread the paste on anything. It enhances everything it touches, sort of like a naturally occurring Peranakan version of Vegemite.
I sampled a braised-chicken dish with fermented shrimp paste and rice. Somehow, when mixed with rice, the bua keluak lost some of that coffee and chocolate flavor and instead offered a light, citrusy finish. The nut can change flavors depending on what it’s cooked with, making it the Zelig of the food world. This is a very complex and interesting ingredient, but the braised chicken was not the quintessential Peranakan dish I’d been dying to try.
THE ORIGIN OF LAKSA
No one is exactly sure how laksa earned its name. One group claims that the name stems from the Hindi-Persian word lakhshah, which refers to a type of noodle. Some say it’s derived from the Chinese word la-sha, which is pronounced “lots-a” and means “spicy sand,” due to the ground dried shrimp that typically goes into the soup. Another theory is that it’s a Hokkien term that means “dirty,” a reference to the messy appearance of the dish.
But regardless of how it came to be, “laksa” generally describes two different types of noodle soup dishes, curried laksa and assam laksa. Assam laksa is something that I’ve seen more often in northern Southeast Asian countries, especially in the upper half of Thailand, where the base for the dish typically is a sweet-and-sour fish soup. In Singapore, laksa is usually built around a curried coconut soup. Most of the versions are yellowish red in appearance, with dried prawns that give them a shrimpy flavor, complete with a curry gravy or soup. Thick rice noodles, known as laksa noodles, are typically used in this dish.
However, sometimes thin rice vermicelli are used, and these are known as bee hoon or mee hoon. Foodaholics will argue that one noodle or the other makes a laksa more or less of an authentic experience, but I’m not sure it’s as easy as that.
I was turned on to curried laksa growing up in New York City, where we ate a lot of Thai and Indonesian food. The main ingredients of the laksas that I knew as a kid were pieces of tofu and fish, shrimp, sometimes cockles or clams, and maybe bits of julienned chicken if you were at a fancier restaurant. Many places add a nice kick by cooking chilies in the broth or by putting a spoonful of nuclear-hot sambal on top just before serving. Of course, the variety of the options—even in New York—is nothing compared to how divergently this dish is represented in Southeast Asia. Malaysians often use Vietnamese cilantro in theirs, and refer to it as daun kesum. In Penang, where I went four or five years ago, the dish is known as curried mee because of the liberal use of mee hoon noodles. Curried mee is a delicacy to the Malaysian Chinese community, especially when served with cubes of congealed pork blood. There are so many versions of laksa, it’s hard to keep track. My personal favorite is Nyonya laksa, made with coconut milk. Katong laksa, a variant of Nyonya laksa, comes specifically from the Katong area of Singapore, where they cut the noodles into smaller pieces so the dish can be easily eaten with a spoon. Some people say Katong laksa is the true Singaporean national dish. I’ve only tried the variety with cut-up noodles two or three times, but to me, the curried laksa with long, thick noodles is king. What can I say? I’m a slurper.
MY SEARCH FOR MARY’S CORNER
I spent my entire trip to Singapore carrying around a notebook with “Mary’s Corner” listed on the back. No address, just a name. Whenever we were out and about, I begged our driver to pull over if we ever glimpsed it. Near the end of the trip, we finally found this humble little restaurant. As is often the case with any good eater, sometimes you have to take hostages, and at times my crew suffers the slings and arrows of being pulled like little bits of flotsam and jetsam in a storm all over cities in search of certain types of food. This was no exception. I made everyone have some.
Mary’s is situated in the Nan Sin Eating House on East Coast Road, with two or three outdoor tables. Orders are placed at a window on the street that fronts the postage-stamp-size kitchen. You get your bowl, sit at one of the tables, slurp down your soup, and move along. At peak hours, the line stretches around the corner, with most people opting to have their laksa to go.
On our visit, I took a moment to peer into the kitchen, where I could see down a narrow space that reached about forty feet back into the rear storage rooms, all the way through to another business in the next building. This interior hall led to the prep area, where I spied Mary presiding over a giant vat—almost like a garbage can—of boiling soup. The noodles are cooked separately and the old woman puts them into a bowl; ladles the liquid gold over the noodles; scatters poached shrimp, bean sprouts, cilantro, sambal, and bits of tofu on top; and hands you a steaming-hot bowl of goodness.
While this might sound like a simple operation, the guys she’s got making noodles to order would beg to differ. And when I say made to order, I mean made from scratch, hand-rolled in multiple portions, batches-to-order. That to me is one of the hallmarks of a great laksa. Are you pounding your own paste for your soup? Are you making your own noodles? At Mary’s, they cook thirty or forty portions of handmade noodles at a time. There’s not a knife; there’s not a cutter or machine. Instead, they use that old Chinese repetitive knead-and-fold methodology.
After repeating this process for about eight minutes, the noodle maker basically raises the tube of dough up over his head and slams it on the table, where it explodes into a thousand strands of pasta. It’s one of the most glorious techniques I’ve ever seen.
Mary’s laksa was impressive. Sure, it had the sandy, ground-up dried shrimp. It had the rich coconut milk I adore. It had the traditional, thick white laksa noodles. And, yes, it had a curry flavor. But what really put this soup in a league of its own was the fact that it wasn’t made with a fish soup base, but instead was created with a strong
, rich, briny, and crustaceously awesome shrimp soup. When that base was cooked with the coconut milk, you ended up with one of the best spicy Asian shellfish bisques that I’ve ever encountered. Sprinkle that soup with some ground nuts, the bean sprouts, the cilantro, a lime wedge, sambal (chile sauce), the blanchan (dried shrimp paste), and you have a dangerously sweet, sour, salty seafood noodle explosion on your hands.
I realize I throw around superlatives a little too much, and I’m always warning myself not to say things like “it was the best bowl of soup I had ever had,” but boy, I’m drooling just sitting here writing this. I can taste that shrimpy goodness and can almost feel the sweat popping out between my eyebrows, which lets you know the soup is perfectly and intensely infused with chilies. You can’t stop eating it. I admit, I might be romanticizing this soup a little because the nearest bowl is three thousand miles away. Or maybe it’s the fact that I may never have the opportunity to devour it again. But having said that, I still insist that the simplicity of the dish, the freshness of the noodles, and the immediacy of the cooking preparation made this my ideal bowl of laksa.
My love of Chinese food borders on obsession. For the record, this Chinese food I speak of is not a plate of indistinguishable fried hunks of meat, tossed in a wok and coated with a sticky cornstarch-based sauce. That’s an American take on Chinese food, something you often find at food courts. I occasionally indulge in this all-you-can-eat buffet-style Chinese food, but trust me, real Chinese food it isn’t. You don’t need to travel to the People’s Republic to find authentic Chinese food. I’ve experienced some of the most authentic Sichuan food in St. Paul, Minnesota. All that is required is access to ingredients and a good skill set in the kitchen. Honesty and authenticity don’t have a lot to do with location, although location often helps.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 10
