Khir Johari, The Food of the Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels through the Archipelago. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2022, 624 pp. ISBN: 9789814841924, price: SGD 80.00 (hardcover).

It would be an understatement to say that this magnum opus has done more than previous scholarship on Singapore’s Malay cuisine. While containing 32 unique recipes, it is not a cookbook per se. Nor is it exclusively targeted to academics, who might hope to find this cuisine subjected to some new theory, hypothesis, or method. The author simply writes about the Malay food of Singapore because it is fascinating, important, and worth preserving. The result is a well-researched, aesthetically pleasing monograph containing sixteen chapters, innumerable photographs, illustrations, text boxes, and additional data presented in appendices.

The Food of the Singapore Malays takes its readers through a journey of what Singapore Malays eat and, perhaps more so, what they used to eat. To that end, the author has woven together interviews with food experts, textual sources in Malay, Javanese, and European languages, and his own memories. Beyond a wide range of dishes, ingredients, and cooking paraphernalia, we learn about food practices, beliefs, myths, symbolism, taboos, jokes, and terminology. The author describes in detail the way Malay food tastes, listing twelve flavor categories (p. 274), and how food is garnished, scented, colored, packaged, eaten, named, and immortalized in poetry and proverbs. In doing so, he emancipates Malay cuisine and puts it in the same league as culinary traditions with better international recognition. For example, while food-as-medicine is typically associated with Chinese and Indian cooking, a similar tradition exists in the Malay world. This point is particularly relevant in view of the persistent myth of Malay food being unhealthy.

But who are the Singapore Malays? While Malay communities—including the Orang Laut—are indigenous to the island, most families labeled as such also have ancestors from Java, Bawean, Banjar, South Sulawesi, the Minangkabau area, as well as India and the Middle East. The author treats Singapore as a microcosm of all these places. While he pays ample attention to the external origins of some dishes, the book incorporates the full culinary repertoire that Singapore Malays consider to be their heritage. This is obviously a shared heritage, many elements of which have been better preserved in, say, Sumatra or the Malay Peninsula. At the same time, a number of culinary traditions could be described as uniquely Singaporean, with the Kampong Gelam area—in which the author grew up—surfacing as the island’s main incubator of innovation. Locally created dishes such as mee Maidin, mee rebos, mee Siam, puding gula goreng, and kueh talam jagong illustrate the innovative power that arises when multiple culinary traditions live side-by-side and complement each other. In Singapore, Malays traditionally relied on Tamils to chisel their spice grinders (batu giling) (p. 220) and on Teochews to steam their fish (p. 193). Their own foodways were also readily adopted and adapted by others. In this regard, the author mentions the incorporation of sambal, pineapple tarts, and dried shrimp cooked in chilies (hei bi hiam) into the island’s Chinese culinary repertoire.

Predictably, some readers might deem the book’s depiction of Singapore’s old foodscapes an exercise in nostalgia. We are told about iconic brands and companies that no longer exist, traditions no longer upheld, dishes no longer eaten, and songs no longer sung. As urban development and government policies brought an untimely end to traditional modes of fishing and foraging, the agar-agar is no longer squeezed directly from the seaweed, charcoal-based stoves have been replaced by Miele ovens, and the ubiquitous birthday cake has ousted glutinous rice porridge for this occasion. Only some crumbling reminders remain: the ketupat hung outside public flat units on the eve of Hari Raya, or the “void decks” underneath the buildings that sometimes serve as venues for wedding receptions. Gone are mee odong, ikan terutup, urap beremi, tumis ranga, ayer batu Katong, newspaper-wrapped parcels of unfried opak ubi kayu wafers, and many other delicacies once common in Singapore, having been replaced by such abominations as laksa cookies, nasi lemak burgers, chendol with red beans, and “a mashed-up mix of different cuts of beef put through a roller and cut up according to standardized dimensions” (p. 202) that passes for dendeng. In the eyes of the author, the regular abuse of the Malay language, as seen in the sloppy usage of culinary terms like kueh lapis, kueh talam, daun laksa (= daun kesom), and otah (= otak), is a connected development.

And yet, by chronicling this forgotten past, the book addresses a range of pertinent contemporary issues. Culinary loss, cultural loss, and environmental loss often go together and are best addressed in conjunction. The author convincingly demonstrates how severed connections with the landscape, kitchen illiteracy, and cultural amnesia stand in the way of a meaningful engagement with the Singapore Malay heritage. Rather than placing the blame on the younger generations, he discusses a multitude of factors contributing to the impoverished state of Malay food in Singapore, which include the diminished natural world, competition with international cuisines, economic barriers to keeping food businesses afloat, patronizing health campaigns, and the bureaucracy of halal certifications. As a result, Malay food is now often sold by non-Malays, leading to a further erosion of connoisseurship and a sense of alienation among the younger generations from their own culinary heritage. The book reveals a cuisine that has lost its anchorage, leaving it vulnerable to expropriation and commodification.

This story does not stop at Singapore. The island’s culinary heritage traditionally overlaps with that of Indonesia and Malaysia, especially the parts adjacent to Singapore. Many dishes discussed in the book predate today’s national borders, sometimes by several centuries. Ethnic boundaries, too, were once more fluid and it would be no easy task to entirely separate the cuisine of ethnic Malays from those of other groups. To the author, Malay cuisine, much like the Malay language, is a product of centuries of contact and exchanges between the archipelago’s diverse communities, which made it their own and added to it (p. 523). As a result, there is no contradiction in asserting that the Malay culinary heritage consists of noodles and soy products from China, sweetmeats from the Middle East, kitchenware from Europe, in addition to culinary influences from across the archipelago.

The book contains a wealth of information, both on Malay food and on Singapore, and is replete with delightful anecdotes. The repurposing of cast-iron mincers to grind roasted peanuts (p. 223) reminded me of a similarly creative use of this tool among Indonesian-descended families in the Netherlands to grind large batches of chilies, which were once difficult to find and had to be processed en masse before the resultant paste was frozen for future use. The next generation of cooks will thank the author for his restoration of (almost) forgotten dishes. So, while the sponge cake-like bolu “survives today only in the name of one specific sweetmeat” (p. 294), the book lists twelve versions (p. 321). Few young Singaporeans would be familiar with such dishes as rojak su’un, beyek-beyek, nasi kenanga, roti tangleng, or mee biryani, but the author pays homage to all of them. The photographs are so vivid one can almost smell, taste, and feel the depicted food. The illustrations, especially on the different kueh, accomplish much the same. But even without these visuals, Khir Johari has the talent to “paint” food through his descriptions: “gum-like slivers of myriad colors” float in the bubor chache “like a kaleidoscopic design on a white canvas” (p. 355), whereas “the pinch-and-tum crimping technique” gives the epok-epok “the appearance of a Stegosaurus’ back” (p. 346). If that does not make the stomach growl, perhaps his recommendations of authentic Malay food in Singapore (pp. 548–549) will.

The culinary connections described in The Food of the Singapore Malays can be complemented with several more examples. Teh tarek, a popular type of milk tea whose signature blend has been perfected in Singapore (p. 80), continues to expand its popularity throughout Southeast Asia. It does not do so in isolation. Singaporean chains like Ya Kun Kaya Toast can now be found in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar. The flatbread known as roti Mariam, “a cross between a puri and a paratha fried in clarified butter” (p. 481), has travelled wide from its origins in North Bridge Road and can be enjoyed in Hadhrami-inspired eateries across Java. The tat Wilhelmina of Kampong Gelam has presumably traveled in the opposite direction, as Wilhelminataart was a popular delicacy in the former Netherlands Indies. The prominence at Malay weddings of ghee rice, lamb dalcha, and pineapple pacheri (pp. 399, 446) also reveals broader connections; the same combination is commonly found among several South Indian communities. To know more about these and other linkages, one can only hope that experts of other minority kitchens of Southeast Asia and beyond will be inspired to write similarly impressive books as the one reviewed here.