Much More Than A Colorful Collection Of Malay Recipes
M. Bakri Musa
Khir Johari: The Food Of Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through The Archipelago
Marshall Cavendish, Singapore, December 1, 2021. Illustrated, hardcover.
ISBN 9789814841924; 624pp; US $80.00
Foreword by Anton Mosimann
What made CNN’s series “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” popular and its late host endearing was that he went beyond describing the various exotic tantalizing recipes of the world to telling the unique enchanting stories of the people behind them.
Likewise, Khir Johari’s The Food Of Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through The Archipelago goes far beyond being simply a rich and colorful compendium of Malay recipes. No surprise that it is now in its third printing after its first in December 2021 and had won many prizes, locally as well as internationally. I was fortunate to get one of the last copies. On a recent California book tour, Khir was pleased to see his book displayed in local Target stores.
At 624 pages with generous high-resolution images on top-quality paper, and weighing nearly eight pounds, this is more an illustrated encyclopedia of Malay culture focusing on the culinary arts. The volume has four sections (“People, Space and Place,” “Indigenous Ingenuity,” “Food As Civilization,” and “Food and the Politics of Identity”), each comprising three to six chapters. Within each chapter are short inserts, with distinct fonts and color page margins, dealing with specific mini topics and loaded with well-researched materials. For example, Chapter I “Setting Sail,” has three –“Malaya Irredenta, Malays, Malayans and Malaysians,” “Melayu” with a quote from Usman Awang’s immortal poem of the same title, and ending with the first recipe, “Asam Pedas.”
As per the foreword, “Khir’s book provides us a deeper understanding of Malays themselves. . . . [O]f how an ingenious people have been able to tap into the advantages of their location between mountain and sea, and their maritime connections, to create a cuisine that is typical of who they are as a people – warm and engaging, willing to experiment and eager to please.”
As for the greater Malay world Nusantara, or Maritime Southeast Asia, this is how Khir Johari describes it in his first chapter:
“Like clouds drifting in a serene sky, a vast constellation of isles and peninsulas – the Malay Archipelago – unravels in majesty from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. The island of Sumatra reclines in esteemed repose. The Malay Peninsula meanders like a vine. Arching gently like a string of pearls lie Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands.”
No surprise to the elegant prose. The writer has a graduate degree from Stanford and had taught for some years at a Silicon Valley public school before returning to Singapore.
Khir’s culinary interest began early, having been brought up in a traditional multigenerational Malay family in Kampung Gelam, Singapore, and seeing his mother, grandmother, and assorted aunties concocting tantalizing aromatic dishes in their communal kitchen. Kampung Gelam, in Khir’s words, “was once the capital of Malay intellectual, political and religious life in Singapore.”
Later as an advisor to his California school’s culinary club, his interest was reignited when one of his students whose family had come from India had an Eureka moment: “I have found myself in front of a tandoori oven!” As an aside, it reflects the richness of the curricular offerings of California’s public schools that they have culinary clubs!
While there are many books on Malay history and society, “that on Malay food was under-researched and under-recognized . . . . In order to preserve what we have, we need to document. Sometimes in order to document, we need to first reconstruct.”
And document and reconstruct Khir did, with meticulous research into areas hitherto unexplored, leading him to conclude, “Our island [Singapore] is not only a recipient of the creations from all the reaches of the Archipelago . . .[but also] a creative kitchen hub, spewing forth its own interpretations of what it means to be delicious, and through that, what it means to be a Malay.”
If I were to liken this volume to a publication in my specialty, it would be a super surgical atlas where the author has gone beyond the myriad technical minutiae of detailed drawings and real life illustrations of organs in living colors to adding the history and biology as well as historical vignettes and towering personalities associated, thus bringing out the human dimension to those miraculous operations.
Seeing pictures of those ladies in their baju kurong stirring their kualis brought back my own precious memories of my mother and grandmother back in my Minang Sri Menanti kampung. Thank God Malay women then were not Bedouin wannabees. Hijabs and burkas are serious fire hazards in the kitchen!
This book blazes new, vibrant, and exciting fields. As such, like all good research, it prompts more questions. Khir Johari pines in us for the taste of related cuisines, as with the Philippines’ Mindanao, Southern Thailand, and coastal Indochina’s Chaim community, as well as of Hindu Bali, Protestant Batak, and Catholic Ibans. Beyond are the Malay diasporas on Christmas Islands and Sri Lanka; further west, Madagascar and South Africa; and in the New World, Surinam and the West Indies. Then there is the converse; the influence of Malay cuisines on local Peranakan Chinese and Indian dishes.
The biologist in me is also curious on whether the spread of cuisines across Nusantara would also have its own equivalent cultural so-called Wallace Line, the invisible barrier between Bali and Borneo to the west with Lombok and Celebes to the east that accounts for the distinctly different flora and fauna on either side.
The vibrant vignettes of history, perceptive sociological observations, and captivating human dramas interspersed in this rich volume makes it an invaluable addition to any library, quite apart from increasing the repertoire of creative and adventurous chefs. For Malay kitchens and others interested in Malay cuisines, this is an essential addition.
