Written by Baba Desmond Sim
Baba Desmond Sim shares his joy in having the ultimate ticket to
the most amazing food adventure
PAINTINGS BY DESMOND SIM
FEW OF US REALISE WHAT A PRIVILEGE IT IS TO BE BORN
PERANAKAN.
ASIDE FROM THE LOUD, cosy and invasive horde of family members
that many of us are born with, we are given an ultimate ticket for the
best and most amazing food adventure of any lifetime one could ever imagine.
It starts at infancy. One of the first memories I have as a toddler was being in my cot, staring at the colourful glass panes of our shophouse windows and smelling the aroma of toasted belachan wafting into my room. Yes, the scent of toasted belachan and the waves of fried rempah aromas were in my first breaths of air.
So until I was fourteen, I assumed every household wafted with the
pungent aromas of Peranakan homes. Until one day, when I had a stay-over at a Chinese friend’s home – and dropped the clanger, “Where’s the sambal belachan?”
They reacted as if I had asked for some alien maggot sauce.
“Sambar si mi leh?” After a few more exchanges, the matriarch of the sinkeh Chinese household finally surmised, “Orh… he wants that stinky chilli paste that nor-hia people like to eat.” I was too perplexed to be offended. They don’t have sambal belachan?
Slowly, I realised the differences. In our extended family, Meals were sacrosanct. TV off. No arguments. You addressed every person at the table, starting from the oldest till the person immediately elder to you. You would hold back from rushing to begin as that would be poor form. If you were the youngest in a multi-tiered family, life sucked. Your only way out was if a favourite grandparent, uncle or aunt ‘blessed’ you with a drumstick when it came to their turn to eat. If you were smart, you would sit right next to your favourite grandparent and eye that drumstick hungrily.
Once kids were old enough to be of use in the Peranakan kitchen, we became conscripted into manual labour. I actually enjoyed sitting around the table and making pineapple tarts as family time. We were too young to get the pineapple jam or pastry proportions right, but our small and nimble fingers were good at crimping the edge of each tart with small, neat rows of pleats.
We had competitions to see who would win Granny’s approval. She had very high standards. It was a proud moment when I learned her style of cutting and pinching pretty little sprays of leaves to put atop her tarts… and she put me in charge of that!
On the other hand, what every Peranakan child – boy or girl – remembers clearly, without wanting to, is the purgatory of pounding sambal belachan. Once old enough to handle the mortar and pestle, we would be taught to make sambal belachan. It was like a rite of passage. We would be handed equipment, a mound of chilli, slices of toasted belachan and told, “Pound. Not too coarse, not too fine.”
The first step was to deseed the chilli. You start, and soon feel a slow burning at your fingertips. After deseeding the whole pile, the burn becomes more pronounced. If you forget for a second and wipe the sweat from your brow, a stream of chilli-laced sweat would run into your eyes. It was not fun.
But you had to persist. Once the chilli went into the mortar, you knew what would come next. As you pound, the juices of the chilli would splatter – on the whole underside of the hand holding the pestle and on the other hand covering the mortar, to prevent the juices from splattering to more parts of your face and body.
Purgatory did not end until the chilli was pounded with the toasted belachan into a paste. That was not the end of the ordeal. The hands would be burning for the next few days. All we could do was suffer quietly and trust that the experience would build us up to be fiercer and tougher when we grew up. Well, that is the secret of how we grew up garang. We pounded endless sambal belachan and survived!
Now I am at the age where you would think I would be squirreling recipes out of Mum’s cookbook, but I am not. Mum proudly still wants to cook for us with her own recipes for as long as she can – and her kitchen is still her own private domain. I am actually learning to cook one Peranakan dish at a time drawing different recipes for each dish from different cookbooks.
How will I know whether the flavours are ‘accurate’? I have a whole lifetime of stored references in my tastebuds. And I have learnt how to re-create dishes just the way my Granny did – through trial and error. Being born Peranakan is indeed to be given the best ticket to a food adventure for a lifetime, and we should each be ever so grateful to be part of this amazing journey
DESMOND SIM IS A PLAYWRIGHT, PAINTER, POET AND WRITER. HE TEACHES PUBLIC SPEAKING, DRAMA AND CREATIVE WRITING AT
AN ENRICHMENT SCHOOL. HIS ARTWORKS CAN BE SEEN ON HIS FACEBOOK PAGE ‘DESMOND’S WORLD’ UNDER HIS PROFILE DES SIM.
