Kueh Pie Tee: A Detective Story

[Music playing]

Jimmy
Hi everyone. My name is Jimmy Yap, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. Today, we know kueh pie tee as a Peranakan dish. A pastry cup, stuffed with delicious popiah filling. But what is this pie tie? Is it really a kueh? To help us answer this question is Christopher Tan, a writer, photographer and cooking instructor. He’s the author of the award-winning The Way of Kueh. On Instagram, he is known as @thewayofkueh and he writes about his food adventures with amazing photography and videos. 

Christopher was a guest on an episode on the second season of the National Library’s cooking show From Book to Cook. And in that episode, he made kueh pie tie using a recipe from the 1950s. And that’s what we’re talking about today. 

Welcome to BiblioAsia+, Christopher. How are you?

Christopher
Thank you, Jimmy. Happy to be here.

Jimmy
Tell us about the origins of the name of this dish. So, kind of a weird name, right? You did some detective work about the origins of this dish. Tell us what you found. 

Christopher
Yeah. So, the fact that the word “pie” is smack in the middle of the name. 

Jimmy
Yes. 

Christopher
You know, that’s not a Malay word, And I refuse to believe that it derives from Hokkien because pie means broken, right? Pai liao. 

Jimmy
[laughs] 

Christopher
I’m sure that’s not a part of its origin, but, you know, it’s just an interesting name – kueh pie tie. Doesn’t sound like any other thing. The first question I asked was why is it spelled that way? Why is it spelled like the English word “pie”? And [the] second question I asked was how long has it been spelled that way? And then I did some digging in the online newspaper archives. 

Jimmy
NewspaperSG, you mean? 

Christopher
Yep. NewspaperSG. And I realised that kueh pie tee was not always spelled kueh pie tee. 

And if you go back far enough, some of the oldest mentions of it, they spelled it [as] “kueh patty”. 

Jimmy
Ah, okay, so what’s that? 

Christopher
P-a-t-t-y. Okay. Which, you know, huge light bulb above my head. Once I discovered that and then I started digging into other sources like vintage cookbook texts, and I realised that a lot of old cookbooks also called it kueh patty. Not kueh pie tee. I conjecture that pie tee just elided from patty. 

Jimmy
Okay, so that sort of makes sense. But what do you mean by patty? 

Christopher
Okay, so this is where it gets really, really interesting. If you’ve never seen kueh pie tee shells being made, okay, they are crispy pastry cups. 

And, you know, as we explored in the video that I filmed for NLB, how you do it is you preheat a heavy metal mould in hot oil and then you dip it into batter just for a few seconds so that a thin film of batter adheres to the surface of the mould. Then you put it back in the hot oil and the batter starts to fry and eventually comes away from the mould in a cup shape. And then you slowly fry it until it’s crispy and brown. 

Jimmy
Sounds delicious. 

Christopher
And what’s very interesting is that this particular method of dipping a mould into batter and then into hot fat is a very, very old one. Okay. According to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, one of the earliest mentions of this style of frying things is from 1570 and a very famous cook from the Italian renaissance called Bartolomeo Scappi, who calls them frittelle, mentions that the models for this fritter are made in the form of lions, eagles, knots and other fanciful shapes. 

Okay, so it’s a very, very old method of frying. And we also know this method of frying from kueh rose, sometimes known as kueh kuyang or kueh loyang, which is you have that very sort of flower-shaped, pattern shaped mould with holes in it, and then you get this lacy honeycomb looking kueh, right? 

Jimmy
Yes, yes. Now I know what you’re talking about. 

Christopher
Chinese New Year and Deepavali and Hari Raya you see them. It’s one of the very, very ecumenical ways. You see it at all festivals. All right. The kueh stalls. So, kueh rose is part of that family. And this is such an old recipe. It’s such an old way of frying. It’s found around the world. And when I say around the world, I really mean around the world. You find them in Iran, in Goa, in Indonesia, in Scandinavia. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Christopher
Scandinavians brought it to the US. You know, you find it in Spain and the South Americas, all these places. So that may sound tangential, but that’s all necessary to understanding the history of pie tee. 

So, these Scandinavian immigrants who brought this method of frying and this recipe to the States, they called them rosettes. So, what we call them is kueh rose. And the rosette moulds in the US usually were sold in sets. So, you get one handle that was removable and then several different shaped moulds that you could screw onto the handle. So, you could make several different shapes with one kit. 

Jimmy
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 

Christopher
I displayed one of these in the video to show everyone what shapes were allowable. And apart from the sort of the flower shapes with multiple holes and petals and frills, there was also a range of shapes where you could just make cups. 

And the biggest rosette iron sets came with many different cup shapes – deep ones, shallow ones. In the video I used one that was shaped like a fish, another one shaped like a slice of pie, and they had standard sort of fluted cup shapes which are practically identical to our kueh pie tee moulds. 

Jimmy
Yeah. And these are moulds that are used in the US? 

Christopher
In Swedish-American cooking. It’s associated with the Swedish community. And so, the other name for them was Patty Iron. Aha... Okay. So, there’s a couple of other names for them. Some people call them timbale moulds in France. Apparently, in France they also use them and they call them timbale. It’s a fancy French word for “cup”, basically. And if you go back, dive back into our local sources, you do find the words “patty iron” and “patty shell” being associated with kueh pie tee. In our local newspapers, patty shells were mentioned earlier than kueh pie tee. 

Jimmy
Referring to the same dish? 

Christopher
Referring to a dish. So, we had a couple of American-style recipes, and I found this in the clippings from the Morning Tribune in 1936 and 1937. They mentioned patty shells, no lengthy explanation of what they were, but the recipes were for – one was for mock turkey, which is pork. Don’t ask me why. And it was in a sauce made from cream of mushroom soup and then spooned into patty shells to serve. 

[The] second recipe from 1937 was for Crab Supreme, which was crab meat with peppers and mushrooms, again in a milky sauce and then served in patty shells. So [by] 1930s, patty shells were certainly here – and I’m sure that the American expat community was aware of them at this point. 

And then the earliest mention of pie tee spelled – the way that we spell it today, P-I-E T-E-E – is from 1954, where a reporter writing about the food fair at the Wesley Church just up the road from where we are now, the National Archives, mentioned that someone was selling pie tee with the description: “This consists of bits of meat and vegetable packed in a tiny pastry cup and bathed in two delicate sauces.” 

That’s all the information we were given. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Christopher
But I, for one, find it interesting the fact that the reporter felt it necessary to give a description. In general, people did not encounter [pie tee] that often. Okay, but apart from that we have no idea whether this was an Asian or Western dish, meat and vegetables. 

And in the Singapore Free Press on 1 April 1958, I hope – hopefully this was not an April Fool’s joke – but they had an article about what you should stock, what equipment every good cook’s kitchen should have. 

And in it was the line, “It would not be amiss if you added to this list a kueh patty iron for frying batter.” And it’s spelt P-A-T-T-Y. But the word is kueh patty iron. So, this is the earliest concrete link we have to the American patty iron. 

Christopher
Back in 1978, the New Nation reported on a shop at Joo Chiat, which is still there – Kueh Guan Huat. And it says, I quote, “A shop at 95 Joo Chiat Road, which sells freshly made white and egg popiah skins as well as kueh pie tee cups (crispy patty shells).” So, it still explicitly equates kueh pie tee cups with patty shells, which is, you know, another firm link to the American name for them. 

Jimmy
In your episode of From Book to Cook – you made kueh pie tee using a recipe from Suzy Hing’s cookbook. 

Christopher
Yes. 

Jimmy
In a Malayan Kitchen. 

Christopher
Yeah. 

Jimmy
That was actually published in 1956. So, for the people haven’t watched the video yet, how is Suzy Hing’s recipe different from the kueh pie tee that we know today? 

Christopher
So how it’s different from what we know today as pie tee – she used milk as the base for the sauce thickened with flour, which has been fried in butter first. So, it’s like a classic white sauce, what the British would call a white sauce. You fry seasonings and ingredients in butter, you add flour and then cook until the flour gelatinises and thickens. Then you pour in milk and cook it all down into a sauce. And that’s what we did in the video. So, and then you spoon it into the patty shells. So, it is very close to what the Americans also served their patty shells. 

It's so interesting, you know, for years we’ve been eating pie tee and, you know, until I wrote my book, The Way of Kueh, it never occurred to me to delve into the history as deeply as this. And so, all of this, you know, the first time I clapped eyes on all this information, it was all new to me as well. 

Jimmy
Fantastic. 

Christopher
So, I just find it, you know, some of our heritage foods have such an unlikely and unexpected origin. 

Jimmy
You filmed yourself [making pie tee] on Instagram and it looked like a lot of work. You take the hot mould and then you dip it in batter and you put in hot oil. I was like, okay, it looks really dangerous. I mean, it looked really pretty on your video. It looks really dangerous. And I’m like, okay, maybe it’s just better to buy these shells, but is there a reason to make them on your own these days? 

Christopher
I mean, okay, I don’t want to impose my priorities on all the cooks out there, but I always think if you want to know how good something can really be and how good something can really taste, you have to make it for yourself at least once. 

People didn’t think twice really about making their own pie tee shells, and insofar as it is related to popiah. It’s one of these festive dishes that everyone has a hand in. 

So, you know, whether, like my family, we would have a popiah party and we would have a huge pot of popiah filling, inevitably there would be pie tee shells as well. So, you have both of them at the same meal and then you farm out the garnishes. Someone makes the filling, someone cuts the cucumber, someone makes the egg, someone slices and fries a lap cheong, someone cooks the prawns, you know, someone makes the chili sauce, someone picks the coriander, someone makes the pie tee shells.

So, divide and conquer. 

Pie tee is one of these dishes that to me emphasises and embodies family ties and community ties. 

Jimmy
Okay, don’t tell anybody. But when I have popiah parties, I order it and then they have all the ingredients and all the things. And I make it very badly and everything collapses, as I put it in my mouth. But, you know, let's just keep this a secret between the two of us. 

Christopher
As long as your mouth is happy, that’s the most important thing, you know? But I encourage everyone, if you’ve never made it, it is quite fun, you know? And for people who are scared of dipping things into hot oil, just use a deep pot and don’t fill it more than half full of oil, so that there’s plenty of air space above the oil so that any, you know, splashes will not leap out at you. 

And because you actually keep the heat relatively low, because you have to slowly fry the patty shell until it’s crispy. So, it’s not you know, other things are fried at much higher temperatures. 

Jimmy
You’re very familiar with old cookbooks. What’s special about this? I mean, what stood out for you when you went through this cookbook? 

Christopher
First thing was the cover. Actually, when I first saw it, you know, the fact that it’s called In a Malayan Kitchen. 

So, this is when Singapore and Malaysia were collectively referred to as Malaya. And then on the cover is a hand-drawn illustration of four different ladies dressed in different ethnic dress like kebaya and sari and samfu, you know, and it’s quite clearly a multi-ethnic cookbook from the get-go, from the cover. And it sort of lays out, in a very diverse and fascinating selection of recipes, how people cooked in Malaya at the time. 

I understand that it’s recipes that she acquired or created over her lifetime, and she put them in the book for her family and so, you know, if it’s an accurate representation of how she used to cook – and we have no reason to believe that it's not – you know, it seems to be a very personal and detailed collection of recipes. 

Then it really shows you how cosmopolitan home cooks were. You know, Suzy Hing was from Samarang, which is one of the provincial capitals of Central Java and Indonesia’s fifth largest city. And it was part of the Dutch East Indies back in the late 1600s. You know, so you’ve had a colonial presence there as far back as that. 

And the city today has a lot of examples of colonial Dutch architecture, as well as Chinese temples. And there’s a lot of multi-ethnic influences blending and co-existing side-by-side in Samarang. And that is reflected in her cookbook. You know, you have very Anglo-style dishes, you have very Dutch dishes, including the rissole I mentioned, and you have Dutch-Indonesian dishes which combine both Indonesian and Dutch ingredients and influences. 

And then you have fairly Chinese dishes as well. And then you have some dishes which are pure Indonesian. 

Jimmy
It really is a Malayan sort of cookbook. 

Christopher
And if you look at other cookbooks from around the same time, Ellis Handy’s, you know, My Favourite Recipes. They were similarly freewheeling in that respect, you know, mixing Malay and Chinese and Eurasian and Peranakan and Western dishes. 

Jimmy
Up till very, very recently, most people only knew Suzy Hing because of the name on that cookbook.

But then somehow very recently we’ve just come to know a little bit more about that. Part of it, you know, is thanks to you. So, give us a little bit of an insight into how that happened. 

Christopher
Ah, so, I did previously write about one of Suzy Hing’s recipes in BiblioAsia, an article I did about kueh lapis legit otherwise known as spekkoek. A very classic Dutch-slash-Indonesian version of the dish. 

So, after I wrote that article, I also did some posts on my Instagram account screenshotting some of the very interesting pictures of cooking equipment and recipes in a book. And then someone left a comment on my post saying, “I happen to be Suzy Hing’s great-niece.” Social media has a lot of pros and cons, but one of the pros is making connections like this. 

Jimmy
It’s amazing. 

Actually, what’s happened since is that we’ve done some research on our end and I think a lot of people suspected Suzy Hing had a Javanese connection because of the recipes in her book. But as a result of this, you know, through some very convoluted method, we’ve come to find someone who actually knew Suzy Hing, her grandnephew, Malcolm. 

As you rightly mentioned, she was from Samarang. She was born at the turn of the 20th-century. She was the second daughter of Goh Kek Sin. She came to Singapore as a child, sat in RGS, she lived with her great paternal grandparents in Newton Road. And the Ho Ho Biscuit factory was the family business. 

And Suzy married Oscar Hing, who came from British Guyana. But, you know, sadly, she was widowed at a young age and they had no kids. 

The family is well-connected socially because, you know, Lady Yuen-Peng McNiece, you know, wrote a foreword [for] her cookbook. So, knowing all this about Suzy, does that give you more insight into her book? 

Christopher
I think it really explains, you know, why there are so many different influences in the book. And man, I wish I had been part of her household back in the day and tasting all these things. That’s fascinating that that her husband is from British Guyana. Do you know? Guyana is one of the other places in the world that has pineapple tarts. 

Jimmy
Oh, really? [laughs] We’re all interconnected through food. 

Malcolm said that Suzy had a collection of recipes, all handwritten in English and Javanese, and she tested these recipes with her cousins who were all good cooks. And so, these became social gatherings for them. And nearly every relative had a copy of the book that was published in 1956. So, you know, she clearly, you know, didn’t want money. The Ho Ho Biscuit Factory was the family business. She knew Lady Yuen-Peng McNeice. She wasn’t doing it for the money. 

It sounds like she probably did it as a way to gather all these recipes and pass them down to future generations. What does that say to you as a writer? 

Christopher
It says to me that she was very forward thinking, for one thing. It was usually the matriarchs who spent time in the kitchen, always had a notebook of some kind just to collect all their own recipes and newspaper clippings and things that they learned to pass down to the next generation. And, you know, to take pains to produce wonderful food for your family, to me, is one of the most concrete and meaningful expressions of love for your family and expressions of pride in your heritage. 

And in the old days the kitchen really was the heart of the home; everyone congregated there, cooked together there. Ate there or near there. And yeah, the fact that she would go to so much trouble to put down her recipes, which – and I must say for the time from 1956, her recipes, while not the most detailed – are pretty precise. 

You know, they’re not offhand instructions. She does explicitly tell you, you know, how to do this and how to do that. The level of detail that she put in is really impressive and really speaks of her desire to bequeath something valuable. 

Jimmy
I think I really like the word, you know, bequeath, because I think that’s what it is. Right? We grew up with, you know, cooking that our parents did for us. And then eventually, you know, sadly, they pass on. And then if you don’t know how to cook that, then you’ve lost that. 

I know you feature a lot of old cookbooks. What’s the point of collecting these old cookbooks? You know, there is any value to having these? 

Christopher
I use Instagram to share knowledge so that everyone can up their game, you know, whether it’s related to cookbooks or kueh making or cooking in general. I like to highlight especially heritage knowledge that might be otherwise be in danger of disappearing. 

So, you know, cookbooks are one of the ways to do that. 

So not all of the cookbooks that I feature on my Instagram account belong to me. Some of them belong to other people who have kind of let me read them. 

Some of them are from sort of archive sources. To me, they are the repository of a country’s cooking know-how, they are a record of how people used to cook and therefore how people used to eat. 

Jimmy
And live. 

Christopher
And live. And, you know, no cookbook is just a source of recipes. 

If you read between the lines, you can find out all kinds of interesting conclusions and deductions about how people used think about food and incorporate food into their lives. You know, and sometimes vintage recipes get a bad rap for being laborious or for being time consuming or tedious. 

I personally always like to use the word “effortful”, because if you put effort into something, you will reap the rewards of that, you know? And if something is truly delicious, truly good to eat, I believe it is worth the effort needed to pull it off. And then again vintage cookbooks are a window, really, into the past, in a very tangible sense, you know, difficult-to-decipher measurements. 

It’s almost like a time machine. You make a recipe from 50, 60, 100 years ago. And in a small but not insignificant way, you step into the shoes of the person who wrote the recipe. 

Jimmy
I love that. When I look at an old cookbook, it’s a time machine. And when you make those dishes – even more so. 

Christopher
Absolutely. 

Jimmy
That’s amazing. So, the book in In a Malayan Kitchen, is actually going to be reissued sometime in the first half of 2024. It might even be out by the time this podcast goes out. You know, there’s going to be photography, you know, updated measurements, and some detail about Suzy Hing and really gorgeous photographs as well. 

How do you feel about this reissue? 

Christopher
I think it’s fantastic. You know, we have so many locally published cookbooks that deserve to be re-celebrated and reissued and re-highlighted from all our communities – from the Malay community, from the Indian community, from the Chinese community. 

There are so many old cookbooks, you know, some of which can be found, not all of them, but some of them can be found in the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library. Some of them are in too fragile a state to be easily handled. But, you know, there is so much treasure there and, you know, you see a lot of verbal sparring on social media about what should be considered Singapore’s national dish. 

Jimmy
Yes, that’s right. 

Christopher
You know, and there are so many dishes that people have utterly forgotten about that could be possible candidates. And we don’t hear about them. But they’re there, you know, So I just really feel that, you know, rather than chasing after what the chefs in Spain or Scandinavia or the US are doing at the moment, we should all just spend a bit more time delving into what we had before, and things that have been cooked and enjoyed on our soil. 

Jimmy
You seem to be writing like, you know, I’ve lost count of the number of cookbooks you’ve written. How many have you written and what are you working on now? 

Christopher
If you count the books that I’ve written solo and those that I’ve also co-written with other people, I think it’s something like 14 or 15. 

Jimmy
Okay, that’s crazy. And what are you working on now? 

Christopher
So, I think by the time this podcast is released, my next book will be out on bookshelves. It’s a sequel to my previous cookbook, Nerdbaker. And this new one is called Nerdbaker Two: Tales from the Yeast Indies. 

Jimmy
Spelled “yeast”. 

Christopher
And “Indies” is like indie music. During the “indoor years”, as I call them, the last few years, all of us were stuck indoors baking and not allowed to go out. 

So, the concept for this book I came up with during that time, it’s a return to my first love, which is baking. And it’s about the very creative and independent perspectives that good bakers bring to what they do. So, it’s also a look at that very specific local and Southeast Asian style of baking. 

Jimmy
What is it? What do you mean by a local? Is there a style of baking? 

Christopher
Look at all the Hainanese bakeries that we have. Again, there’s a few remaining at Whampoa. And these bakeries, they supply all the kopitiam with the bread for the kaya toast. They supply French loaf, you know the old days you didn’t – at least in my family and many Peranakan families – you didn’t serve chicken curry with rice; you served it with French loaf. 

Jimmy
Do you call it a baguette or call it French loaf? 

Christopher
No, no, no. It’s not a baguette. I must say. That is not a baguette. It’s a French loaf. Roti perancis. Okay. All right. Yeah. An orthodox Parisian baguette would be far too chewy to serve with our local food. So French loaf. It looks like it’s somewhere between a batard and a baguette. 

So, it’s like a fat baguette, and it has a much softer crumb. And it’s a very absorbent crumb, which is why we serve it with curry, we make roti John. We serve it with chili crab. 

But also look at the kind of baking recipes that Suzy Hing had in her book. She has recipes for a couple of kinds of bread, one of which is as an enriched bread, which she calls roti sobeh. She spelled roti sobeh as in S-O-B-E-H. in Indonesia, it’s called roti sobec, which basically means “tear”. Tear bread because you bake it as rolls next to each other and then they fuse as they bake and then you tear them apart to serve. Everyone goes on about milk bread nowadays. This, in fact, is a very early example of milk bread now, which again is a colonial legacy in Indonesia. But I don’t just talk about baking in my book, although it is called Nerd Baker 2, there are all kinds of steamed kueh and sort of pan-fried things that we use fermented foods or yeast in. 

Jimmy
So, is it like contemporary recipes or are they... 

Christopher
They are a mix of things. So, I have a recipe for French loaf. And then there’s a recipe for the kopitiam-style bread. I mentioned in the book that I was so happy when I finally managed to duplicate that very soft, spongy kopitiam bread – I did a dance around my kitchen. 

Jimmy
The bakeries in Whampoa will put a contract out on you. 

Christopher
Yeah, hopefully not. No, no, no. Please support your local bakeries. 

Okay, I want to make that clear. But yeah, so it’s a blend of my own creations and some classic things and you know, some which are sort of my riffs on things that we’re all familiar with. So, I have a recipe for an anpan bun, like a Japanese red bean bun, which is inspired by the original anpan bun from Japan, as well as what we used to buy from Yaohan. Remember Yaohan? 

Jimmy
Yes, yes, yes. 

Christopher
That everyone used to queue up for in the 80s? Yeah, things like that. 

Jimmy
We met a few days ago and you were talking about toddy and baking and so this was a bit mind blowing. Why is toddy – I mean, no, I’m sure nobody will complain about having a bit of alcohol in their bread – but why is toddy a part of baking? 

Christopher
Toddy is fermented palm sap – and it can be extracted from various species of palm coconut palms, Palmyra palms. They have a big spadicle, which is like a big flower bud. And then if you make cuts in that, they start to bleed a sweet juice and you collect the juice. And due to wild yeast and microbes in the environment, this ferments and becomes toddy. Okay, so it becomes slightly fizzy. The sweetness is enhanced a little bit, and then the longer you let it ferment, it becomes slightly alcoholic. And then other microbes start to turn the alcohol into vinegar eventually. 

Jimmy
Eventually people actually buy it because of the alcohol content, isn’t it? 

Christopher
Yes, that’s right. I mean, the alcohol content varies a lot depending on your terroir. You use a fancy French to it. But in the sort of late 1800s, early 1900s, fresh yeast from the west was not readily available here, and there were not many beer breweries. A lot of places in the West they would use yeast from beer brewing to also make bread. 

And that was not common back here. Dry yeast as a commercial product had yet to be invented. So, a lot of local bakeries, especially the small ones, would use toddy in their bread dough as a source of yeast. And at that time, early 1900s, we had, you know, coconut plantations at Geylang and other places around the island and you could get toddy from them. 

But toddy was not a particularly reliable source of yeast. The fermentation was a bit unpredictable. Sometimes it would be very fast, sometimes it would be slow, sometimes it would be so fast that the bread would end up with an overly sour taste. And I know sourdough is very trendy now, but if you use poorly fermented toddy to make bread, apparently the taste was very disagreeable, kind of dank. 

There was a slight stigma attached to toddy just because of the unreliability of it and some of the more European bakers advertised themselves as such in the local newspapers. And again, you can see all these advertisements in NewspaperSG, in [NLB’s] e-resources. They set themselves apart by saying no toddy is used in our bread. 

Jimmy
I have to ask because I just came back from Melaka. And my father, whenever he goes back to Melaka he wants to eat, tapai? Is that from rice? 

Christopher
And I’m very glad you asked me that because I talk all about tapai in my book as well. 

Jimmy
Oh fantastic! 

Christopher
So tapai – which is Malay, what the Indonesian equivalent is, tapay – is a fermented starch of some sort. So, you can have tapai pulut, which is fermented glutinous rice, which a lot of Malaysia and Indonesia, and Peranakans make. And then you have tapai ubi kayu, which is fermented cassava. Okay. And this is a yeast product and you get raggy yeast which are sold in little balls or cakes, dry yeast, you grind them up and you mix them with the cooked rice or the cooked cassava, and you just let them ferment. And then the yeast breaks down the starches into sugars and it comes becomes a very sweet and delightful dessert. And if you leave it long enough then you get a very, very, very tiny amount of alcohol in the whole thing. 

Jimmy
So, what’s really interesting was because we’re sitting around a wedding dinner table, and my cousin was saying, “I remember when grandmother, you know, whenever she made tapai, shooed everybody out of the room.” Nobody could speak because if you didn’t do it properly, it would turn pink or something. And so, yes, I guess it speaks to the unreliability of making. 

Christopher
And, you know, in the old days before the science of it was fully known, people would come up with all kinds of explanations to account for how or why something did not turn out well. 

So, there are a lot of pantang associated – pantang meaning “taboo” in Malay – associated with the making of tapai. So among the taboos for tapai were: if you were pregnant or menstruating, you could not make the tapai. You had to make it with all the doors and windows closed and with preferably no one else in the room. You could not wear red while making it because then it would turn red. 

Jimmy
Why is that? 

Christopher
Red or pink is a sign of spoilage in many fermented things. 

There’s always some kernel of truth in all this pantang, no matter how outlandish to us. And in the old days because raggi was again – and, in fact, these days it is still – made as a cottage industry product. So, every batch is slightly different. You could never predict exactly how long fermentation was going to take and you know what potentially ruins fermentation is rogue microbes. Little yeast, or bacteria, or whatever, or bacilli, that you don’t want to get into, or ferment, or it would skew the results. So, by closing those windows, you prevented microbes coming in from the wind by keeping your hands clean and cleaning everything. You made sure that no, you know, no other hygiene affected it. 

And we do know that your physiology, everyone has unique microflora on their skin, a population of microbes. You know, we all have personal collections of microbes that live in our intestines and on our skin. Everyone’s profile is different. And, you know, hormonal changes in your body can affect the balance of microflora on your skin. And I theorised that that could then, you know, if you were using your bare hands to make the tapai, again could have different results. 

And recent scientific studies have shown that sourdough bakers who bake with sourdough cultures, again a wild yeast, if they handled their sourdough with bare hands and if they did this for long periods of time, the range of microflora and microbes found on their skin [would come] to resemble the range of microflora found in the sourdough starters. So, you are what you bake, in that sense, right? So to me, you know, maybe there is, in fact, a scientific reason for some of these [pantang]. 

I just want to say as well that in my new book, number two, there are recipes for cakes and breads made with tapai, so if you like tapai okay, there’s a recipe for how to make tapai ubi kayu from scratch. And then how to use that tapai ubi kayu to make very interesting traditional Indonesian breads and cakes. 

Jimmy
I’m really excited to read your book. I love the title, by the way. I think it’s so clever. 

You just have to rush to the bookshops to buy this book because it sounds very, very interesting. Christopher, I want to thank you for joining us on this podcast. 

Before we go, though, it’s now time for our very popular quickfire questions. 

What is your dream filling for kueh pie tee? 

Christopher
My dream filling would be an extremely super istimewa deluxe version of regular pie tee filling. 

Jimmy
What would that consist of? 

Christopher
The basic bankwang as the base but then [cooked] with a really rich pork stock. And I could use something fancy like Iberico pork, right, to make a really full-flavored stock. And then I would have mantis prawn, which is that very succulent prawn. You know, if you have [it] in season, sometimes there’s a line of roe running through the middle, and in Penang, you know, you do find some popiah stalls where they have mantis prawn popiah. So, I will put that on top and then I would have crab meat and homemade chili sauce on the side. 

So a really, really deluxe pie tee filling. And then I would use an American mould to get extra big pie tee cups. 

Jimmy
I think – I fear – Christopher that you’ve just invited a popiah party at your house where people would have very, very high expectations. 

Christopher
You did say a dream filling. So, you know, it may never become reality, but here’s hoping. 

Jimmy
Okay, what’s the one dish you wish you could master or you would like to master? 

Christopher
Aiyo, where to start lah? You know, it’s very funny, but every few years, my mind will latch onto something, and will get obsessed with a dish. And one of those, in fact, was kueh ambon, which is on the cover of my new book. Which took me 10, 15 years to really get a handle on. 

Jimmy
What? 

Christopher
Yeah. It’s a very finicky kueh to make. Okay. The full recipe’s in my book, The Way of Kueh, but that recipe took me over 10 years to perfect. 

Jimmy
Wow. 

Christopher
Or to refine, I should say. 

But what is left out there for me to master that I really want to get a handle on? I mean, there are too many to choose just one. 

Jimmy
How about something, something local, or baking related? 

Christopher
Again, too many, so many. I think I’d like to get more into rye bread. Like the very hearty and complex rye breads that you find in Scandinavia and very dense in the sort of region between China and Russia. There are very interesting sorts of Eastern European/Asian-style rye breads. So that’s something that you need a lot of time [for] and you need very specific ingredients. So that’s something. 

Jimmy
Do you, like Suzy Hing, test your recipes on your family? Are they the guinea pigs for all your dishes? 

Christopher
I’m sure some of them might say I inflict my recipes on them, but obviously if I am post-mortem-ing and sticking my fingers into things, I don’t give them to people to taste. But if I have leftovers from my recipe testing, I do usually give them to family and friends. And to anyone who might be listening and might want to leave a comment on my Instagram asking for a taste, sorry you’ll have to take a number. A lot of people ask me that. I never like to give someone something until I’m at least 80 percent happy with it, right? 

Jimmy
Of course. What’s the one thing you would rather buy than cook on your own? 

Christopher
Really, really good ice-cream? My kitchen is too hot. Even with an ice-cream maker, my kitchen is too hot to make ice-cream. So, I would gladly shell out for really good ice-cream. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Christopher
And also, kimchi. I don’t have the space and I don’t have the necessary ambient temperatures in my kitchen to make good kimchi on my own. But, you know, anyone who’s been to Korea and has had really good artisanal kimchi that is still alive and fizzy when you eat, will know what I’m talking about. 

Like good, fresh, gut-enhancing kimchi. 

Jimmy
Because this is audio you cannot see the look on my face when he said fizzy kimchi and the look of horror. 

Christopher
No, really, when you bite into it right there’s a slight little effervescence almost like champagne. 

Jimmy
Really? 

Christopher
And the kind of very complex aftertaste and aroma nuances you get from a properly made, well-made kimchi is unlike, you know, all those pre-packaged kimchi that you see in the supermarkets. They’re functionally dead because they’ve been on the shelf for too long. Yeah, all the microbes are dormant. You won’t get this. But once you taste the real thing, it’s very easy to get converted. 

Jimmy
On my next trip to Korea, that's what I shall look for. Fizzy kimchi. 

Complete the sentence. Food is... 

Christopher
Love. 

Jimmy
Okay, but explain why. I mean, food is love. Why? 

Christopher
You know, as we mentioned earlier, food is a very concrete way of expressing your love for someone. By cooking for them, by serving something to them that you’ve made with your own two hands and that you’ve made with the knowledge of what they like and what they enjoy and what floats their boat, you know, to cook for someone is, to me, really one of the ultimate expressions of showing your devotion to them and showing your appreciation of them. 

And, you know, it’s a trope that Asian parents show their love to their kids, not by saying so, but by cutting fruit for them or cooking meals for them. You know, and it’s a trope, but it’s also a truth. 

Jimmy
Well, thank you very much, Christopher, for joining us on this podcast. You know, it was wonderful to have you. Please follow Christopher on Instagram. He is @thewayofkueh. 

And, also, please, if you want to watch Christopher make kueh pie tee, or to check out Suzy Hing’s recipe for kueh pie tee, check out the show notes. You can also browse through the BiblioAsia website to find out more about From Book to Cook and all these wonderful, amazing things that we’re doing at BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg. 

Christopher, thank you once again. I hope to see you soon. I can’t wait to buy your book. 

Thank you very much. 

Christopher
Thank you, Jimmy. 

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Susie Hing, In a Malayan Kitchen (Singapore: Mun Seong Press, 1956). (Call no. RSING 641.59595 HIN-[RFL])

Janice Loo, “‘Mrs Beeton’” in Malaya: Women, Cookbooks and the Makings of the Housewife,” BiblioAsia 9, no. 3 (October–December 2013).

Christopher Tan, “Love Is a Many-Layered Thing,” BiblioAsia 16, no. 4 (January–March 2021).

Christopher Tan, Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies (Singapore: Epigram, 2023). (Call no. RSING 641.815 TAN)

“The Pantry Shelf,” Morning Tribune, 20 March 1936, 15. (From NewspaperSG)

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Christopher for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.