Wet Market to Table
PAMELIA CHIA
THE BOOK
This timely release celebrates the rich and unique produce Singapore’s time-honoured wet markets offer. The book is themed around 25 ingredients, including taro, celtuce and jackfruit, parsed into wonderfully modern and creative recipes that go far beyond traditional curries and stir-fries. They draw from varied cultures, running the gamut of Vietnamese bahn xeo and young jackfruit biryani to pani puri with cassava, and rojak ice cream. Collectively, they are designed to “nudge Singaporeans to give wet markets and their ingredients a chance,” explained author
Pamelia Chia.
THE AUTHOR
A food science and technology graduate-turned-chef, Chia wrote the book over a year and while working at local Michelinstarred restaurant Candlenut. “I set out to write this book from a cook’s perspective,” she offered. “All (the) strange and wonderful produce (at the wet market) enthralled me. In a country that is so manicured... wet markets offer a certain sense of groundedness and soulfulness that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Singapore.
“With this book, I believe I have provided Singaporeans with an unintimidating starting point to seek out the markets,” shares Chia, who specifically spotlighted easily-found ingredients that are still uncommonly used with the goal of inspiring Singaporeans to be “as creative with our regional ingredients as we can be with Western produce”.
TRY THIS
We love the originality of the Jambu Galette, in which the ubiquitous rose apple is thinly sliced and arranged in gorgeous spirals across a tart crust. The Laksa Leaf Pesto Croissant Loaf is another recipe we flagged for a long weekend, requiring as it does the intrepid home cook to make a butter-laden dough from scratch at least three days before baking. THE CASE FOR WET MARKETS
“To me, the wet market is Singapore’s version of the farmers’ market I’d read about in cookbooks. What I did not expect was for the ‘ humanity’ of the wet market to grow on me. I visited them thrice a week over a year for the book, and felt a sense of kampung spirit I had never experienced before. While the people can be impatient, gruff or rude, wet markets on the whole provide one with a a sense of rootedness you don’t really experience in this digital era.”