Here we go again about Penang food. We have the best food! I don’t really have to prove it, given many of you already believe that and do head to Penang during holidays, sometimes almost exclusively for makan.
I’d bet that’s what many of you are doing this Christmas season too.
If you look around and count the number of restaurants, food stalls or menu items outside Penang that have the word “Penang” in them, I’d say my point is proven and I’d move on, gloating ever so slightly as us Penang people are wont to do.
But no, big claims require big proof. Here, I’d trot out how Penang has been recognised by the CNN Travel show and the Lonely Planet publication. When it comes to street food, Penang sizzles with the best in the world.
It helps that we actually still have people selling food on the streets! Many other so-called civilised countries have taken them and put them into sterile food courts (Singapore, I am looking at you). Where’s the fun in that?
Most of the street food in Penang is safe because they are cooked to order. This reduces the chances of food poisoning. Additionally, as people become more prosperous, standards of hygiene have gone up too, even in the streets.
Gone are the days when the quality of street food was measured by how big were the rats scurrying around between your feet and the drain. Those days, and such food stalls, are long gone – mostly!
I’d worry a bit more about street food in India or Indonesia for example, but heck I’ve eaten street food there too, and am none the worse, if none the better, for it.
When meals were all of fresh food
Growing up in a Penang kampung that was still quite rural then, I got to eat well even though we kampung folk were poor. Being a fishing community, we ate fresh seafood all the time.
We ate stuff fresh as it took years before electricity arrived, and longer still before people could afford refrigerators. It was either a long trip to go buy ice to keep the fish from rotting, or eat them quickly. We ate them quickly.
Deep sea fishing trawlers appeared in the ’60s, and while they wreaked havoc on the inshore fishermen like those of our kampung, at least we got to eat quality deep-sea seafood that nowadays is becoming scarce and expensive.
Seafood was the poor people’s food then. Meat was expensive, and reserved for special occasions such as festivities and weddings. This is the opposite of how things are today.
I got to experience the best of Malay kampung food, mostly seafood – including shellfish and mangrove goodies such as mud crabs, and even the occasional turtle eggs.
And I got to eat a lot of greens too, some grown by our neighbouring vegetable farmers, some from trees and shrubs around our house, and some from the nearby hills and swamps.
An abiding memory is watching freshly prepared fish, garnished with turmeric and salt, clasped in a coconut frond and grilled over embers. I’d watch the fish cook and turn golden, its juices falling into the embers and turning into steam sounding like mini gunshots – piu, piu, piu.
Then we’d eat the fish with tamarind dips (the tamarind from a nearby tree) and chillies and onions and assorted herbs and spices, many grown around the house or in the hills and swamps nearby.
A favourite during the fasting month was nasi ulam – rice mixed with various shoots and leaves and salted fish. You can still get it at pasar malam now, but you can count the number of different ulams – leaves and shoots and roots in them – on one hand.
My mother made it with 17 different ulams! She’d use everything found around the house, and then she’d go to the hills to pick some of the wilder ones. The salted fish were fish we salted ourselves, usually the cheaper kinds that didn’t fetch a good price at the fish markets.
Cooking with ‘elbow brand’ spices
My mother had some Indian Muslim blood, a pretty common thing in Penang. This meant we also got to eat a lot of mamak food like korma and various curries, made with creamy spices prepared by my mother.
Best of both worlds indeed.
But my mother wasn’t the reason why Penang has such great food. Having one of the most diverse populations in Malaysia, local people adopted and adapted each other’s cuisine over the years. The humble nasi kandar became a staple among all, and the Penang nasi lemak also became a breakfast must have, although it was a slightly different variety with yellow curry rather than the thick sambal found nowadays
Penang being relatively close to Thailand, Thai dishes were quite easily found everywhere, some cooked by ethnic Thais or Thai Chinese or Thai Malays themselves.
Having spent so much time as part of the British empire, western food is plentiful, whether in hotels and fancy restaurants or in humbler places. There are many places where you could have tea and scones, which I didn’t like much because scones taste like chicken feed to me.
And over Christmas, turkeys and stuffing too, though probably not on the streets.
Street food used to be a family affair. Your favourite char kuay teow or apam seller was probably doing what his or her parents or maybe even grandparents did. You’d get to be very good at it, and people know where to find the good stuff.
My mother was a very good cook and her curry spices were legendary. They were laboriously ground together with the flat stone mortar and rolling pin, where others may have bought them ready-made in packets at the sundry shop.
People would always ask her what brand of spices she used, which always offended her slightly, given the time and effort she put in to grind everything into fantastic mixes.
She’d reply, with a little sarcasm in her voice that she adopted from me, “elbow brand lah”!
Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everybody. And do check your bills at the restaurants, maybe even the street food stalls, before paying!
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.