COVER STORY
Singaporean chef Malcolm Lee on reinventing the painstaking Straits Chinese heritage cuisine
Yes, We Peranakan!
Singapore is obsessed with food. There is a waistline-increasing variety for all budgets, temperaments and times of the day, but if one were to narrow their destinations down, Singaporean chef Malcolm Lee insists on two that visitors shouldn’t miss.
“Food is a very big thing for us,” he laughs. “We have a lot of things, but the two cuisines you have to try are hawker food and Peranakan food.”
The latter is a distinct type of cooking, which is rather scarce in Bangkok, but last month, Lee was in town as part of the Michelin Guide Dining Series. In collaboration with the two heads of Sra Bua By Kiin Kiin Bangkok and Kiin Kiin restaurant Copenhagen, he cooked up a special dinner that brought together the best of contemporary Thai and Peranakan food. Some courses by Lee included a turmeric lobster curry unusually paired up with
khanom jeen (fermented noodles). Given their regional proximity, the two cuisines are not too different. Yet, the chef notes how sometimes, even though the same ingredients are used, flavours come out quite differently.
“It gives you that ‘same same but different’ feeling,” Lee says of Thais flavouring, often with fish sauce and limes, while Peranakan cuisine uses shrimp paste and kalamansi limes. “People who never tried it before might go, ‘Wow, it’s actually quite nice and similar to Thai food’. That bridges them into our culture, and it works the same way around as well.”
For the unfamiliar, the Peranakan aesthetic may be mistaken for Chinese. Upon closer inspection, however, the two cultures can be easily distinguished, as the Peranakan look usually features more colours, especially pink and green pastel tones. Chinese plates are usually red and dragon-adorned, but Peranakan ware often displays phoenixes and flowers instead. As Lee explains it, the Peranakan community descends from Chinese traders who settled down in the areas of Singapore, Malacca, Penang and southern Thailand between the 15th and the 17th centuries. When they missed home, they made do with whatever they could find and essentially, this is where the fusion of Chinese and Malay traits occurred. Food-wise, he says, “you have both Chinese techniques and ingredients and Malay curries and chillies but somehow it’s all on the same table, which is really special. What’s unique for us is that we have a lot of pork on our menus but Malays don’t. We’re not shy about that and it’s very interesting”.
Growing up in a family of talented cooks, Lee would eat home-cooked Cantonese, Hokkien and Western food as a child, but his fondest memories have always been of his mother’s Peranakan cooking.
“When mum cooked, you didn’t need to reach the house to know,” the 34-year-old recalls. “I could smell it from two floors down. But it’s in the small things too, where she would wait for everyone to sit down first before she cooked the vegetables, so that they were hot and fresh when served. All that attention to detail has always been on my mind.”
Unlike Chinese stir-fries, which take two minutes in a wok at most, Peranakan cuisine calls for more tedious and timeconsuming preparation.
“It requires a very special skill set to cook it. It’s much more female in nature.” Lee remembers groaning in his teen years when tasked to pound chillies for what seemed an infinity. “You need to be very patient. It makes me really understand why in the past people would always say to choose a future daughterin-law by her cooking. Because if she could cook these foods, then she has exhibited this virtue. You have to put all your love into it — if you don’t, you cannot cook it.”
Curries are some of the dishes that best signify Peranakan cuisine, with buah keluak the pinnacle of its flavour. The poisonous black nut which grows in Indonesia is usually served within its shell and in savoury foods, but Lee is one of the handful few trying to innovate and preserve the flavours of his youth by serving Peranakan food, albeit with a modern twist. His one Michelin-starred restaurant, Candlenut, serves buah keluak ice cream among other novelties that move it beyond a preconceived aura of “grandma food”. In a culinary field where every grandma has their own recipe which is passed down within their family, his approach makes him a target of sorts.
The founder and chef recalls: “People say it’s no good when I make a new curry with crab instead of prawn, but I say just try it first, then bring in the story of the old dishes. Sometimes, you just do old things, which people don’t like, and you lose it altogether. The challenge for us is to make something oldfashioned and traditional into something young and relevant, so when the younger generation see and try it, they go ‘Wow, what is this?’. Then you bring tradition in and I think that’s very special.”
Besides cooking and making sure his dishes come out as photogenic as the brightly coloured shophouses, Lee places just as much importance on the history surrounding the food. When asking his mother to taste test his dishes at his restaurant on Dempsey Hill, he pushes for her reasoning too. “Mum will say it’s too spicy and I ask why and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, it would just be very literal and I just fix it, but why is the question. My mum, grandmother and aunts all have a connection to and stories from back in the day and there’s a reason why they insist on things. Food can taste good, but it can lack a story. I want to translate the story of what it was like back then to our guests.”
Previously a culture that bordered on extinction, Peranakan is now seeing a comeback with a surge of interest and small dessert cafés opening all over Singapore in the past two years. The first Peranakan chef to be awarded a Michelin star is grateful to be flying the flag for the community, especially in a country with stiff competition when it comes to food.
“It’s a good phone call to receive,” he says of the day he found out that Candlenut was awarded a star. “It’s a good wind for the restaurant but even more so for heritage food in Singapore, because there’s so many other things out there. People may not see the future in it, but I think at least the message that goes out is that even if you are doing traditional food, you can still be on the world level with other kinds of cuisines. It opens the idea to a lot of people and now you really start to see more people re-exploring their roots and coming out of the shade. When they start to explore, they start to understand and they start to appreciate. That’s a really great thing.”
Candlenut is on Dempsey Road, Singapore. For reservations, visit comodempsey.sg/reservations/candlenut.