We are all fooling ourselves when we deem some cultural aspects as "authentic." Actually, sometimes they are not really authentic as much as they are just really old and most everyone has forgotten their foreign origins. Who wouldn't dream of having an authentic and delicious pizza made in a Neapolitan cafe? Neapolitans invented pizza, but the ingredients don't originate locally: wheat comes originally from Turkey, tomatoes come originally from Mexico, and the list goes on. But who can remember?
Some have criticized Singapore for not having an "authentic" culture because it's merely an amalgamation of foreign cultures: Chinese, Indian, Malay, and European. The Malays were here first but received Islam from Arab conquerors. The Chinese and Indians largely came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as laborers. You would be hard pressed to find in China many so-called Chinese dishes served in Singapore -- except maybe at a Singaporean or Malaysian restaurant. At traditional Chinese dinners in Singapore you can often find a curry on the menu. Curry just means sauce made with spices. You would usually expect to see curries in Indian, Malay, or Thai restaurants but not usually in Chinese restaurants (outside of Singapore/Malaysia, of course).
Peranakan food is one of those cultural amalgams you find in southeast Asia. Christine and I shared a lovely dinner on Friday at Candlenut, a Peranakan restaurant in Singapore.
When thinking about the myriad cultural influences of Singapore, maybe it helps to think about its location. Singapore sits at the eastern opening of the Strait of Malacca, a relatively narrow passageway of water between Malaysia and Indonesia. The strait forms a bottleneck for shipping between east Asia and lands to the west (south Asia, Africa, Europe). For thousands of years traders from Arabia, India, Europe, and China plied these waters and in fact still do. A huge volume of cargo continues to flow through the strait. The travelers brought bits of their homes with them and deposited them in Singapore when they stopped to trade.
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| Can you see the Strait of Malacca circled in red at the bottom left? |
The Peranakans are descended from Chinese male immigrants who in the years between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries settled along the Strait of Malacca and married local Malays as well as brides from China that they sent for. You may observe that Peranakan culture and aesthetic appears more Chinese than Malay; Peranakans may be called Straits Chinese. The Peranakan language is a mixture of Malay and Hokkien, a Chinese dialect from southeastern China.
Peranakan food is the result of Chinese people cooking with local ingredients and influences. The style is perhaps further divorced from China than Singaporean Chinese food because it is older. I am not knowledgeable enough to adequately describe this exotic food, so I quote the below from Wikipedia, which refers to Peranakan as "nonya," a common term for Peranakan:
Nonya cooking is the result of blending Chinese ingredients with various distinct spices and cooking techniques used by the Malay/Indonesian community. This gives rise to Peranakan interpretations of Malay/Indonesian food that is similarly tangy, aromatic, spicy and herbal. In other instances, the Peranakans have adopted Malay cuisine as part of their taste palate, such as assam fish and beef rendang. Key ingredients include coconut milk, galangal (a subtle, mustard-scented rhizome similar to ginger), candlenuts as both a flavoring and thickening agent, laksa leaf, pandan leaves (Pandanus amaryllifolius), belachan, tamarind juice, lemongrass, torch ginger bud, jicama, fragrant kaffir lime leaf, rice or egg noodles and cincaluk - a powerfully flavored, sour and salty shrimp-based condiment that is typically mixed with lime juice, chilies and shallots and eaten with rice, fried fish and other side dishes.
I don't believe I can describe the tastes of our meal at Candlenut, so I will narrate through photographs.
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| Candlenut's menu |
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| small bites (from the menu) |
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| Various mains: I really don't know the names for all of these, but I promise they were delicious. |
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| Dessert menu -- some of the ingredients sound very foreign and are mostly names of ingredients you just don't find very often outside of this region; sometimes they could be hard to find even in this region. |
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| Candlenut interior |
I believe it wrong to debate the "authenticity" of any cultural institution in Singapore. Is it Malay, Chinese, what? I believe the government here wants people to think their cultural roots aren't deep. This way, the government controls the institutional story, which invariably demands Singaporeans' implicit trust in these highly intelligent men who are saving Singaporeans from a mean-spirited world. Peranakan food is just part of the cultural panorama that has prevailed in this part of the world that for centuries has been created by travelers and immigrants. And Candlenut is a great restaurant. Singapore is an entrepôt, through where many peoples have passed over the years, and its culture is a reflection of what they brought with them and what they did with it when they arrived. It's not that Singapore houses several unique cultural streams flowing independently. In fact it's that Singapore by nature is a panorama of cultures that have converged into something that is uniquely Singaporean.
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