Malacca Food

Singaporeans like going to Malacca, for two reasons: Eating and shopping! I have to admit I am no exception. Yes, it is a charming, historical town.  And yes, I should probably make more of an effort to visit a few of its many museums. But, as I always say, always leave something for next time.

When I was last in Malacca one year ago, I must admit that I did not come back raving about the food.  Maybe we didn't go to the right places (although highly recommended, I thought they were over-rated).  This time round, I thought that the food was much better. 

We went off for lunch directly after we finished checking in to our hotel, at the Calanthe Art Cafe.  I did visit this place last year but only tried their coffee. The place has charm and it is a pleasant place to be in the heat of the afternoon.  Its walls are covered with murals and creative art displays.  Two old televisions bring us back to yesterday.  One has been converted into an aquarium!  The cafe proudly proclaims that it sells 13 States Coffee, the blends based on the specialty of each Malaysian state.  It also sells laksa, which of course we had to sample given that it was advertised as one of Malaysia's best 50 laksas!  I've realised that the Malaccans don't use the thick bee hoon noodles, just yellow noodles or bee hoon.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed the lemak gravy and the different toppings of egg, cucumber, fishcake and others.  

We went for dinner subsequently at Capitol Satay in Bukit Cina. I enjoyed the food, and the fun of cooking the items in the thick peanut sauce. Especially memorable was the huge shrimp we ate, which we had to ask specially for.  For the record, it was pretty good, even though ratherdifficult to shell and thereafter to eat given the size.  It was a memorable meal, but I think one visit to Capitol is enough, the queue is just too much.

The other truly enjoyable meal was our dinner at the Equatorial Hotel nonya restaurant, Seri Nyonya. Now people recommend other restaurants in Malacca, but thus far Seri Nyonya is myfavourite.  The cooking is more refined and less oily, and there is a better variety of dishes to choose from.  We had the butterfly fish for starters (thin, crisply deep-fried fish slices with a dressing of lime, shallots, chilli) followed by ayam buah keluak, sweet potato leaves fried with sambal belacan, and yummy sambal prawns with assam sauce.

So these are my three food recommendations for those aiming to take a trip to Malacca.

Food Bites Old and New

It's been a while since I featured any Katong eateries on this blog.  Partly because I lost my old Sony Ericsson K500i with its really excellent camera phone (nothing has been the same since) and partly because the food scene in Katong tends to shift so fast; all very well when new restaurants come in but then the old ones depart and my blog becomes out-of-date :-(  Anyway, thought I'd restart this again, with one old favourite and one newcomer on the scene. 

The time-tested favourite is Glory Catering, on East Coast Road (near the junction with Joo Chiat Road).  It's a small shop, distinguished by all the kueh kueh in front, and the jars of pineapple tarts and other goodies in the crowded entranceway.   Glory prides itself on its pineapple tarts, which are indeed pretty good (for bought rather than homemade tarts that is), and there are a number of newspaper reviews on the walls of the restaurant which serve as an endorsement of their prowess.

The cooking is pretty good - the tasty, lemak chicken curries (chicken rendang,  masak merah are my favourites), sambal squid and sambal goreng. It's amazing how fast the turnover is - food is served quickly (but don't expect beautiful presentation) and people eat and leave in a jiffy.  I also enjoy their soft drinks -- they serve Bundaberg ginger ale, root beer and others.

The new kid on the block is Makan Peranakan, also on East Coast Road (Telok Kurau Road junction).  Situated in "Food R Us", the corner coffee shop of the Peranakan Hotel, it is a little stall which sells selected peranakan dishes - old favourites like mee siam, laksa, and kueh pie tee and more unusual dishes like nasi kunyit, nasi ulam.  My favourites are the mee siam (savoury, with decent sized prawns) and the pie tee (tasty filling in a nice crisp pie tee shell).  It's a pretty new outlet and if you fancy the mee siam, go early because it runs out fast. The nasi kunyit (glutinous rice, coloured with golden tumeric) is served with a really tasty chicken curry, prawns and some omelette.  The most unusual dish here - the nasi ulam, full of herbs and (strangely) little bits of fish, is pretty tasty but tends to get a little dry. 

In general, however, the zhi cha at Food R Us is  pretty solid.  Good, tasty fare and friendly staff (who remember our preferences) make it the place we go to again and again (that and being right on our doorstep).  So if you happen to be around the East Coast Road area and looking for a bite to eat in the evening, give this a try.

Auspicious Chinese New Year wear

I was wandering around Chinatown at the end of last year together with a friend of mine.  There are a few small little stalls in the Chinatown Complex on Smith street, selling sarong kebaya.  One was so crowded that it made browsing the shelves a little difficult (we are talking about something the size of a hawker stall here) but another a little further down with a smaller selection, was easier to see and access.  To my great delight, they had a series of nice kebaya tops in dark pink rubbia cotton for very reasonable prices.  Whilst I don't think that the quality of the embroidery work was as good as that on my existing kebaya, it was still pretty decent.  So I ended up getting my outfit for Chinese New Year in this little Chinatown stall.  What was a little sad was that the complex was quite quiet, with all the tourists milling around the streets just outside. 

One thing led to another.  I obviously am no where near completion on my first beaded slipper and I didn't think my existing pair went that well with my new kebaya top.  So I made my way to Katong Shopping Centre and there in another basement shop I found a pair of rather nice (and surprisingly comfortable) shoes and in another shop a few doors down picked up the kerosang.  Again, I must admit that even my pathetic amateur work is probably going to result in much finer beadwork (smaller beads)than that on this pair of kasut manek but I figured no one is going to be looking at my feet that closely.

So please note - there's no need to go all the way to Malacca to get one's nonya outfits - we have locally quite a few shops able to supply all our needs.  And that easily, I was able to venture forth on the first day of  CNY in full nonya regalia :-)  And of course in the most auspicious of colours to boot.

Glam up the Gammon

Christmas ham is a traditional Eurasian staple.  My grandmother would buy hers from a little shop at the corner of Tembeling and East Coast Road.  My mother remembers the ham coming in a sack, all packed in saw dust.  It would be boiled for hours to cook it and to remove some of the salt used to preserve the meat.  The first pieces would be eaten Christmas Eve, after midnight mass, together with achar,  mulligatawny soup and a crisp French loaf.

Today, we just go to Cold Storage and after removing the plastic wrapper, the ham is good to carve and eat.  But of course the challenge of eating all this ham remains.

So, the resourceful Eurasian housewife came up with a way to present it afresh to family members tired of eating the same thing day in day out.  And that's how gammon curry came about.  It's not my family tradition but I found this yummy recipe in Wendy Hutton's Eurasian food cookbook,  "Food of Love".  The whole cookbook can be downloaded so I feel quite comfortable reproducing the recipe here (for the record I bought the hard copy of the book).

I have to highlight that this is not the lemak coconut based curry but a sour, spicy curry cooked with cumin, fenugreek and mustard seeds and sweetened by the addition of prunes. Must admit that I didn't actually have *that* much leftover ham so I had to buy some cured pork belly to supplement the pieces of ham.  But the whole thing tasted great, especially eaten with rice and a cool green pea and mint salad.  The last is definitely not traditional but it goes very well. 

Ingredients
1 tablespoon toasted cumin seeds, pounded till fine
7-8 dried chillies (soaked to soften, pounded finely) - note that the original recipe calls for 8-10 chillis but I think that's a little hot
2 tablespoons oliveoil
approx 100ml red wine vinegar
500g gammon ham or cured pork belly
1/4tsp fenugreek seeds
1/2 tsp brown mustard seeds
16 fresh curry leaves (more if it is frozen or dried)
1/2 cup pitted prunes
green olives
sugar totaste

Directions
1.  Combine the pounded cumin and chilli to form smooth paste and fry in oil till fragrant. Transfer to a bowl, add the vinegar and use the mixture to marinate the meat for about 2 hours.
2. Heat oil and fry the fenugreek, mustard seeds and curry leaves quickly for about 1 minute.  Add the meat (reserve marinade) and stir-fry till brown.  Add the marinade and water to just cover meat.  Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for about 30-40 minutes.
3.  Add the prunes and olives and simmer for another 10 minutes.  Add sugar to taste.

The NUS Baba House

Front Door
Originally uploaded by Taking5

First post of 2011!

I visited the Neil Road, NUS Baba House last month, together with my Dad's three sisters (aka Tua Kor, Ji Kor and Sar Kor - as you can see we use the typical family naming conventions).

The NUS Baba House came about through a donation by the youngest daughter of Baba Tun Tan Cheng Lock, who wanted to preserve a little Baba/Nonya culture in modern Singapore.  The house has been carefully restored to what a typical Peranakan house would be like in the 1920s. This photo featured is of the "pintu pagar", the front entrance door. This particular door is so beautiful - the carvings are so detailed and the gold and silver paint only serve to bring out their beauty. 

Sadly, no photos are allowed inside, so there are not many more photos to feature.    And, in addition to my earlier post on Peranakan houses, I've found this very detailed description online of the typical Peranakan house, so I'm not going to go into that either. I will just give a quick account of the visit and how we experienced the Baba House. 

The four of us were part of a small group touring the House together with a guide.  The group included a small family group of three people - one Baba and two Nonyas (one obviously the little old matriarch of the family) currently residing in Australia but originally from Malaysia.  They were on holiday in Singapore and wanted to take a look at the Baba House.  The rest of the group were "ang mohs".  The guide said that one of the nice things about taking groups around, is that the Peranakans in the group often chime in with their own stories and experiences. (Of course, I can imagine the downsides too). 

We started off in the reception room in the front of the house, where we heard a little on the restoration work done on the house.  Our guide explained that the colour of the house (a bright blue) was similar to the original colour, detected when layers of paint were stripped off.  Whilst the colour might appear a little bright, it would fade over time to a more muted colour. 

Walking into the next room, we looked at the photographs of the former residents of the house.  We were told that the founder of the family first came to Singapore some time in the late 1800s.  The house however was purchased by one of his son's wives.  So it was only the third generation of the family which stayed in the house.  Upstairs, we visited the main bedroom where the old lady would have stayed.  Her marriage bed was against one wall, a smaller day bed against another.  There were a number of cupboards, where I assume she would have kept her sarongs and kebaya, plus a special cabinet for her handkerchiefs.

Whilst we walked through the house, my aunts reminesced about our family home, which was in the city centre (Choon Guan Street, just behind International Plaza) and as such sadly has been torn down and (I think) a tall condo block has taken its place.  We looked at the carvings on the screen dividing the entrance reception room from the rest of the house and they started talking about how, as little children, they had to clean the carvings using a tissue on the end of a chopstick.  We walked through the courtyard, and they talked about the well which used to be in the centre of their courtyard.  They looked at the bedroom, and started talking about their grandmother's (my greatgrandmother's) bed which is of course now in the Peranakan museum.

They were not alone.  We looked at photos of a Peranakan wedding, including the heavily decked out bride.  The litttle old Nonya in our group chipped in to say that the 10 layers of clothing were so heavy, that most nonyas of her generation had stopped wearing most of them.

In some ways, we are indeed in a transition period when many older nonyas and babas are still around and can still relate stories of how they lived, and how their parents lived, so many years ago.  But this generation will not be around forever, so we have only this short time to listen to and record their stories.

The Baba House is only open by appointment, so do check the website for further details if you are interested.