Shiok!. Terry Tan

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      shiok! (she’iok) (adj.)

      sublime, unutterably wonderful, greatly more than satisfactory in all ways, unsurpassably good

      Some wag once said that the quickest way to start a debate in Singapore is to walk up to a random group of people and ask them, “So where can I get the best chicken rice?"

      Eating is the Singapore national sport. An irresistible vein of foodieness runs deep in the Singaporean genetic makeup. We plan lunch over breakfast and dinner over lunch, and then go out to supper. We incessantly trade tips about the best places to get the shiokest dishes. Our Chinese wedding dinners stretch to nine courses over four hours. We endure forty minutes of queueing for a simple bowl of minced pork noodles with black vinegar. Why? Because we can’t find the particular savor of the stall’s old-fashioned chili sauce anywhere else.

      There is a such diversity of ways and places to stuff your face here, from hawker centers and corner coffeeshops to the classiest contemporary Asian and Western restaurants. You can empty your wallet for a French dinner one night and sit down to a $1 dosai (south Indian rice crepe) the next morning. Given the details of our island republic’s history, our egalitarian omnivorousness is no surprise. Over the centuries before and since its founding in 1819 by the Englishman Sir Stamford Raffles, Singapore has had a cultural life braided with Chinese, Malay, Arab, Thai, Indian, Indonesian, Eurasian, colonial British, and continental influences. Our cuisine, then and now, reflects this. How else to explain a Chinese chicken soup with macaroni, crispy shallots, and fried bread croutons? A rich curry of pork ribs and bamboo shoots? A Hainanese chef’s special “chicken cutlets” in H P Sauce-spiked brown gravy with chips and peas? A staple breakfast trio of hot buttered toast slathered with coconut-egg jam, a soft-boiled egg drizzled with dark soy sauce, and a cup of thick, black, highly sweetened coffee? When you grow up with such an eclectic mix of edibles, your taste buds get a uniquely intoxicating education.

      Chinese Cooking: Dialectic Differences Forget the greasy homogeneity of the oriental take-away menu too often found abroad. The true diversity of Chinese cuisine is as wide and deep as regional French or Italian. There is no “Chinese food” per se—there is food from Hunan and Swatow and Beijing and Yunnan and Shanghai and that’s without considering the web of Chinese ancestry extending throughout Southeast Asia, the Thai-Teochews, Indonesian Chinese, and so on, each strand of which has its own culinary distinctions.

      Terry comes from the match of an Indonesian Chinese father and a mother whose antecedents came from the early Peranakan clans of Malacca, Penang, and Thailand. Then again, his father’s family also had Hokkien roots in China’s Fujian Province, and his mother’s family a branch of good Teochew stock from Swatow Province. Every family feast was a glorious tok panjang—the Peranakan festive offering of dishes spread across a long table. Chris’s maternal grandfather was a true-blue baba who married a true-blue Cantonese lady, and their household meals were an eclectic mix of classics from both worlds, brought together in a mouthwatering alchemy.

      In essence, Chinese food in Singapore has four main regional branches—Hokkien, Teochew Cantonese, and Hainanese. Teochews are inordinately fond of soups, braised dishes, and a disservice to summarize India’s cuisines in anything less than several hundred pages, but as a rough reference for the palate, southern Indian food in Singapore is characterized by rice flour based breads as well as rice dishes, with an abundance of seafood, fresh vegetables, cool yoghurt, and sour tamarind as foils for aromatic, chili-hot spice blends spiked with mustard seeds and curry leaves. Northern Indian food here calls more often on wheat breads as staples, and boasts many rich and complex curries as well as tandoori specialties. A meal of either ilk is typically built around a mix of dry and wet dishes, and chutneys and pickles. One “Indian” curry, made with large fish heads in a spicy, sour gravy, is in fact a uniquely Singaporean variation on a Keralan theme that you won’t find in the motherland.