Nasi lemak unites both flavours and people, writes Kerry-Ann Augustin
THERE is nothing we Malaysians love more than our food.
For most of us who grew up with the cultural tapestry of flavours, picking a favourite is tricky.
But deep in the recesses of our minds, there is one that will always stand out for more reasons than one: Nasi Lemak.
The dish has remained a Malaysian breakfast staple and over the years has gained notoriety as a supper standard.
From street stalls to old coffee shops, swanky restaurants and Malaysian cafes, this is one item that is always on the menu.
Its power lies in more than its robust f lavours — it does what most politicians fail to do: Unite Malaysians irrelevant of background, colour or creed.
SCATTERED ROOTS
In a radio interview a few years ago, Najib Arrifin, the director and lead researcher at the Nusantara Ac a demy of D e velopment , Geocultures and Ethnolinguistics (Nadge), speaks candidly about his findings on our de-facto national dish.
“There is some circumstantial evidence that points to the origins of nasi lemak in the west coast,” he says, explaining that the word lemak is a cooking term used widely in the west coast, as opposed to the east coast of the peninsula.
“In the west coast, nasi lemak has always been a big breakfast thing, which makes sense for an agrarian society,” he says, citing examples of generations of people who toiled in the heat doing physical work in farms and fields.
“They would need a fairly substantial meal in the morning and nasi lemak had all the elements - carbohydrates from the rice, oil from the sambal, nutrition from the santan (coconut milk), protein from the anchovies and cucumber or kangkung (water spinach) for vegetables.” Najib a lso brought up the famed Malaccan folklore behind the creation of this dish, which involved a villager’s daughter who accidentally spilled santan into a pot of rice while cooking.
The girl’s mother came home to eat the rice, which unknowingly, had been cooked with santan.
Bewildered by its unique flavour, she asked her daughter what kind of rice it was.
“The daughter was afraid her mother would find out so she kept reassuring her by saying: ‘Nasi ler mak,’” he says.
“And ‘ler’ in west coast states such as Perak, Selangor or Malacca, is a dialect for ‘lah’.
So, from then, the mother thought it was a dish called nasi lemak.”
VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE
Irrelevant of its origins, nasi lemak’s popularity is growing by the day.
“Every time we post a review or feature on nasi lemak we get three times the amount of hits than usual,” says Honey Ahmad, co-founder of food network and event company Fried Chillies.
“People are constantly looking for good nasi lemak!” she says with a smile.
Honey, together with founder Mohd Adly Rizal Mohd Din and their team, recently organised the I Eat Nasi Lemak event for the second consecutive time.
This year, more than 15,000 people filled the halls of Menara TM in Bangsar.
“The turnout was so good that we felt bad for people who came later in the day because most of the stalls had sold out by lunch time,” she says, of the event that saw drones of people lining up by 9am, an hour before the seven-hour-long event kicked-off.
That’s not surprising considering Malaysians have been known to forsake their sleep for food.
And how could they not? Twenty of the best nasi lemak vendors in the country laid out their finest meals during the event.
Among the few introduced were vendors from Negri Sembilan, who cook their sambal with catfish instead of anchovies and the other with masak lemak cili padi telur itik.
There were also less traditional forms of the dish such as organic nasi lemak as well as nasi lemak kukus goreng, which Honey describes as “cooking nasi lemak like char kuey teow”.
“The beauty of nasi lemak is that everybody has made it their own,” says Honey,adding that traditionally, each state and community has a nasi lemak that draws from our rich cultural heritage.
The Indian nasi lemak in Kedah, for instance, borrows from their northern nasi kandar influence, serving their nasi lemak with curry.
Chinese nasi lemak vendors like Black Man Nasi Lemak often use pork balls, pork chops and even wild boar rendang.
Eurasian families are accustomed to using assam prawns and kangkung, showcasing their links to Malacca.
MORE THAN JUST A DISH
But no matter our influence and cooking styles, the dish bears a much deeper significance.
In his essay, More Sour Than Sweet? Food As A Cultural Marker in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth And Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Mark Shackleton describes how food, even in literary works, form our national identities.
“Food is strongly associated with personal and often with national feelings.
It can, for example, be associated with home (or an imagined home), in which case it is usually associated with pleasure and nostalgia.” “In all societies, eating and drinking are core activities that help to structure and shape human relation and cultural identities,” w r ite s L au renc e T ib ere, a n associate professor of sociology at the University of Toulouse-Taylor’s University in an article published by Flavours magazine in 2013.
Tibere goes on to explain that the accessibility of nasi lemak both physically and economically as well as its versatility as a dish which Malaysians, irrelevant of religious background, can enjoy symbolises a shared identity.
“The Malaysian attachment to nasi lemak can be seen as a crystallisation of a story made up of several other stories; in other words the tangible manifestation of a series of values which help a community to organise the everyday living together.” Similarly, research by Yuen Chee Keong and Christina Ong Sook Beng of University Malaya’s Language Studies and Linguistics Faculty found that certain words make the Malaysianidentitymorepronounced when it comes to cuisine.
“To substitute English words like ‘chicken’, ‘bread’ and ‘rice’ for ayam, roti and nasi, is a choice made for the discourse to not only meet local needs and to avoid ambiguity but also to portray their Malaysian identity,” write Yuen and Ong, recalling the Malaysian food blogs they studied.
Their dissertation , From Skewered Meat To Satay And Coconut Milk Rice To Nasi Lemak: Identity Constructions in Malaysian Food Blogs In English, also mentions sambal, an important element of nasi lemak.
“Due to the strong influences from the Malays, sambal has been an extremely versatile accompaniment in all sorts of cuisines regardless of ethnicity in this multicultural Malaysia.
It is perhaps more likely that sambal evokes an idea of the condiment or dish, which includes all its local flavour, aroma as well as appearance, another example of identity representation,” they note.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
These cultural markers are especially evident when Malaysians are away from home.
“Living away made me realise how significant nasi lemak is to Malaysians studying abroad,” says Muhammad Harrith Redza Zulkefli.
Originally from Kuching, Sarawak, Muhammad Harrith, who is studying at the University of Exeter in United Kingdom, sells nasi lemak to Malaysian students on campus.
“What better way to make fellow Malaysians smile on a cold Sunday morning than delivering homemade Malaysian cuisine to their doorstep?” he says with a glint in his eyes.
Together with t wo other Malaysian students, he faced many sleepless nights trying to recreate the flavours of home.
Muhammad Harrith admits that it is a challenge, from ingredients sourcing to cooking techniques and logistics but he believes that food, in this case nasi lemak, is what truly unites Malaysians.
TRUE TREASURE
As silhouettes of the city’s concrete jungle begin to take form against the twilight skies of Kuala Lumpur, there is a narrow road in Sea Park in Petaling Jaya that transforms a dingy back lane to a nasi lemak haven called Nasi Lemak Bumbung.
People of different ages and ethnicities fill the lane and their tummies with their favourite no-frills dish.
But there’s something very special about this particular nasi lemak outlet: The traditional Malay dish is cooked by Indian men in a space that is shared with a Chinese coffeeshop.
Who says you need a logo to promote unity? We have nasi lemak.