REVIEWS

Truly a melting pot

JAMES HIPKISS takes to the kitchen with cookbook in hand and finds himself on a visual culinary expedition to the East and West via the pages of A Celebration of a Singapore Kitchen.

SINGAPOREAN Mary Gomes’s new cookbook is called A Celebration of a Singapore Kitchen, and one may, from the title, expect to find a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian recipes within it.

Well, not quite, things are a little more complicated than that. A clue to what it is all about actually lies in the author’s name, Mary Gomes.

Mary, being of Eurasian extraction, grew up with Singaporean Eurasian cuisine, and later through her husband and mother–in-law, also became familiar with Nyonya cooking.

In fact, the author has previously published in 2001 The Eurasian Cookbook, and her new title in a way combines Eurasian cuisine with what one would expect from a Singapore kitchen, i.e. Chinese, Malay and Indian dishes. Thus, this book promises to be a literal melting pot of culinary styles, the best of both worlds, or rather the best of several worlds.

Some of the dishes one would expect to see in the book are present. Lemak chicken curry, chilli crab, char kway teow, Padang fish curry, fish molee and mutton Mysore, for example, are all featured.

But then, moving westwards (geographically speaking), recipes such as Irish stew, Christmas turkey, honey baked ham and oxtail stew are also present; Eurasian with a very strong emphasis on the “Euro”, it seems.

Further adding to this culinary diversity are Nyonya bak chang, streaky pork chilli garam, Eurasian-style foo yong hai, and other recipes which are truly fusion dishes when considering their origins.

Looking through the contents page of the book one sees chapters covering snacks, soups, meat, poultry, vegetables, rice and noodles, acar and sambal, and desserts and drinks, around 100 recipes in all.

One particularly notices the good variety of Chinese soups, mouthwatering seafood dishes, tasty sambal and rich-looking desserts. Although the book is well illustrated with quality photographs, not every dish is illustrated.

The author has clearly tried to keep the recipes as simple and fuss-free as possible. Most of the ingredient lists are not too long, and all are easily available in Malaysia. The instructions are also simply broken down into two stages: first, preparation; and then, method. Within each of those stages every instruction is numbered and clearly and concisely described.

One senses that Mary has written this book very much with the amateur chef in mind, rather than the expert, and considered too that many home chefs are not able to devote huge amounts of time to cooking in today’s high-pressure lifestyles.

The chilli crab recipe (a restaurant favourite of mine) I tried was surprisingly straightforward; preparation and cooking time being less than 45 minutes in total, and the only slightly fiddly or messy bit being the mixing of some of the ingredients, including belacan in the electric blender.

I was a little unsure where the recipe required “tomato sauce”; whether the author was referring to tomato ketchup, which was what I decided to use. At first the wok did smell very ketchupy, oops, but as the ingredients cooked, my fear evaporated, as presumably did the vinegar in the ketchup, and a delicious chilli crab aroma took its place.

And yes, though I say so myself it tasted delicious too, more credit to Mary’s foolproof recipe than to my cooking skills! I finished up every scrap of the rich, spicy sauce with, as the author suggested, lots of crusty French bread... What, no rice? Well, this is a Eurasian author whose recipe I followed.

The logical accompaniment for this dish, apart from bread, seemed to be Mary’s Eurasian cucumber salad. Again it is quick to prepare — how long does it take to chop a few raw vegetables and hardboil an egg? Tasty too, with its mayonnaise dressing and a little English mustard stirred into it.

Though the author again presented me with a minor dilemma — what did she mean by “two bunches of local salad leaves”? Any lettuce-like leaves, I assumed, and since the salad did come out as successfully as the chilli crab dish, I guess I assumed correctly.

A Celebration of a Singapore Kitchen by Mary Gomes is published by Horizon Books and is available in good bookshops. This book is a good buy for the keen amateur chef, with its large variety of recipes, and straightforward style of instruction. Eastern, Western, and East-meets-West cuisine, all in one volume, which makes it quite a bargain.

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