The Role of Foraging in Malay Cuisine
Foraging for food in the hills, the forests and the coastline has been carried out by the Malays for centuries, as Khir Johari tells us.
The Sulalat al‐sala n1 ( Genealogy of Kings), be/er known as Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, tells us that when Sang Nila Utama – the Sumatran prince of Palembang who sired the Malay kings of old Singapura – landed on the island of Temasek around 1299,2 the shores were at a dry low tide ( ayer tohor). We know this because the tale reports that the first thing his men did aier landing was to forage along the beach. Here Sang Nila Utama is referred to by his title Sri Tri Buana, which means “Lord of Three Worlds” (the upper realm of the gods, the world of humans and the underworld): “And when [the men] reached the shore, the ship was brought close in and Sri Tri Buana went ashore with all the ship’s company and they amused themselves with collecting all manner of shellfish and seaweeds.”
This gives us an idea of just how embedded the practice of foraging for food was for coastal Malays. In fact, man has been foraging for food since time immemorial.
Foraging, requiring li/le to no spe‐ cialised tools and demanding less physical exer tion than agriculture and hunting, is likely the oldest means of acquiring sustenance. But gathering food from wild sources has not been abandoned entirely today. Certainly not in the Malay world, where foraging – or meramu (to collect all sorts of materials) – has survived well into modern times. The verb meramu is a prefixed form of the root ramu. The Malay word for ingredients – as in those needed in a recipe – is ramuan: things which have been gathered.
The Gems Around Us
The Malays foraged in multiple ecological domains and habitats. This emerged from their well‐oriented understanding of local geography, which was made legible by the use of specific nomenclature. They identified different types of terrestrial fea‐ tures: there were padang (plains), cangkat (knolls), bukit (hills), lembah (valleys) and
gunung (mountains). But even flat land itself was differentiated based on eleva‐ tion, with darat (upland) distinguished from baruh (lowland). Forests, or hutan, were classified as either rimba (virgin for‐ est) or belukar (secondary forest). Rivers were divided into hulu (upstream) and
hilir (downstream). Freshwater swamps, or paya, were different from mangrove swamps, or bakau. Formations on the coast were also differentiated into telok (bays and coves) and tanjong (capes). At sea, the Malays identified terumbu or beting (patch reefs), karang (coral reefs) and
busung (mudflats).
On land, the Malays foraged in the spacious yards around their rural homes, in the belukar near their villages as well as along trails that connected them. Much could be made of the leaves, shoots, stems and roots found therein. In the dish known as botok-botok, fish steak is marinated with spices and infused with flavourful foliage and herbs before being wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. Flowers could also be
Khir Johari is a researcher of Malay history and culture, and former vice-president of the Singapore Heritage Society. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Santa Clara University and a Masters in education from Stanford University. The Food of Singapore Malays (2021) is his first book.
gathered for consumption. The flowers of the durian tree – prior to their fruit‐ ing – were oien collected and enjoyed as ulam (a dish of raw vegetables eaten with rice).
Besides foliage, flowers, shoots, roots, stems and tubers, the forests also occasionally turned up rare extrava‐ gances, like wild honey. A person skilled in the dangerous task of extracting honey ( manisan lebah, literally “bee’s sweets”; also known as ayer madu or simply madu) from a hive was the pawang lebah (beekeeper).
There was also much to obtain from the swamps, both freshwater and mangrove, which were a rich source of edible flora and fauna. Beremi, a native watercress ( Herpestes monniera), was once abundant in freshwater swamps in the Malay world but is now no longer widely available due to habitat loss.
At One with the Sea
Of course the sea was no stranger. Gath‐ ering shellfish, seaweed and other inter‐ tidal products ( berkarang or mengambil karang-karangan) was an important pastime for the Malays, many of whom lived near or by the sea. Among specimens commonly collected for consumption were gonggong (dog conch; genus Strombus), ranga (spider conch; Lambis lambis; alter‐ natively rangar; range in the Johor‐riau dialect), siput kilah (noble volute), jani (sea urchin), gamat (sea cucumber), latoh (sea grape), sangu or agar-agar (jelly seaweed), kupang (mussel), remis (surf clam), kepah (Venus clam) and kerang (cockle).
Cockles were once abundant along the entire west coast of the Malay Peninsula and on the sandy shores of Singapore. Collected in bucke uls and carefully rinsed, these shellfish are “a favourite article of diet” of the Malays, who cooked them into sambal, or simply boiled them, stir‐fried with vegetables, or skewered into sate kerang.
In the days before Singapore’s south‐ ern islands were reclaimed and their inhabit‐ ants relocated to the mainland, the islands were home to various Malay communities who had an intimate relationship with the marine ecology around them. Juria Tora‐ mae, an independent researcher, artist and marine conservationist, has wri/en about how the residents of outlying islands like Pulau Sudong lived off collecting corals and seaweed, in a place where land was too scarce to put under the plough. She notes how “corals and seaweeds were popular amongst Singapore’s mainlanders for home decoration and jelly‐making”.
In a paper published in 1982, Chew Soo Beng gives a rich account of the lives of the Pulau Sudong islanders before they were rese/led into high‐rise public housing on the mainland in the late 1970s:
“Groups of women row their kolek [small wooden boat] to different parts of the exposed portions of the reef to gather sea produce. This activity was performed with considerable gaiety, seeming to be an enjoyable activity. Everyone carried a basket and unmarried girls wore bunga raya (hibiscus) in their hair. In teams of threes or fours, usually to form a line, they combed the reef for agaragar (an edible seaweed), gulong, the trepang and a variety of bechede-mer. When both the tide and sun were low, the gathered chatter of the women at work could drift into the village where the men, excluded from the offshore merriment, conversed beneath their favourite pondok.”
Remnants of this lost way of life can be seen today only in those parts of the Riau Islands in Indonesia where such time‐ tested rhythms have not been swept away by the modern economy’s relentless forces. The fishing and gathering expeditions of Singapore’s southern islanders oien brought them to Riau. The islands on both sides of the Singapore‐indonesia border together formed a contiguous maritime neighbourhood.
Bound by ties of kinship, these island communities transcended the artificial international borders that divide the waters between Singapore and Indo‐ nesia, first drawn up by the British and Dutch colonial powers in the Anglo‐dutch Treaty of 1824.7 Prior to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the Singapore dollar was a widely accepted currency in Riau. Even when Riau islanders got married, dowry exchange was made in the Singapore dollar as well. This affinity with Singapore was made possible by geographical proximity.
Islanders on Pulau Pemping (on the Riau side of the border), for example, can see the Singapore skyline from their homes overlooking the sea. They adhered to the Singapore Standard Time for their daily prayers and watched Singaporean televi‐ sion. Movement across the border used to be more porous. Mak Imah, who lived on Pulau Semakau (on the Singapore side of the border), simply dismantled her home, crossed over to Pulau Pemping and reas‐ sembled it. This took place when she and
her neighbours were ordered to rese/le on the mainland. Singapore’s authorities then amalgamated Pulau Semakau with Pulau Seking to form Semakau Landfill, which began operations on 1 April 1999.
Of course, mainland Singapore itself is an island, and Malays residing in its coastal se/lements lived much the same way. Those living in seaside villages such as Tan‐ jong Irau, Telok Mata Ikan, Padang Terbakar,
Kampong Wak Hassan and Pasir Panjang, for example, also engaged in foraging for sea‐ food on beaches, intertidal zones, estuaries and rivers. This spontaneous relationship with one’s ecological surroundings is at odds with post‐independence Singapore’s micromanagement of nature. In the mani‐ cured city‐state, fishing is allowed only at designated waterways, and picking of any fallen fruit, vegetable or mineral from the wild is either banned or subject to approval by a state‐issued permit.
In 2009, the Berita Harian news‐ paper reported that two women – Che’ Kamsiah and Che’ Saemah – were seen picking cockles and shellfish from Sungai Ketapang, a tributary of the Bedok River (Sungai Bedok). That an activity once
8 so commonplace is now considered newsworthy a/ests to the radical trans‐ formation in the way of life of Malays in Singapore. Sungai Ketapang has since been canalised in concrete and courses by the Laguna National Golf and Country Club before flowing into the Bedok River.
Conscious Consump on
Prior to reclamation and more recent de‐ velopment, one can imagine how Sungai Ketapang was perhaps one among many natural cornucopias for Malay se/lements in old Tanah Merah. More importantly, this episode suggests the profoundly intimate knowledge that indigenous com‐ munities have of their natural world, one that has even withstood – in its own li/le way – the displacement brought about by urbanisation.
This knowledge extends to under‐ standing what can be acquired at which times of the day and year, as well as the natural processes of an ecological system that make such foraging practices sustain‐
able. For Malays living in pre‐industrial times, where natural resources were readily shared with the community, the principle of conscious consumption was largely upheld.
For instance, it was never in the long‐ term interest of a kampong community to harvest all the fish in a water body at once, even if one had the means. Some foraging practices could even help in the propagation of certain plants, such as turi ( Sesbania grandiflora) and ubi kayu (cassava; Manihot esculenta), where a broken‐off stem regenerates into two or more new ones. Even when flowers were picked, it was important not to strip the entire plant bare, but to leave some flowers behind to ensure that there was no decline in the fruit crop.
If an entire tree had to be killed, no part went to waste. This was the case when the umbut – the prized heart of a palm – was acquired. Once the umbut was removed, the palm ceased to live. For coconut palms, the leaves were gathered for weaving into ketupat (rice cakes) cases or for wrapping otak-otak (fish mousse mixed with spices, wrapped in banana or coconut leaves and then grilled). The spines of the fronds, lidi, had multiple uses too: they were mainly used as skewers for sate ( satay), and could also be bundled together to form an egg‐beater or even a broom if longer fronds were used. The trunk was oien used as a beam in construction, while dried coconut husks were used as cooking fuel.
Modern‐day exploitation of natural resources and industrial capitalism, how‐ ever, challenged the viability of foraging as a way of life. Just as the last of the Malay villages in Singapore were being torn down in the 1970s and 80s, growing awareness was afoot in the West about this fast‐ disappearing mode of consumption.
In 1971, Alice Waters, one of the key pioneers of the organic food movement in the United States, opened her restaurant Chez Panisse (which is still in operation today) in Berkeley, California. The restau‐ rant emphasises using only locally grown ingredients from sustainable sources, and the menu changes according to the seasons, serving only what is available at that time of the year.
This sensitivity to seasonal constraints was also a crucial characteristic of forag‐ ing by the Malays. They only plucked the leaves of the puchok pakis (fiddlehead fern; Diplazium esculentum) while these were tightly furled. While binjai ( Mangifera caesia) can be consumed even before it ripens, as some find it appealing in its sour stages, one rarely plucked the tree bare before the fruits reached their prime. As for the keranji ( Dialium indum), the fruits emerge only once every five years, making it a waste to chop the tree down in its “unproductive” years in between.
Industrialised food production has overcome constraints like these. One can now enjoy durian at any time of the year, despite it being a seasonal fruit. This has allowed the human consumer to transcend their position within the food chain, no longer subject to its natural processes or the constraints of seasonality. There is a danger, perhaps, in this growing distance between us and the natural processes that give rise to our food. The more removed we are from the natural domains where our ingredients were once traditionally harnessed, the less control and discern‐ ment we have in determining what food we should be consuming.
In Singapore, a contemporary move‐ ment is advocating for a revival of organic food production. Social enterprises run for‐ aging trips and are trying to build an urban farming industry. This has been a/ributed to a “global food trend” of picking and eating plants growing in the wild, drawing inspiration from the likes of Michelin‐star Danish restaurant Noma, started by chef René Redzepi in 2003.9 While this move‐ ment may in fact draw on a recent global turn towards sustainable practices in light of growing concerns about climate change, we have observed how foraging for food by our forebears in Singapore is nothing new, but in fact was once also the norm.
Journalist and food writer Michael Pol‐ lan argues that the modern food industry has taken over the role that culture and living in nature once played in mediating our relationship with food. “The human omnivore,” he writes, “has the incalculable advantage of a culture, which stores the experience and accumulated wisdom of countless human tasters before him.” Whereas an ecologically conscious exis‐ tence once informed our choices about what and how much we could eat and when, these decisions today have been largely taken over by a highly organised global food industry.
Cultural knowledge on consumption – providing a system of ethics, taboos, and other do’s‐and‐don’ts with regard to nutrition – has also become increasingly less relevant as advancements in nutrition science offer more systematic guidelines. While the la/er ought to be celebrated, we cannot help but mourn, however li/le, the loss of inherited wisdom from earlier generations that understood food within an ecological context, and one in which the human consumer was embedded. As global food security becomes an increas‐ ing concern, it is perhaps timely to remind ourselves that not so long ago, it was still in fact possible for people in Singapore and the region to – at least in part – feed themselves by directly harnessing nature’s giis.
This is an edited chapter from The Food of Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through the Archipelago by Khir Johari, published by Marshall Cavendish Editions (2021). The book explores in detail the history and culture of Malay food in Singapore and raises questions such as: How did Malay cuisine evolve to its modern‐day form? How has geography influenced the way Malays eat? What cultural beliefs shape the rituals of Malay gastronomy? What does food tell us about the Malay worldview?
This book is scheduled to be pub‐ lished in October 2021. Thereaier, it will be available for reference at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library and for loan at selected public libraries. It will also retail at major bookshops in Singapore.