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A Secretive Food Culture Enters the Spotlight
21.09.2023 - 18:37 / atlasobscura.com
THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE SEPTEMBER 17, 2023 EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE .
I knew I had made a mistake almost instantly. It was Christmas, and my mother and I were preparing jiu hoo char, a stir-fried dish of finely shredded jicama, cabbage, dried cuttlefish, and a host of other ingredients. Because everything must be uniformly diced into even-sized pieces, the preparation can take a few hours—which is why I impatiently asked, “Do we have to cut them this way?”
Cue a stern glare and a cultural lesson.
Jiu hoo char is a specialty of the Peranakans, a cultural group that stretches across Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. While not Peranakan herself, my mother inherited her jiu hoo char recipe from my grandmother, who inherited it from my great-grandmother, who in turn learned it from her neighbor, herself a nyonya—a Malay and Indonesian honorific for married women of the Peranakan culture.
Often, the specifics of certain recipes are only shared with those who are part of a Peranakan family by heritage or marriage. How much galangal do you put into aromatic nasi ulam? How long do you steam the pork for a tender babi pongteh? These important details can also be kept from other family members. Margaret Goh, a second-generation Peranakan from Singapore, knows this all too well. “The dishes were so difficult to get recipes for,” she laughs. “My aunt was so coy about her recipes!”
As recently as a decade ago, there were fears that Peranakan cuisine might die out, due to the tradition of recipes passing only from mother to daughter. But now a new generation is stepping up, drawing on the past to forge a new future.
Just off New York City’s Union Square, Kebaya is the first restaurant in the city to focus on Peranakan food. Opened in February 2023, it’s the brainchild of Goh and restaurateur Salil Mehta. Mehta notes that Peranakan dishes such as assam pedas have long been on the menus of Southeast Asian restaurants.
But at Kebaya, Peranakan cuisine is at the forefront. “These are Peranakan dishes that have been on [our] palates for a while,” Mehta tells me. “People just don’t know what Peranakan is.”
Peranakan culture dates back to the 15th century. Derived from the Malay word anak, meaning child, Peranakan refers to the descendants of the Chinese seafaring traders who landed in Southeast Asia and married local Malay women. Today, pockets of Peranakan culture are scattered across Indonesia, Singapore, and the Malaysian states of Penang and Malacca.
In Peranakan strongholds, you might hear the mix of Hokkien dialect with the Malay language, known as Baba Malay. But nowhere is the intertwining of cultures as strongly reflected than in the food, where
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