Eating Her Curries and Kway by Nicole Tarulevicz

Author:Nicole Tarulevicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Constructing and Reinventing the “Local”

The category “local” is used in Singapore to signify belonging; it is a device that can both include and exclude. Doris Lau Siew Lang’s slim volume Cook with Love: A Collection of Easy-to-Cook Local Recipes highlights the way the term local is used in cookbooks and in relation to food.27 The book is self-published via the company Ray of Hope, run by Doris and her husband as a self-help and mental-health advocacy concern. The self-help message behind the cookbook underscores a range of Singaporean national social policies that encourage individuals and communities to take responsibility for themselves. And while there are just thirty-eight recipes in the Cook with Love collection, it is perhaps representative of Singapore with its five categories: noodle dishes, curries, soups, sambals, and miscellaneous dishes. Naming and categorizing dishes is a key part of the process of codifying and communicating the national cuisine.

The noodle dishes are Laksa, Lor Mee, Fried Hokkein Mee, Prawn Mee Soup, Char Kway Teow, Mee Goreng, Yong Tau Foo Beehoon Soup, Hor Fun, Wonton Mee, and Fishball Minced Pork Mee Soup. Many of these dishes could equally well be listed in the “soup” category. Laksa, the first of the dishes, holds a special place in the minds of Singaporeans and appears in almost every collection of Singaporean recipes. What is striking about this is that it is not a dish often cooked at home; the recipe, then, has another function—recording for posterity, not for cooking. The dish that is unlikely to be cooked must still be recorded because of the connection it provides to an imagined tradition. Chan Kwee Sung, in his collection of memories of Singapore, laments the passing of the “old laksa”: “The distinctive taste of the original laksa was lost long ago when it was introduced into haute monde eating outlets.” For him, the inclusion of extras such as cockles seems “a sacrilege to the genuine laksa lover.”28 Laksa now is not only a dish eaten out; it is one that has been reinvented. And as we will see in Chapter 8, laksa is also monumentalized in the National Museum of Singapore.

The other dishes that feature in Lang’s collection appear in nearly all other Singaporean cookbooks, too. It is not just laksa that makes the claim of street-food-as-home-food. Char kway Teow, a very Singaporean noodle dish, is much more likely to be eaten out, generally at a hawker stall, than it is to be cooked at home. Local food is understood as street food even though, or perhaps precisely because, it is purchased outside, not cooked at home. In fact, a study of recipe lists in Singaporean cookbooks bears a striking similarity to the items in James Hooi’s Guide to Singapore Hawker Food, which is intended to show the reader “how to order, what to order and other indispensible information to get around the Hawker Food Stalls.”29 What we are seeing is the emergence of a national cuisine composed of dishes cooked for you, not by you, yet still recorded in cookbooks.

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