Khir Johari Digs Deeper To Uncover "The Food Of Singapore Malays" - Men's Folio
Lifestyle, Wine & Dine

Khir Johari Digs Deeper To Uncover “The Food Of Singapore Malays”

  • By Men's Folio

Khir Johari Digs Deeper To Uncover "The Food Of Singapore Malays"
11 years of anthropological, and auto-ethnographic research by Khir Johari has led to a book debut titled The Food of Singapore Malays, a treasure trove of 400 photographs of food and culture around the region and 32 detailed recipes for Malay dishes.

My fondest memory as a kid was my first time munching on sate kerang (steamed cockles skewered on the dried spine of coconut fronds and doused in peanut sauce) prepared by relatives in the four kitchens of Gedung Kuning where I grew up. Most of these traditions are preserved in many Malay households. One example is the cooking and weaving of ketupat with young coconut leaves — an artisanal process that takes skill, patience, and time.

A few, however, have been lost to the time pressures of modern-day living. You have to cook with sincerity. When you cook with pride and care for the people you love, you will always give your best, and never cut corners.

Khir Johari Digs Deeper To Uncover "The Food Of Singapore Malays"
An image featured in The Food of Singapore Malays by Khir Johari: Dexterous hands rolling the batu giling.

Soon after moving to the Bay Area in California to study and then to teach, I was able to embrace the city as my second home. As non-American Asians are a minority there, I took it upon myself to be a cultural ambassador of sorts. Once, I even had the privilege of cooking a spread of Singapore dishes for a dinner party held in honour of the Mayor of Cupertino!

California’s Asian kitchens however have mostly been colonised by American tastebuds. What I missed most was the range and complexity of flavours found in Malay food. At present, it is generally accepted that there are five core tastes in cuisine — sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. However, there are 12 flavour categories in the Malay language. Half of these categories are not perfectly translatable into English.

It is important for us to understand what “Malay” refers to. The term encompasses multiple, overlapping identity categories. Are you Malay by race (an anthropological definition), ethnicity (perceived as language and cultural practices), nationality, geography, self-identification, or cultural affiliation? I don’t think Malay people in any part of the world can be reduced to a singular “cultural identity.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Khir Johari (@khir19)


Scholars and researchers write plenty of books on all kinds of topics. Books on Southeast Asia by Asians and non-Asians have long existed in the bookshelves of libraries and bookshops. Unfortunately, and perhaps more so in this digital culture of social media and short attention spans, many people are unaware of this because they don’t read widely.

The Malay Archipelago is a cradle of culinary flavours from all over the world. Historically, it was a hub of cultural globalisation – a center of international exchange that was even larger than that of the Mediterranean. Kampong Gelam is a microcosm of multiculturalism in Singapore, home to a more diverse mix of nationalities and ethnic communities than you would ever find in any other part of the city. HMV’s 1954 recording titled, “Singapore in Kampong Jawa,” bears testimony to this fact.

Back in the day, Kampong Gelam had the largest concentration of Malay intelligentsia in the whole of Malaya. These included teachers, politicians, doctors, traders, merchants, writers, publishers, artisans, and food innovators. Singapore even had a Sultan who lived with his family in a royal citadel in the heart of Kampong Gelam.

It is not true that there is little documentation of Malay cuisine in terms of published cookbooks and recipes. Perhaps what seems lacking is a sustained effort to understand and analyse Malay cuisine from a historical, geographical, and anthropological perspective. 

Khir Johari Digs Deeper To Uncover "The Food Of Singapore Malays"
A 360 degrees view of The Food of Singapore Malays by Khir Johari.

One of the reasons I wrote The Food of Singapore Malays was precisely to challenge misconceptions like how it is always fried or oily. Malay cuisine’s rich repertoire consists of many non-fried, non-oily dishes, some of which are hardly found in public eateries. Malay food is spicy but it is not necessarily chilli hot. Sambal belacan uses only one type of spice – the chilli – which may make it hot. A dish like soto ayam uses coriander seed, cumin, star anise, cinnamon, turmeric, galangal and ginger – all of which are not hot unless you add the chilli padi sambal. 

Malay food is also perceived as oily. Not only do we have a wide range of grilled and soupy dishes, but a typical Malay meal at home consists of rice, fish, vegetables and condiments. The fish can be in a clear broth or a curry; it can also be pan-fried or grilled. Vegetables are actually at the heart of a Malay meal, served raw or in a salad (ulam), as well as sauteed. Condiments such as a sambal of some form help to bring together the meal. There is always a balance of rich, spicy, tart and neutral.

The Malays originally used coconut oil, now recognised for its health benefits and sold at a premium. Santan, coconut cream that imbues a delicious richness (lemak in Malay of which santan first spawned the term as a way to describe its distinct quality) to our dishes, has also been proven to be good for you. 

There is also a rich body of work on food as medicine in the Malay world. Our familiar hawker centre fare is but a sliver of the impressive range of Malay cuisine. All of us need to be continually educated because there is so much more out there in the world to learn. So hopefully my book will play a part in this educative process.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Khir Johari (@khir19)


The 32 recipes were photographed by Law Soo Phye because besides being an outstandingly talented photographer, she impressed me with her deeply respectful attitude towards Malay culture and her nuanced eye for the aesthetics of Malay food. They were handpicked to illustrate the range and diversity of Malay gastronomy. Put it this way: it is a sweet and savoury degustation menu, designed to showcase the deliciousness of grains and vegetables, rice and noodles, meat and seafood galore, curries and consommé. These recipes range from the simple to the complex, and are representative of both ancient and newly minted recipes. 

If there is a dish that is emblematic of the Malay Archipelago, it would be the pindang, also known by its cognates as singgang or sinigang depending on its location on the map of insular Southeast Asia. The pindang tells the story of two main ingredients from the two ecosystems of land and sea: namely, the tamarind and fish coming together in a pot. It is the version popularised by Portuguese Peranakan, known as pindang serani, that I chose for this book to demonstrate the concept of ‘peranakanness’.

There are medicinal herbs to be found in the wisdom of many indigenous peoples around the world, including the Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. Similarly, Malays have developed their own system of traditional medicine for healing the sick. Within the category of medicinal foods, there is the jamu tradition — an ancient system of herbal healing that has its roots in Java. 


An image featured in The Food of Singapore Malays by Khir Johari: Berkarang at low tide.

It took me this long — plan and write, rewrite, and re-plan which was similar to working on a university thesis or dissertation — because the process demanded an interdisciplinary approach where I had to be a historian, a geographer, an anthropologist, a botanist, a literary critic, a world-traveller, a photographer, a theatre director, a cultural ambassador, a chef, and a food critic all at once. And all this took time to learn, especially since there was also so much to read and digest!

I amassed a unique Southeast Asian collection of artworks, rare books and artefacts, food anthropology items, and music recordings. With information so scattered, you have to be not just a historian, but a botanist, zoologist, and anthropologist in order to connect the dots.

The process of data collection and analysis involved regional trips across the Malay Archipelago to discover older food-ways by interviewing different people in different Malay communities, observing how they cooked and prepared their meals, tasting and trying out their recipes, and even exploring the natural environment from which they sourced their ingredients. This could have been taken a long time, but hundreds of people in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia came forward to contributed photographs, anecdotes, and even their homes once they understood that this book was meant to document their way of cooking and living.  

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Khir Johari (@khir19)


A dish that is fairly ubiquitous in celebrations is the pulut kunyit – steamed glutinous rice coloured with turmeric and flavoured with coconut cream. In Malay culture, rice is regarded as a sign of prosperity, and yellow signifies nobility, power, and sovereignty. The stickiness of the rice symbolises the strength of social bonds, just as cooking and eating are Malay communal practices that serve to bring people and families together. Such is the significance of its role that even Singapore Chinese devotees on a Kusu Island pilgrimage bring pulut kunyit prepared by Malays to visit the revered shrines there. 

Some natural ingredients used to prepare dishes, for example, can also be a preventive measure against potential illness. For example, the sour juice of the belimbing fruit is said to help control sugar levels and lower blood pressure. Kapor (chalk-lime)is used in a variety of Malay confections. It is believed to possess antacid-like properties.The Malays in the past and present were, and are, far more sophisticated and forward-thinking than some people give them credit for. Take the king of fruits, for example. The Malays have intimate knowledge of the tree as timber, the medicinal properties of itsbark, root, seeds and leaves.

There are dedicated names for different stages of durian fruiting, complete with anatomical terms foreach part of the fruit. The Malay nomenclature of durian varieties alone is both scientific and poetic. There was even a whole movement to preserve heirloom varieties against the march of urbanisation and commercialisation. Sustainability seems to be a trendy and timely topic today, but it has always been a mantra within Malay culture. My cultural and ethnic roots lie deep in the history of Nusantara soil. I had to dig hard to uncover and rediscover what time and tide have either buried or swept under the carpet.

Once you’re done with this story about The Food of Singapore Malays by Khir Johari, click here to catch up with our February 2022 issue!