Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  ‘But you’ll love the way that these have been cooked.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll take one then, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll give you two anyway and some Chinese tea on the side.’

  ‘But I’m not thirsty.’

  ‘Never mind, I made this tea especially. My mother gave me the recipe. It’ll stop you catching colds and improve sexual performance.’

  ‘I’ll take fifteen cups, please.’

  ‘I’ll put in some fried chicken for you, too, to go with the tea.’

  ‘But I’ll explode. I couldn’t possibly...’

  ‘Well, I’ve cooked it now. It’s my great-grandmother’s most famous recipe. Our entire family swears by it. Please take it. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.’

  You have no choice but to eat all the food, waddle out of the shop, proceed to a discreet corner and die. I know this to be an incontestable fact because I have expired several times after going to a friend’s auntie’s place to have a wee ‘bite to eat’. It is always the same. Taking your place at the table, you are shocked to find that the table has, in fact, disappeared. No one told you that someone in the family was training to be the next David Copperfield. For the table has vanished under a multitude of bowls, plates and cups, all of which are full. Twenty-seven bowls of fifty-three different dishes later, you realise who the magician was. It was the lady of the house who kept whizzing past you to fill the table with various dishes at breakneck speed.

  So let’s not beat about the bush here. If there is one thing Singaporeans can be truly proud of, it is their dominant food culture that can be traced back to the origins of modern Singapore. When Sir Stamford Raffles was sent by the East India Company in 1819 to find trading outposts along the Straits of Malacca, he saw Singapore and said, ‘That one looks fine, I’ll take it. Do you take American Express?’ Before long, Malays from all over the archipelago, Indians and mainly Chinese all flocked to Singapore to look for work or to trade. By 1841, the population had already passed 40,000 and continued to rise. What did they bring with them in abundance? Their local dishes, of course.

  The Malays enriched their spicy dishes with coconut milk sauces. Their nasi padang, which is a choice of spicy meat, such as mutton or chicken curry, served with various vegetables on a banana leaf, is my favourite. Beef rendang is also delicious but even that pales in comparison to satay. Whether it be chicken, pork or beef, barbecued satay is one of those things that I could eat all day. Though I would like to point out a little fact to certain food court operators. If hawker centre stall owners can afford to sell satay sticks at 30 cents each, take a little profit and still make them taste divine, why, may I ask, do you have to sell them at 60 cents each? Please do not tell me that your overheads are so high that you must charge almost double for something that costs very little to produce. It is just a little observation that tends to make me say, ‘Sixty cents for a stick of fucking satay,’ when the mood takes me.

  Then there is Indian cuisine. Ever since I was a young boy growing up in Dagenham, I have always had a penchant for Indian food after my mother declared it a Saturday night treat. It became a tradition. In parts of England, we tend to have food traditions.

  For example, Friday night is usually fish and chips night. In truth, this was an occasion I dreaded more than I actually enjoyed as my mother would always make me run to the chip shop. She would not allow my younger sister to go to the shopping precinct after dark – an excuse my sister managed to get good mileage out of until she left home at twenty-two, I might add. So it was left to me to perform ‘The Sprint’ to collect the fish and chips. This involved a beanpole of a teenager, i.e., me, running for his life while holding a bag of piping hot fish and chip meals under his left armpit. Arriving home and breathing like a nymphomaniac, he would muster the strength to knock on the door. His mother would open it and, with a face like thunder, say, ‘What took you so long? The chips are freezing cold. Look at them! I’m going to have to microwave them now and you know I hate microwaved chips. I’ll go myself next time.’

  That was our Friday night food tradition. Our Saturday night treat in later years was one I really did enjoy because it involved Indian food. There would be dishes of chicken briyani, various curries, mutton korma, Bombay potatoes, onion bharjis and piles of naan bread and yellow rice everywhere. After which, the family would sit, motionless and silent, on the sofa watching our stomachs swell and taking turns to either fart or burp. Happy times.

  So when I came to Singapore, I was in cuisine heaven. Indians might only make up just over seven per cent of the population but they certainly make their presence felt in food terms. I am told that Northern Indian food is less spicy and uses more cream and ghee whereas Southern Indian dishes favour a greater use of curry leaves, mustard seeds and coconut milk. Ironically, Singapore’s most famous Indian dish, fish head curry, is not an Indian dish but rather a regional creation. Still, it typifies local Indian cuisine and I have yet to come across a Singaporean who does not like it. Roti prata, my own favourite Indian dish, is as simple as it is tasty. Looking a little like flat pancakes and slightly bigger than a compact disc, these flour creations are delightful for supper when they are drenched in curry.

  The best place to go for any of the above is, without a doubt, Little India in Serangoon Road. When I went to Little India for the first time, I went to Komala Vilas and had the South Indian plate. It was divine. For S$5, you get rice and a series of hot vegetable dishes. The best part is that it is free flowing. You go in, wash your hands, find a table, signal to the old Indian guy to put a banana leaf down and the eating begins. There is no time for any spoon and fork nonsense. I have participated in gluttonous competitions to see who could consume the most food. I must confess that I have never won but I have polished off two full plates of rice, curry and vegetables. Try to top that.

  Now, let’s talk Chinese. The Chinese are famous worldwide for their cuisines and I would regularly visit my local Chinese takeaway on the way home from the pub. Of course, food always tastes good when you are drunk and if you are really lucky, you get a chance to see it again in the morning. This was why I used to feel so sorry for Chinese restaurant owners in England. They often got to see their well-prepared dishes ten minutes later, usually sprayed up their windows or on the pavement outside their shop. Sometimes, I sit and watch the hawker stall operators and see how hard they work in sweaty conditions. Although they must have a hard life, I still believe that hawker stall workers are better off than those running takeaway restaurants in the inner cities of England.

  Chinese restaurant owners in England undoubtedly enjoy a higher standard of living because Chinese food there is not exactly cheap. However, I imagine that around 11 o’clock, when the pubs close, their job becomes hellish. Drunks all over the world are renowned for their lack of charm and sophistication, and some in England would not feel out of place at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. In fact, the Straits Times published a report in April 2000 stating that violent attacks on Chinese restaurateurs in London were on the increase and appeared to be racially motivated. To be sure, the Chinese in England make a hell of a lot more money than they would if they ran a hawker stall in Singapore but hawker stall owners do not have to endure racist shit every other night.

  This is just as well because it gives these hawker stall owners more time to concentrate on doing what they do best, producing good grub. There are far too many exquisite dishes to be able to list them all here so I will just mention my favourites. You cannot go far wrong if you ask for char siew fun, which is barbecued pork rice. I am also a bit of an expert on the old chicken curry, seeing as I eat it at least five times a week (I am not kidding), especially the Chinese version with its hot reddish curry and fat potatoes.

  When I eat at a Chinese restaurant, I always get a plate of Chinese mixed vegetables regardless of what else I order. This dish includes carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, cauliflower and heaven knows what else and is cooked and served in an oyster sauce. I could ea
t it all day, along with ginger beef, which is strips of tender beef served with ginger and spring onion and cooked in a thick oyster sauce.

  I suppose the best thing about Chinese food, and this is going to sound awfully obvious, is that it is so varied. With so many Chinese immigrants arriving in the 1820s to escape the poverty, famine and political unrest in China, Singapore soon became home to Hokkiens, Cantonese, Teochews and the many other Chinese provincials who joined the country’s Straits Chinese. Yet if I had to highlight just one group of Chinese settlers for their dish, it would have to be the Hainanese for their chicken rice. For my money, if one dish were to symbolise and represent Singaporean cuisine, it would have to be this one. Its tender chicken is either boiled or roasted, cut into strips and placed across the best-tasting rice in, well, the universe. Cooked in chicken stock that is also served as soup, it is the fluffiest, juiciest rice in the business.

  However, do not think that it is just the French who stuff their faces with frog’s legs. There are several hawker centres and coffee shops that I have been to that keep dozens of live frogs in a tank for you to select from. I speak from experience here. After being in Singapore for about three days, David took Scott and me out for a late night supper and placed a mysterious dish in front of us that looked like undernourished chicken wings fried in batter. The titbits did not taste too badly. They tasted like greasy chicken but with very little meat around the bone. Of course, David then pointed out the tank containing the frogs and laughed – Singapore 1 England 0. Consequently, Scott and I made up some stories about the ingredients that went into some of the famous English dishes that we knew David had tried at Manchester. Let’s just say that when he visits England again, I do not think that he will be eating shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole or spotted Dick in a hurry.

  There are two things to learn from this. First, the English do, to their credit, have some wonderfully eccentric names for their dishes. I believe this is to compensate for the fact that we do not have very many so we tend to go a bit overboard on our culinary creations.

  Second and perhaps far more relevant, the extent and choice of dishes cannot be overstated in Singapore. I have barely scratched the surface with the few that I have mentioned. Despite its small size (it is only 641 square kilometres), Singapore has Thai stalls, Indonesian restaurants, Japanese sushi bars and places where you can get Vietnamese, Korean or even Mongolian food. Then around places like Holland Village, the so-called sophisticated area where all the expatriates hang out, there are Mexican, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and even German restaurants. A food haven for the fussiest of Western tourists.

  I feel, however, that I should point out a little observation about Western food served at hawker stalls. You see, it is not really Western food at all or it certainly is not English food. Whenever I walk past the food stalls in a coffee shop and I pass a Western stall, the owner will invariably say, ‘Hello, sir. Chicken chop for you, sir?’ This always makes me laugh. You see, call me uncultured but I had never even seen a chicken chop before I came to Singapore, let alone eaten one. I confess I am no English aristocrat but even this working-class urchin has eaten at cafés, restaurants and the odd hotel and yet I had never come across a chicken chop and nor had any of my friends. Pork chops, yes, and, of course, we had all eaten lamb chops but never a chicken one. Despite this fact, nearly every single Western stall in Singapore sells them. There is a stall in Toa Payoh Lorong 1 where the friendly owner actually calls me ‘chicken chop’. At first, I thought he was asking me if I wanted a chicken chop but I realised he was, in fact, calling me one.

  I would approach the stall and he would shout, ‘Wah, chicken chop, what you want today?’

  ‘Egg and bacon, can?’

  ‘Can lah, chicken chop, no problem.’

  Sure enough, eggs and bacon would arrive and that would be it. In fact, the eggs and bacon would arrive with cucumber and lettuce, a strange but refined addition to the traditional English breakfast. It is all delicious but I just cannot help wondering where the stall owners get their recipes from.

  Eating out in Singapore is a social occasion whereas it is something that is done out of necessity in England. That is not to say that English people do not enjoy fine dining, we love our grub as much as the next overweight Western consumer. As a rule, however, the restaurant is not our major forum for social interaction, the pub is. Hence, Singapore has a food culture; England has a pub culture.

  When I was eighteen, my step-dad was giving me a lift home one night when we passed the Robin Hood pub in Dagenham, which was notorious for its unruly clientele. As we pulled up at the traffic lights, we saw two guys fighting each other with snooker cues outside probably the world’s shittiest pub. What I remember vividly about the incident was that it was only 10 o’clock in the evening and these two guys were openly brawling. Even more striking was the reaction of my stepfather, which was nothing. Having grown up in West London, he had seen it so many times before that he just made some passing comment about ‘those silly bastards’ and looked away. I was stunned. It was like a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. The two guys were ripping lumps out of each other’s backs while men and women just stood and watched. It really was nothing out of the ordinary.

  That is certainly one advantage of having such a thriving food culture. You seldom hear of Singaporeans having a brawl outside a food court because they have both eaten too much nasi padang. The only violence I have encountered at a restaurant is me hitting companions with noodles as I fight a losing battle with a pair of chopsticks. I am hopeless with chopsticks. I have all the control of a baby holding a marker pen. I can just about manage the wooden ones but when it comes to those heavy silver ones you get in hotels, well, you might as well give me a pair of javelins.

  Having such a dominant food culture does have its drawbacks though. An expatriate friend was on his way home from work one day when he decided to pop in on his Chinese girlfriend for a chat. Being polite, he called her first to let her know he was coming and told her that he had already eaten.

  When he arrived, he discovered to his horror that her parents had kindly prepared him a meal. As you can imagine, there was plenty there. He sat down at the table and looked down at the food. He tried to muster the energy to eat it but he could not. His girlfriend urged him to make an effort because her parents had taken the time to cook it and he would offend them. A valid point. My friend then explained that he had just wolfed down a substantial meal and although he was extremely grateful to her parents and did not want to upset them, he had not asked them to prepare a meal in the first place. An equally fair point.

  The girlfriend’s mother then noticed that my friend was not eating his meal and had a discreet word with her daughter. The girlfriend then told my friend that her mother was a little upset because he was not making an effort. By this stage, the atmosphere was souring rapidly and what had seemed to be a rather trivial matter to him was on the verge of becoming serious. The parents told their daughter that although they understood that her boyfriend had already eaten, he was insulting them by not even trying the food and that he must at least attempt to eat it. When my friend heard this, he actually laughed at the incredulity of it all, which only served to piss off his peacekeeping girlfriend. Exasperated, my friend shovelled down forkfuls of what he later described as the most uncomfortable meal of his life. He spent most of a miserable evening at the girl’s house avoiding her parents and then spent an even more miserable night on the toilet. Apparently, relations between all four protagonists cooled so drastically that it was several weeks before the matter was eventually resolved when my friend apologised.

  Make of this incident what you will. Some would say it was a culture clash; that my friend was intolerant or the girl’s parents too stubborn. Others would argue that the whole episode is stunningly trivial and overblown. I would side with this viewpoint if it had been an isolated incident. But it is not.

  During our first week in Singapore, Scott and I wer
e taken to an auntie’s house for a meal and as always the dishes were delightful. All except one – peanut soup. Along with David’s homemade shark’s fin soup in Manchester, peanut soup is the worst thing that I have ever tasted. Perhaps it was our Western palates stubbornly refusing to acclimatise to a unique taste but the soup affected Scott particularly badly. No one else noticed but I saw him shudder as he swallowed it.

  Now there should be nothing wrong with this. I have yet to meet a person who has liked absolutely everything that he has tasted. After all, we are only human. And I would wager that no one would actually enjoy my mother’s baked potatoes with their razor-sharp, slit-your-throat edges. But as we sat at the dinner table, Scott and I were made to feel most uncomfortable. Our hostess insisted several times that we drank the soup so we grew to like it. Scott bore the brunt of it. He was hemmed in by over-eager aunties who watched him eat every mouthful. Luckily, I was sitting at the other end of the table where I had perfected the unoriginal technique of holding a glass of water in one hand and a spoonful of peanut soup in the other. When no one was looking, I would swallow the soup and then hose down my taste buds before they could cry ‘What the fuck are you doing to us?’ Scott had no chance. He drank at least half the soup before he was left alone. Back at home later that night, he spent over an hour redecorating the inside of our toilet bowl with the soup. Two years later, after he had returned to England, I met up with him and brought up the subject of peanut soup. With no hesitation, he said, ‘I can still remember the taste of that stuff. I thought it was gonna fucking kill me.’ Quite.

  This is the fundamental problem with having such a proud, dominant culture of any kind: there will always be a fine line between pride and arrogance. Walk into any pub in England and tell the landlord that his beer is the worst you have ever tasted and you will not leave with a friendly pat on the back.

  When my dad was drunk, he would champion the quality of British beer. ‘Son,’ he would say, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. He might have played for Manchester United but George Best was the greatest.’