'Peranakan' cuisine, a marriage of two worlds

The renowned Peranakan cuisine, a blend of Chinese and Malay culinary traditions, has been around for about four or five generations but never fails to delight modern palates.

"It's a fusion food created a long time ago," said entrepreneur Nyonya (Mrs) Seah during an interview at one of the family-owned Baba Inn and Lounge peranakan restaurants. The Seah family runs four peranakan restaurants in Singapore, all of which are mostly patronized by families and business executives from neighboring countries like Indonesia and Malaysia.

It has its origin in the marriage of a Chinese princess to the Sultan of Malacca in the mid-1400s, but it really took off in the 1800s when Chinese immigrants began to intermingle with the Malay people, giving birth to a distinct culture and cuisine.

These Straits Chinese people, baba (male peranakan) and nonya (female peranakan), later migrated to neighboring areas, including Singapore, bringing along their culture and cuisine as they settled there.

Various meats, especially chicken, fish, prawns and other seafood items are used in this cuisine. As for the vegetable dishes, lady's fingers, long beans and kangkung (water convulvulus) are mainly used.

This Chinese-influenced cuisine, Seah added, also uses a lot of Malay spices, which are also common in Indonesian cooking, like lengkuas (galangal), keluak (a sort of nut with black flesh), serai (lemon grass), cloves, cinnamon, turmeric and tamarinds, to name a few.

"Every dish is cooked with a lot of spices so it is unique. This is quite unlike Chinese food, which mainly uses ginger and garlic," she said.

Meanwhile, the cuisine's Malay influences are clear from the use of pandanus leaves in the dishes or snacks, and banana leaves as wrappers or to line the serving plates so as to imbue the delicacies with tantalizing aromas.

To preserve the authentic flavors and smells, traditional serving plates and preparation tools and cooking utensils, like stone mortars and pestles, are still used.

"The food tastes better when the spices are ground with a stone mortar and pestle ... they bring out the juices and aromas, something that you cannot get when using a blender," she explained.

As for the cooking process, peranakan cuisine is prepared by slowly stir-frying the spices first followed by other slow cooking processes. This long-drawn-out, time-consuming method of cooking makes sure that all the spices fully release their flavors and aromas.

"If the cooking process is shortened, what you will get is a raw taste with a strong, pungent aroma," she said, while adding that some dishes, such as ayam buah keluak (chicken cooked with aromatic keluak nuts) take three to four days to prepare.

Unlike busy women today, Seah says that women in the past did not leave the home to work, and took pride in preparing delicious dishes and snacks in the kitchen with which to pamper their husbands, family and friends.

"It was in the kitchen that women in the past spent long hours talking and gossiping, while making all the rempah (spice mixes) for the food," she added.

Most peranakan cooks do not use measuring devices or clearly specified quantities. This is why previous exposure to the old- fashioned way of cooking is essential if one want's to produce authentic peranakan dishes.

"You have to learn from a young age, and have to watch how the older people in the household, like your grandmother or aunts, prepared the food or used the ingredients. Many peranakan recipes, like those in my family, are usually handed down from one generation to the next," Seah explained.

Apart from ayam buah keluak, other famous peranakan dishes include itik sioh (braised duck with coriander and tamarind), itik tim (steamed duck served with salted vegetable soup), nonya ngo hiang (spring roll with shrimp and minced pork filling), ikan otak-otak (fish cake wrapped in banana leaves), udang masak nanas (prawn with pineapples), chap chye (mixed vegetables) and, of course, sambal belachan (chili with prawn paste). As for dessert, pulot hitam (black glutinous rice porridge) is among the famous treats that peranakan cuisine has in store for the diner.

However, Seah added that there are peranakan dishes, like sambal jantung (the heart of a banana tree cooked with spices), that are not served in restaurants any more simply because the younger generation are no longer familiar with them.

Sambal jantung may be losing its popularity, but good old fashioned peranakan cuisine remains as popular as ever, even among the younger generation, in Singapore and in neighboring countries. --Maria Endah Hulupi