#kopitiam

Egg Trilogy Part 3/3

I. Century egg

II. Half-boiled eggs (kopitiam style)

Free for personal use; repost with credits :)

Part 1

Mum went off to queue for the Economy Rice (菜饭). She picked the following dishes for her cai png  - Har Cheong Gai (虾酱鸡) marinated in fermented shrimp paste and deep-fried, sweet & sour pork and Chinese cabbage stir-fry with white rice.

Something I hear often from Westerners is how they dislike eating in Singapore especially outside of “classy indoor restaurants”, because they say that the hygiene standards of the local food courts and street food is disgusting. I’ve heard them say the same and fearmonger about other ASEAN countries too.

Say whatever you want about hygiene and “lower class”, but there’s something about eating food next to a road, or seated on the floor, or in a home/an eatery crafted from raw natural local materials, or in the open wilderness. That is the whole point of local food and connection with the land, and this isn’t an experience you can grasp from a commercial restaurant.

There’s studies out there about eating where one feels at home, and one feels safe. And home isn’t just a physical place, it also isn’t just the people, it’s everything and all interrelations and interdependencies, distilled through time and locally distinct identities and experiences.

Food is about the experience of the meal; safety and happiness and community—as much as it is about sustenance and taste.

We have 团圆 (tuányuán) in Chinese culture which means reunion, typically over food. We have traditional tuanyuan dishes and desserts, intended to symbolise reunion and the intergenerational connection. The harvesting of ingredients that go into them and the preparation/cooking process, are all intended to promote reunion activities and gatherings.

It is also about the symbiotic connections of taste/flavour, the material food, the memories and the preparation; To the locals & community as in intergenerational family trades with these specific skills to work with the land. The journey of the food through time and space, and even, through the streets of a street vendor’s morning route. And most importantly, to the land as the origins of its ingredients.

This is what it means to be nativised to a land, to have a eco-consciousness beyond just environmental politics. It means having a stake in caretaking of the environment which grows to sustain you, and allows to create stories that bind you to your community, and your community to the land. Because you are of this land and its peoples. It is completely different to colonial agricultural relationships, which is why when Europeans and other colonisers appropriated China’s methods of agriculture which had thousands of years in development and heritage, the colonisers lost this practice, our animistic and land consciousness.

It’s why it’s so comforting to me to sit by the roadside, eat my Mee Rebus, listen to the traffic, the passersby milling about. To hear the dialects swapped and shift from my family with the stall owners as they have for decades. To squeeze a calamansi lime over my mee, and know it was harvested in neighbouring Philippines and SEA countries. To know that I can walk 5 minutes to get a “limau asam boi” (Bahasa Melayu) “Kat Jai Shui” (Hakka Chinese Dialect) which is a calamansi lime + sweet sugar plum drink, local to my mother’s home country, Malaysia.

This is also why there is so much charm to street food, festival food, street hawkers, to trishaw vendors, to hawker centers; all cultural symbols of Asia. And why the world has adopted street culture as a method for community-building.

It is not rocket science why SEA has some of the best cuisines, and the best cultural integrations in its spices, foods, the multilingual names of dishes, and client-hawker-farmer relations. Our culture with food, fosters all of these.

Mee rebus & Kat Jai Shui

A dessert called 汤圆 (tāngyuán), which can mean both “reunion soup/broth” or “soup/broth round/circular”, which is a playful homophone for Tuan Yuan. This is a dessert of glutinous riceballs (hand-rolled) with sweet peanut filling or sweet black sesame filling, boiled in a sweet broth flavoured with lemongrass, ginger (in the bags), and syrup, which are all traditionally ingredients available in Asia. We sometimes add Pandan leaves, which are available in SEAsia. Typically, the riceballs are coloured pink and white, but we didn’t have food colouring.

Commission for @keinga-kobold and @siggymc !

Suka Hati Kopitiam @ Damansara Perdana, Selangor

A chain kopitiam we only just tried today. It's a Malay style Ipoh Kopitiam. Food selection has more Malay dishes like lontong and me ladna.

We got the dry wantan mee and roti sarang burung. The wantan mee was overcooked, making the texture too soft for our liking. There was a hint too much dark soy sauce and a little too salty. The roti sarang burung was not crispy enough, the two eggs were half boiled which was something I really enjoyed but somehow it already came with too much of a dash of soy sauce, making it too salty.

old town white coffee grand, m boutique hotel, ipoh.

my friend told me that this particular branch of old town is different from the ones we see in kl, so we came here for lunch during our weekend trip. i have to say, the interior design here is really pretty with that nostalgic feel. and i totally love how comfy and relaxing the cafe is, and it’s pretty much empty since there’s only one other customer who was there working.

the menu here is similar, but slightly different from what i see in other branches, like the basic food are there, with a lot more others that is not available else where. i also noticed that the prices here are more expensive.

i ordered my favorite butter toast as usual, i just simply love them, it’s fragrant and crispy and just nice to eat. then the iced americano with lemon, i really liked having citrus-y taste in my black coffee, the combination is just lovely, this is a drink unique to this cafe.

for main meals, we picked the seafood noodles, which is an upgrade from the regular prawn noodles that they serve, and chicken rendang rice bowl, which is an upgrade from the regular nasi lemak chicken rendang. the noodles are pretty nice, the soup smells so good, it is very appetizing. and the rice bowl is yummy too, and quite a big portion, the chicken rendang was very flavorful, i liked it.