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Complex Numbers #1059420 added November 13, 2023 at 9:53am
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Secrets Revealed
Every once in a while, I run across something I didn't know about. Weird, huh? That I don't know something? Well, now I do.
I'd never heard of the culture, let alone the food. Obviously, I've never tried it. Honestly, Atlas Obscura, here, could have made this whole thing up, April Fools style, and the joke would have been lost on me. Naturally, I checked out the Wikipedia  page, with the understanding that those can be a spoof too. But nope... just an entire culture I'd never even heard of.
Jiu hoo char is a specialty of the Peranakans, a cultural group that stretches across Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. While not Peranakan herself, my mother inherited her jiu hoo char recipe from my grandmother, who inherited it from my great-grandmother, who in turn learned it from her neighbor, herself a nyonya—a Malay and Indonesian honorific for married women of the Peranakan culture.
Somehow I doubt that these recipes translate well into Western standard cookbook recipes. But I don't know; maybe someone's tried.
As recently as a decade ago, there were fears that Peranakan cuisine might die out, due to the tradition of recipes passing only from mother to daughter.
Based on what I saw on the Wiki page, it's not just the cuisine but the culture itself that seems to be hovering on the edge of decline.
Just off New York City’s Union Square, Kebaya is the first restaurant in the city to focus on Peranakan food.
If there was going to be one anywhere in the US, I'd guess New York or Los Angeles. I visit New York fairly often; this is something I'd like to try.
Peranakan culture dates back to the 15th century. Derived from the Malay word anak, meaning child, Peranakan refers to the descendants of the Chinese seafaring traders who landed in Southeast Asia and married local Malay women. Today, pockets of Peranakan culture are scattered across Indonesia, Singapore, and the Malaysian states of Penang and Malacca.
I don't know enough to tell whether there's bigotry involved. We in the US don't have a monopoly on racism.
A key hallmark is how much care goes into each dish’s preparation. Take kuih pai tee, for example, a petite vegetable-and-spice filled pastry. Making the tart shells requires dipping a mold into a thin batter, and then dipping it into a hot vat of oil and removing it at just the right moment. Remove it too soon, and the shell crumples; leave it in too long, and it burns.
Yeah, that's a lot of finicky work.
Below are some of the unique building blocks that make up Peranakan food.
I won't go into this part. For once, though, I'm not put off by the graduate thesis food bloggers always write before getting to the practical part. I'm a little bit less ignorant than I was before I read the article, and that's a good thing. |
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