The Crisped, the Baked, the Spiralled: Curry Puffs and Their History

Christopher
Certain kinds of curry puffs, like pork curry puffs, as you mentioned earlier, you can’t find those now.

But on the other hand, you can find things like otak-otak or taro puffs. So the diversity has changed. To me, I think they’ve almost receded too far into the background because we’ve so many other different snacks from around the world that are now easily accessible to us, whether it’s a hot dog or a bagel. Curry puffs don’t loom as large in our imagination as they used to. 

Jimmy
Previously we had no choice. 

Christopher
Not say no choice. But they were a thing that almost everyone enjoyed.

[Music playing] 

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating. 

The curry puff is a perfect food. It’s delicious dough wrapped around a yummy meat filling, and then deep fried to perfection. Heaven. I could go on and on about curry puffs, but I won’t, because I’m not an expert. My guest today, though, is. With me in the studio is Christopher Tan, an award-winning cookbook author, engaging cooking instructor, intrepid food researcher, and all-around nice guy. His latest book is Tales from the Yeast Indies, which was published in 2024. Christopher made three types of curry puffs for an NLB cooking show, From Book to Cook, and he’s here today to tell us everything we need to know about the humble, or indeed not so humble, curry puff. Welcome to the BiblioAsia+ podcast, Christopher. How are you?

Christopher
Great. Hi Jimmy, thanks for having me.

Jimmy
Before we start, can we just tell people, what is a curry puff?

Christopher
Curry puffs, as we understand them here today in Singapore, are basically pastry wrapped around a filling. I want to be as generic as possible with that starting definition. There are many subtypes of curry puff, but generally, when we say curry puff, we mean pastry plus filling. Could be baked, could be fried.

Jimmy
Heresy. Why would you bake it when you can fry it? But that’s the very generic definition.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
But there are specific types, aren’t there?

Christopher
Let’s plunge into the finer grain types. So from what I see and from what I’ve cooked myself, I can see, broadly speaking, that there are three main types of curry puffs that we find in Singapore. Type A is made with short-crust pastry, so a plain dough, slightly crispy, but with no internal layering, and then those are deep fried. So that would have been the kind that I had in my school tuck shop back in the ‘80s. Then, what I call type B curry puff is made with puff pastry, so a layered, crispy textured pastry with the filling. And the most recognisable types, to most locals are the Indian Muslim, what they call mamak-style curry puffs, which are triangular or rectangular.

Jimmy
Yeah.

Christopher
There is also a subtype B, which is a baked curry puff using Western-style butter puff pastry. It’s the same kind of puff pastry that we would use for chicken pie.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And this subtype was popularised by places like Balmoral Bakery and other bakeries run chiefly by Hainanese bakers who were often trained in Western pastry, and then they applied what they learned: the pastry techniques to pair that with a curry filling.

Jimmy
Interesting.

Christopher
So, you know, you could almost consider them, I guess, Hainanese fusion or more generically, colonial Southeast Asian fusion. Then there’s type C, which are deep-fried curry puffs again, but this time the pastry is layered, and they’re layered such that the curry puff shell shows a spiral pattern, almost like a seashell. And those are, again, are deep fried, and those are the kinds that you will see at some of the chains of curry puff shops at our hawker centers, quite often by Chinese hawkers, but not necessarily, also by Malay vendors, and those can have sometimes sweet fillings. I’ve seen yam paste, taro paste –

Jimmy
Really?

Christopher
Sardine.

Jimmy
Oh, my God.

Christopher
Otak-otak.

Jimmy
Oh, my God, I’m going to throw up. That’s interesting. There are three main types and one subtype.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
I just wanted to clarify the difference between type A and type C, because type A and type C seem very similar, except one has that spiral pattern.

Christopher
Type C has the layered spiral pastry. And then type A is just plain pastry.

Jimmy
Does that affect the taste in any way, or is it just a visual?

Christopher
That definitely affects the texture, ’cause the spiral one, when you bite into it, it kind of flakes apart into layers.

Jimmy
I see.

Christopher
Whereas the type A is, just breaks cleanly, without the layers. But type A is the kind that would have been taught in domestic science classes, and you can find them in a lot of heritage cookbooks, like Alice Handy’s My Favourite Recipes. My mom actually likes Alice’s recipe for that.

Jimmy
Compared to your recipes for curry puffs.. Let me tell you how I got fascinated by curry puffs. So I moved to the UK when I was in my early teens, and I remember reading a book by a British naturalist called Gerald Durrell.

Jimmy
Oh, I love Gerald Durrell.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
My Family and Other Animals.

Christopher
Yes, My Family and Other Animals. I don’t know; I can’t remember whether it was that book or another book, but he came from a family, and his mum was born in India, so she was born under the British Raj in the 1880s, and she used to cook a lot of curry at home. And the first mention I ever saw of curry puffs outside a local context was in his book, and he mentioned having curry puffs at a picnic.

Jimmy
Oh, and he called it curry puff?

Christopher
And he called it curry puff.

Jimmy
Oh!

Christopher
I was like, “What is this? This is like, you know, a big, bearded English guy. Why is he eating curry puffs?”

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And I was so fascinated by that. When you delve into the history of curry puff, right, or more, again, more generally, if you delve into the history of meat filling wrapped in pastry, that goes back maybe, we can say safely, at least to the 13th century and maybe earlier than that. So, there are many kinds of meat-wrapped-in-pastry or meat-wrapped-in-dough snacks, from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and then from there, that sort of format of food spread through the trade routes, Silk Road, overland, into Central Asia, and from there into India and other parts of the world. Okay, so we’re talking about areas and countries including places like Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Iran, North Africa, and you know, Morocco, they all have various kinds of meat wrapped in pastry.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
And sometimes they look just like our spiral curry puffs, sometimes they are plain.

Jimmy
So they are curry puffs then.

Christopher
Well, they are puffs, whether the filling has curry spice in it, you know.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
That’s another label. But that whole format of food is from that area. And then one of the earliest written references we have to it is from this book. It’s a medieval Indian cookbook written in Persian in the late 1400s, called Nasir al-Din Shah’s Book of Delicacies, and there’s a reference to sanbusa, okay, which is meat wrapped in pastry. Does that word sound familiar to you, the sound of the word sanbusa, what does that sound like?

Jimmy
Yeah. Well, actually, tell me because I don’t know.

Christopher
Well, it sounds like samosa.

Jimmy
Oh, right. Okay, I’m an idiot.

Christopher
According to the scholars, that would have spread into India and evolved into the many kinds of samosa that we have now.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And interestingly, in Pahang and the coastal areas of eastern Malaysia, right, they have something called tembusa, which scholars have identified as coming from the Persian sanbusa, same root.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Very interesting, right? So if you look across India, and there are many regional cuisines Culinarily speaking, India is a hugely diverse place, and there are many kinds of Indian Muslim cuisines as well, so they have many kinds of samosas in India. And bear with me, I am going to connect this up to our curry puffs eventually.

Jimmy
At some point.

Christopher
So my theory is that through the British the kind of curry puffs that Gerald Durrell would have grown up with came to Singapore.

Jimmy
All right. Via India.

Christopher
Via the British connection.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Because back then, in sort of, under colonial rule, you know, the big households with Indian cooks, if they had leftover curry, they would probably have some kind of English pastry lying around that would have been easy to whip up, and then you just wrap up your leftover curry and bake it or fry it and have it the next day.

Jimmy
Right

Christopher
For tiffin. Okay, what we call tiffin means like a light lunch or a light midday meal in India. And the earliest mention of curry puffs in our newspaper archives is from 1907, in a column in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, and it was written about someone’s train trip in Mysore, in India, and they referred to curry puffs.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
Without further detailing, so it must have been assumed that people would have known what they were.

Jimmy
Known what it was.

Christopher
Already. Okay, and then the next notable mention is in the Straits Times in 1912, a short article about a special day for the St. Andrew’s Cathedral Sunday School, and it mentioned that they had an annual picnic tiffin with curry puffs and ham sandwiches.

Jimmy
Sounds delicious.

Christopher
Okay, so we see this connection between curry puffs and tiffin.

Christopher
So it’s my theory, hence, that type A curry puffs actually are a British legacy in Singapore. In my research, I found a few different kinds of samosas that I thought would be interesting. So when we say samosa nowadays, we think of the sort of three-corner type.

Jimmy
That’s right. Yeah.

Christopher
That just have a potato and pea filling and just a plain, lean, short-crust pastry, right, which are deep fried. But if you go to India, you will find something called a warki samosa, which looks just like our type B curry puffs, triangular-shaped layers. Indian Muslim type, again. Then they have something called a lukmi samosa, which I believe is from Andhra Pradesh, but you can also find it in Delhi, and they almost look like ravioli. So they’re squarish or oblong, and they will have a flaky pastry, and I have seen examples that are half-moon shaped as well. And then, most intriguingly, there is a kind of samosa called a Japani samosa, which, despite being called Japani, has nothing to do with Japan, but it is a deep-fried, layered pastry samosa made in an oblong shape, but when you fry it, it is shaped such that the edges puff up and spread out like a fan, so they call it Japani samosa, and it’s associated with, I think, one or maybe more specific hawkers in Delhi who made that popular from the 1940s.

Jimmy
Okay. This raises the question – when is a curry puff not a samosa or the other way around?

Christopher
They are all part of the one big family of things in pastry, or meats in pastry or vegetables in pastry.

Jimmy
They’re cousins.

Christopher
They’re cousins. Actually, I should address something that I did actually get some notes about. Online, there’s a lot of confusion about the relationship between curry puffs and Cornish pasties.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
And I think it was one or two food writers who mentioned it, and then everyone obsessively copied and pasted and kept repeating it, that local curry puffs in Singapore and Malaysia may have descended from Cornish pasties.

Jimmy
This is the whole idea of fillings and dough.

Christopher
And I think when you have a filling and a dough, it’s very easy to confuse or conflate things that may be distantly related, and then you may think actually there’s a close relation when there isn’t. If you have not had a Cornish pasty, a Cornish pasty is traditional to Cornwall. It is associated with miners who needed something they could hold in one hand and eat while working down the mines, and it is such an iconic food in that part of England that there are very specific rules as to how it may be made and what may go inside of it. So a traditional Cornish pasty is made with hot water dough, where you pour boiling water into flour and mix that into a dough, okay? And then the filling is typically raw meat, usually beef, cut up small and seasoned, and raw vegetables, onion, potato, and swedes, or rutabaga, which is a kind of root vegetable. And these are all cut up small, seasoned, put into the dough, baked into quite a large pasty and quite a long time, because the filling has to cook from raw.

Christopher
So if you’re listening to me describe it’s actually very different to our curry puff. So I don’t think that it is in any way directly related to what we know as curry puffs, even though Cornish pasties were brought by migrant miners to different parts of the Americas, and the Caribbean, and Australia, and South Africa, and they brought their pasties with them to those countries, and what evolved, the descendants of the Cornish pasties are still acknowledged today as being related to Cornish pasties, unlike our curry puffs.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And we know that Cornish tin miners did come to Malaya at various points to assist with the tin mines in peninsular Malaya, but I don’t think there’s any record specifically of Cornish pasties being adopted by our communities here.

Christopher
And I want to quote also a Straits Times article from 1953, and I think the author might have been English, and it was an article about what to bring with you if you are going fishing.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
So picnic foods for a fishing trip, I’ll read to you verbatim. “When you go fishing, you can be sure of three things that you will catch as well as, or instead of, fish. The first is a tan, the second a thirst, and the third, a whale of an appetite. I suggest you tackle the last item with a good supply of easily packed and eaten foods such as curry puffs, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, sandwiches, and fruit. And if you want to add an original note to your picnic, why not try out the following?” And then there’s a recipe for Cornish pasties. So in 1953, curry puffs and Cornish pasties were already being distinguished as being two very different things in a Straits Times article. 

You know, hence, I believe that our curry puffs are not directly related to Cornish pasties. Yes, they both belong to the worldwide family of things wrapped in pastry, but, apart from that, yeah, there is no direct relation.

Jimmy
Okay, but can I ask you then, because if you go online, there’s lots of nonsense online, but yet a lot of people are drawing links with the Portuguese empanadas. Could it have come via Portugal to Malacca, to Singapore?

Christopher
So ’there’s definitely a connection there.

Jimmy
Of course, the Portuguese could come via Goa as well.

Christopher
So, one of the sort of very important cultural centers for gastronomy in the medieval world was Moorish Spain. When North African and Muslim empires ruled the Iberian Peninsula, what they call Andalusia or Al-Andalus, and that stretched from, like, the 700s up into the 1400s. I think there was, like, 400 years of rule, and then they kind of hung around for a bit after that. But it was during that time that many kinds of layered pastry, we’ll come back to that later, many kinds of layered pastry were developed, but it was at that time that the Portuguese absorbed all this Arabic cuisine knowledge about pastry and meat and meat-filled pastries, and from there, when the Portuguese went to settle colonies in other parts of the world, they brought all that with them. So, when they went to South America, they brought the concept of meat wrapped in pastry, and that became the empanada.

Christopher
So the word empanada comes from the word empanar, meaning to wrap in bread or to wrap in dough.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
Right? Once it hit Latin America, then it evolved into many different kinds ofempanada, empadina, you know, several different kinds, depending which country you’re in, and of course, that was when New World ingredients like potatoes began to be incorporated into the filling. So, if you find something that is meat wrapped in pastry, and it has things like potatoes, and chilies, and tomatoes in the filling, quite likely that was a result of the Age of Exploration.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Right? Whereas the really truly medieval ones from, sort of North Africa, the Arabian lands, did not have these New World things. It was just meat and pastry.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Maybe onions.

Jimmy
I have sadly never gone to the New World, but someday I will. How different are empanadas and their various ilk from curry puffs?

Christopher
They are very diverse. So, the dough can sometimes have yeast in it.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
The dough might have layers in it or might not.

Jimmy
Oh, okay.

Christopher
Most often they are deep fried. Quite often they are baked as well, you know. It could have things like beef and raisins or dried fruit or nuts or many other things. So, you know, depending which country you’re in, but whether it’s Argentina or Brazil, there are many, many different kinds, and all the other countries as well, of course.

Jimmy
Right. Okay. It sounds like, you know, this concept of like convergent evolution, right?

Christopher
It’s convergent and parallel and linearly related but distantly related.

Jimmy
Okay. All right.

Christopher
Wait, we haven’t finished our journey yet, right? So, when they came to Southeast Asia…

Jimmy
You mean the Portuguese?

Christopher
The Portuguese, and the Spanish, you know, they came to East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. They also brought it with them. So, in fact, many of the curry puff cognates around Southeast Asia have Spanish or Portuguese names. Or names with Spanish or Portuguese roots. In Goa, in India, a former Portuguese colony, there’s something called pastéis, which are essentially pastries with savory filling.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
Made at festive occasions especially. We go to Indonesia, okay? They have something called pastel, which is definitely a Spanish word. So if you have a curry puff in certain parts of Indonesia, they call it pastel. If they have a spiral-type curry puff, it’s pastel gulung. Gulung means spiral.

Christopher
If you go to the Philippines, they also have empanadas, which can be plain.

Jimmy
And it’s called empanadas?

Christopher
And it’s called empanadas. And if you have the spiral one in the Philippines, they call it empanada kaliskis. Kaliskis means fish scales, because the spiral –

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
On the curry puff, it looks like a fish scale.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Right?

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
In Thailand, they call it karipap. But they credit it to the Portuguese, who brought many other recipes to Thailand, apart from the pastries.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
And then in Macau, you have something called chili cotas, which I think is a very specific name, but also has Spanish roots, but it’s ’an almost extinct recipe in Macau now.

Jimmy
Oh, you mean you can’t get it?

Christopher
It’s, only in private homes.

Jimmy
Oh, right.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
So, you know, so the Portuguese brought specifically the layered, eh, well, not specifically. The Portuguese brought curry puffs in general to Southeast Asia, but the kinds that seem to have been most popular are the spiral type.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
You can still find them around this part of the world today.

Jimmy
Okay, so this is very interesting, and obviously you’ve done a lot of research. So I want to ask you, what is the earliest curry puff recipe you found in Singapore, Malaya?

Christopher
So the oldest one that I have seen was in the Mem’s Own Cookery Book.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Which was 1920.

Jimmy
Wow, okay.

Christopher
The author of that book, if I’m not wrong, had a British India colonial connection as well. It was published in Malaysia in 1920, It’s called Mem, short for Memsaab. She has a recipe for dry curry puffs. Okay, let me read it to you. “Take the remains of cold beef or mutton, free from gristle and fat. Mince, add pepper and salt, some curry powder, and a little finely minced or beaten onion. Add a tiny piece of butter. Stir well, make some plain shortcrust, roll fairly thin, cut into squares, put a little mince in each, damp the edges, fold over, and bake.”

Christopher
So that would have been a type A, but baked, not deep fried. And this is very typical of the Anglo-Indian curry puffs that were associated with the Anglo-Indian community, who were mixed race.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
British and Indian.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And for them, curry puffs were an established fixture of any kind of celebration or party or just a daily snack.

Jimmy
Okay, and the recipe doesn’t sound too different from what we would do today.

Christopher
No, pretty much the same.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Pretty much the same. The only question is whether you would.

Jimmy
The filling first.

Christopher
Yeah. I mean, this was obviously using up leftover cooked meat, but, you know, sometimes the filling was cooked from scratch. So that’s a nice segue into my research in a book called Chemical Analyses of Malayan Food.

Jimmy
Okay, tell us about this book.

Christopher
Yes. So that was a survey of every single dish, every or at least every dish they could find, that was sold at hawker stalls or small restaurants in Singapore during the late 1920s. The survey was published in 1935, but the data collecting had happened in the few years before then.

Jimmy
Yeah, what was the point of publishing this?

Christopher
Just to make a record of what people were eating. And the chemical analysis, so they actually wanted to find out about the nutrition and whether all these hawker foods were meeting people’s needs. It was far, far more diverse and I think far more vegetarian than hawker food today.

Jimmy
Oh, really?

Christopher
Right.

Jimmy
So better than. Okay. Things were always better in the past.

Christopher
Okay, so it’s a strange study. The main authors were British expats. So some of the details are a little bit wonky. They consistently refer to coconut milk as coconut juice. And of course ’today we would –

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Distinguish between those two. But it records no less than six kinds of curry puff and one kind of curry bun, and this was in the late 1920s. And they were sold by Cantonese, Hainanese, Peranakans, Bengalis, Tamils, and Malays.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Right. So if it’s in the sort of late 1920s, early 1930s, if they were already that popular, that established, to be sold by that many different communities, then they must have been well ensconced in ournational diet by then.

Jimmy
It is our national food, because, I mean it’s the perfect snack, right?

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
It’s meat wrapped in delicious dough and deep fried.

Christopher
So let me read you briefly. So this is the Malay curry puff as recorded in this survey, right? And they call it curry pok. Actually, there’s a type D curry puff, which is the curry puff hairstyle.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
You know, made popularised by Tony Curtis in the 1960s, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Jimmy
Okay, it’s a different conversation.

Christopher
Okay, so curry pok, Malay curry pok from chemical analyses of, Malayan foods. “Sliced onions and garlic, are fried in deep coconut oil in a chetty pot until brown. The curry stuff.” So, back then, they called curry spices curry stuffs, which again, is a colonial British term. “Composed of ground coriander, chilies, saffron,” and by saffron, they probably meant turmeric. They often conflated the two. Jintan putih and manis, which are fennel and cumin, “is then added and fried. Then beef and potatoes cut up, add and stirred while being fried. Coconut milk is poured in and left to boil until gravy thickens. A quantity of curry is then put on pieces of flour dough, rolled over, and fried.”

Christopher
Okay? “And one cent each. Each curry pok weighed 37 grams and eaten cold by fingers.” They always mention how the dish was eaten.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
In the survey.

Jimmy
Right. But okay, this was a description of what kind of curry puff?

Christopher
The Malay curry puff.

Jimmy
The Malay curry puff.

Christopher
Specifically. Then there’s another entry for epok-epok. So even nowadays, you will find the term epok-epok used almost interchangeably with…

Jimmy
I always say use it synonymously.

Christopher
And epok-epok is actually a Riau Malay name for curry puff.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And I have not seen it, consistently applied where something can only be epok-epok or something can only be a curry puff. I’ve seen both names used to refer to many different kinds and different kinds of fillings in those. But as I understand it, epok-epok is just the Riau Malay name for curry puff.

Jimmy
Wait, curry puff or curry pop?

Christopher
So curry pop is just a local mispronunciation of puff.

Jimmy
Okay. All right. Because I’ve heard karipap, right?

Christopher
Yeah. So I believe, like in Bahasa nowadays, they would spell it K-A-R-I-P-A-P, karipap.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
But the old days, it was many different kinds of spelling, you know, karipap, curry pop.

Christopher
Yeah.

Christopher
Before you know…

Jimmy
Standardisation.

Christopher
Standardisation. So in 1935, epok-epok curry puffs, and these were sold by, quote, “Hokkien Straits-born hawkers,” meaning Peranakan. Right? At least I think it’s Peranakan. At this distance, it’s hard to confirm, but the recipe went, “Flour mixed with a little salt and made into a dough, potatoes cut into small, short strips, mixed with onions, also cut into small, short strips and minced pork. Then boiled into a curry with chili, kunyit,” turmeric, “ketumbar,” coriander, “and a little salt. The dough is made into small cakes stuffed with the curry and fried in a pan of coconut oil till cooked.” Two cents each, 27 grams, so smaller, yeah.

Jimmy
But pork-

Christopher
But pork.

Jimmy
So clearly it is not a Muslim dish.

Christopher
So at least in this survey, the curry puffs made by the Chinese hawkers, so Cantonese, Hainanese, and then the Chinese Peranakans or Hokkiens, all had pork lard and/or pork meat. Whereas the curry puffs made by Bengali hawkers had beef and mutton, right, and prepared by Tamil hawkers, had potatoes and prawns.

Jimmy
So I’m trying to remember, so the Malay karipap, what was the filling? What was the meat filling?

Christopher
So the Malay one was, onion, garlic, beef, potatoes.

Jimmy
Beef.

Christopher
And then curry spices and coconut milk.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
So it was a lemak kind of curry.

Jimmy
Right. Right.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
It just struck me that I’ve never had a curry puff with pork in it, so, because, you know –

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
In Singapore, at least, right? So in Singapore, most of the time, the curry puffs are chicken.

Christopher
I think nowadays, local hawkers, just to make it more inclusive –

Jimmy
Yeah.

Christopher
You know, they will use chicken or the curry puffs will be vegetarian.

Jimmy
Yeah.

Christopher
But, like I said, hawker food was much, much more diverse a hundred years ago. Many different kinds of things.

Jimmy
I don’t hear any beef curry. I mean, maybe the Chinese or the Malays would have the beef as a filling.

Christopher
Well, the Bengali one had beef in it.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
And in fact, the Bengali and the Malay ones had beef in it.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
The Tamil one only had vegetables and prawns.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Interesting.

Jimmy
So once again, it’s all about, you know, what the fillings are, right?

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Obviously then that is related to what people are used to eating.

Christopher
And if you think about it’s a very versatile format. You have a dough, you have a filling. You can put whatever you like in that.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Filling.

Jimmy
Even otak-otak.

Christopher
Even otak, yes. Hence, the modern diversity. But looking back 100 years ago, there was already diversity back then, and the type A puffs, insofar as they came from the Anglo-Indian tradition of using up leftover curry, whatever you had, would or might have been put into a puff at that time.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
You know?

Jimmy
I have to say, my favourite curry puff is actually the sardine curry puff, where there’s no curry at all, right? Where it’s the sardines with tomato sauce and the onions and all that. Sardines are okay. Otak-otak, I draw the line. I’m so sorry.

Christopher
There’s an Anglo-Indian cookbook called Curries and Bugles.  

Jimmy
Curries and Bugle?

Christopher
Yes.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
I think the author is Jennifer Brennan. I could be getting her name wrong. Her family grew up under the British Raj, and she has a recipe for sardine curry puffs in that book. So back then, in British India, they were already making sardine curry puffs. Also, because back then, every pantry had a can of tinned sardines in it.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Right. Yeah.

Jimmy
Right. So, I mean, you know, to me, the sardine curry puff is the pinnacle of curry puffs, and everything else pales in comparison. And so in From Book to Cook, you made three types of curry puffs.

Christopher
Yes.

Jimmy
For the people who haven’t watched the episode, can you tell us, what were the three types of curry puffs you made, and what was special about the curry puffs that you made?

Christopher
Okay, so I made all three of the different types that I mentioned earlier. So the type A, deep-fried, short-crust pastry curry puffs; type B, baked curry puffs with puff pastry, layered pastry; and then type C, the deep-fried curry puffs with the spiral pastry. I used the same minced beef and potato filling for all three types, but in the video, we showed the different ways you could make and shape the pastry.

Jimmy
Right

Christopher
In that. The most interesting thing about the pastry that I made, and that I wanted to personally revive, was the use of lamb fat in the layered pastry, which usually –

Jimmy
Your lamb fat was only used in the layered pastry? It wasn’t used for –

Christopher
No. The short-crust pastry was just made with butter.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Like normal shortcrust, right? But, for the layered pastry, I used lamb fat. So just to explain, the kind of puff pastry that most of us would be familiar with now is butter puff pastry, the Western type, where basically you layer a dough and butter, and you fold, and you roll it out, and you fold it up a few times to generate, you know, as many as 700 or more layers. And then when you bake it it puffs up, and you get these, you know, nice Western-style pastries. Back, in the 1970s, a few, at least two or three of the recipes that appeared in Berita Harian for Malay-style curry puff used mutton fat or beef fat as the fat that was layered into the dough, and this gives it a much more crispy finish than butter, because animal fat, like beef or mutton fat, would have been pure fat, pounded to a paste, and the water content would have been slightly lower than the water content of butter.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
Used in modern puff pastry.

Jimmy
Out of curiosity, you’re saying that mutton fat or beef fat was used to layer the pastries.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
At that point in time, what was the kind of fat that was used for cooking in general? Would it be vegetable fat, like for frying or whatever?

Christopher
So we have to remember that processed oil as a supermarket product did not become really common until, you know, maybe 1940s, 1950s even.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
I mean, the war kind of changed a lot of things in our supply chain.

Christopher
But, certainly in terms of the Chinese cuisine, okay, I can’t speak as reliably forMalay or Indian cuisine, but in Chinese cuisine, pork back then was a very common meat, and chicken was a luxury meat.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
So most families, if you cooked a lot of your own pork, you would have a lot of pork fat lying around, so you would have rendered the lard and used that as your everyday fat. I have a Cantonese cookbook published locally from the 1980s, and almost everything is fried in lard rather than oil.

Christopher
In the Malay kitchen, Peranakan kitchen, coconut oil would have been rendered by boiling coconut milk until it separated, and then the oil would be strained off, and then that would have been used for casual frying.

Jimmy
What about tallow?

Christopher
Tallow as in beef fat? I don’t know how common that was in the home kitchen.

Christopher
I’m sure that butchers had a lot of it to get rid of, so maybe some people bought it or restaurants bought it and rendered it to make beef fat.

Jimmy
So, like vegetable oils.

Christopher
Processed oil.

Jimmy
Processed oil, like nowadays we have…

Christopher
Corn oil or sunflower.

Jimmy
Yeah, exactly.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Right. That is actually very recent.

Christopher
Those are fairly modern.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
You know, I mean, you look at rice bran oil.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
Which has only really been common in the last maybe six to 10 years.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
And that is now a very popular deep-frying oil.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Wow, I did not know this. This is another article for BiblioAsia we need from you.

Christopher
And…

Jimmy
Oil, cooking oil.

Christopher
A hawker told me that for deep-frying things like youtiao, actually, refined coconut oil is considered the best.

Jimmy
Wow.

Christopher
Because it gives you a very good crisp finish, the coconut smell is not at all intrusive, and it just is very stable at higher temperatures.

Jimmy
So it’s a question of smell, right?

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
So mutton oil, or, not mutton oil, but oil rendered from lamb or mutton.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Would have a particular taste.

Christopher
Yes, and depending where the fat is from on the animal, that will give you a different result. So whether it’s a sheep or a cow or a pig, generally the internal fat, the fat near the internal organs, is considered to have the purest, most neutral taste and aroma, okay? In Chinese cooking, we use something like, called, in Cantonese, ji mong yau, which is the kind of membrane from the intestinal cavity of the pig.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
Right, which is, was used to wrap meat rolls or meatballs. In Peranakan foo bee, we wrap hati babi bungkus, pork liver balls, and the same membrane, I think technically it’s called the omentum or the mesenteric lining, which you will find in all cookbooks, and I’m sure, you know, a lot of home cooks would’ve been freaked out by it. But that same membrane is used in French cooking to wrap things called crepinette, which are little meatballs.

Jimmy
Yeah.

Christopher
Because as a fatty membrane, when you wrap something in it and then you bake it or you fry it, it bastes the contents, so it keeps everything moist and rich tasting, right? So that fat, if you chop it up and render it, it gives a very good, crisp finish to pastries without any obtrusive pork smell.

Christopher
Okay?

Jimmy
Hmm.

Christopher
And then, and so, lambs and sheep also have this lining, and if you’re going to use mutton fat or lamb fat, or beef fat, that lining will give you the best results compared to fat taken from nearer the muscles and under the skin of the animal, because that is closer to sort of muscle and blood vessels. That is a much stronger flavour. So depending how strong a flavour you like, and which fat you’re able to get hold of.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
You can tweak the taste of the pastry.

Jimmy
Presumably, people would use the cheaper type.

Christopher
I mean, the cheapest one is if you just get scraps of meat with fat on and trim off all the fat and collect them up and render it yourself.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
So in the recipes in Berita Harian, they make mention of pounded fat. So, I assume they meant raw fat that was cut up and then pounded to a paste, which is what I did in the videos from, for From Book to Cook. I actually used lamb caul fat, which I got from a butcher, so that’s the lamb internal lining, which had already been cleaned, and all I did was puree that to a paste in an electric blender, and then mixed it with flour to make a fat dough, which I then layered with a water-based dough to make the layered pastry.

Jimmy
Why do you layer a fat-based dough over a water-based dough?

Christopher
So that is the classic way of making a layered, a laminated pastry.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
Again, this goes all the way back to Al-Andalus, Andalusia, Moorish Spain, you know, back in the 1300s or so, and they developed many kinds of layered pastry back then, and essentially, it’s either pure fat that is layered with a water-based dough, or you mix the fat with a bit of flour to make a fat-based dough, which is easier to handle, and then you roll and layer that with the water-based dough. So essentially, you have a water element and a fatty element, and then layer it together, that produces the pastry with internal structure, and when you bake or deep fry that, the water in the water-based dough turns to steam and puffs the layers apart.

Jimmy
Oh, okay.

Christopher
And then the fat in the fat-based dough melts and then crispens everything up.

Jimmy
How clever!

Christopher
Yeah. Which, you know, dear listener, if you go and watch the video, you will see all this happening before your very eyes in the video that we made.

Jimmy
You made three types, as you mentioned, three types of curry puffs. And as you say, the type A is the most common one, I’m guessing.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Right?

Christopher
Probably most widespread just because of its use in domestic science classes.

Jimmy
Right

Christopher
But also it’s the easiest one to make, pastry-wise.

Jimmy
Right, and the kind that you buy in, you know, shops around Singapore.

Christopher
Yeah.

Jimmy
Perhaps a less common is the triangular one, which is perhaps the one…

Christopher
The layered, the layered one. Yeah, you can still find them around Katong and Geylang.

Jimmy
Yeah, but not as common.

Christopher
Not as common, yeah.

Jimmy
Not as. And then the spiral one I don’t see quite as often, so.

Christopher
I do see them at hawker centers.

Jimmy
So it is at hawker centres.

Christopher
So you can find them. They are probably not as common because the spiral technique takes a little bit more work. They are usually priced at a slightly higher premium than –

Christopher
The other types of curry puffs.

Christopher
You know, but you can still find them, and you can actually find them all across the ASEAN region.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
To be honest, the spiral puffs are my favourite just to eat because if you fry them correctly, you fry them slowly so that, you know, the pastry becomes very dry and very crispy, they will actually stay crispy for a couple of days, which is no mean feat in our humidity.

Jimmy
So why is that?

Christopher
You fry them slowly, all the water in the pastry evaporates, and then the internal fat in the layerings helps to ensure that everything is fully cooked. So, if you fry it slowly, you will get a nice, puffy, layered, thoroughly crispy and dry pastry around the curry filling. This is if the curry filling is also not super moist. So, if it was a potato filling, no problem, the puff will stay crispy for a couple of days after deep-frying. If it was a sardine curry puff, which generally, they usually have quite a bit of onion, and then the sardines themselves. No one likes a dry sardine.

Jimmy
No.

Christopher
So the filling will be a little bit wetter, so those will not stay crisp as long, but at least for a day.

Christopher
So yeah, the spiral ones are my favourite, I have to say.

Jimmy
You did your research by looking at old cookbooks, and you’ve come up with your own curry puff recipes. Now, in your latest book, Tales from the Yeast Indies, and I don’t know if I’ve said this, but I love the title.

Christopher
Thank you.

Jimmy
But, there’s no recipe for curry puffs in that one.

Christopher
No.

Jimmy
But in the book prior to that…

Christopher
Yeah

Jimmy
You did have a recipe for –

Christopher
Yeah, so Nerd Baker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies is the sequel to Nerd Baker 1, which is just called Nerd Baker, and in that book, I have a recipe for a beef fat layered pastry curry puff. So it’s a Malay-style, Indian-Muslim curry puff, but with beef fat in the layers, and that was a nice recipe. The layers do not puff apart as much as butter puff pastry because the animal fat doesn’t have as much water content, but the edges become very crisp, and you have a very rich beef flavour. So if you’re the kind that when you roast beef, if you spoon up all the drippings left in the pan to put on your potatoes, whatever, then you will like that curry puff.

Jimmy
I feel my arteries hardening as we speak. But clearly, from what we’ve heard so far, you are not just a guy who dabbles with recipes. It’s almost like modernist cooking. You understand the scientific principles behind all these different techniques. Tell us about the research that you had. So you don’t just take a recipe and do it, you absorb it, you understand it, you are the recipe. You understand the curry. To make a curry puff, you must be the curry puff, right? So that’s what you do.

Christopher
Well, that’s a little bit transcendental for me, I think. Pastry and confectionery, in general, is a lot more like science than sort of improvisatory hot cooking. When you’re talking about ratios of water and fat and sugar, and egg, you know, five-percent difference either way can make a huge difference to the eventual result.

Jimmy
Right. Yeah.

Christopher
So, for me, as a cook, I feel that I need to... I really want to understand something from the bottom up. And for me, as a culinary instructor, if I’m trying to impart knowledge to people, I need to know it really well myself. So, whenever I write a cookbook or I write a recipe to teach, I always start from first principles in creating that recipe, and then tweak it, and tweak it, and tweak it until I’m happy enough with it that I can send it out into the world.

Jimmy
But the other thing about it is that there’s also, you do a lot of research. And we are hoping very much, and here I’m begging you on air, to write about curry puffs for BiblioAsia. But maybe you can tell us a bit about the research process in coming up with the curry puff recipe that you have developed.

Christopher
Yes. So the curry puffs that, you all filmed me making for the video was not based on any one particular recipe, but I was reading all the old recipes in our local newspapers, in Ellis Handy, in all the different, old cookbooks that I have, and it was from gleaning different bits of knowledge, from all these, places, that, I came up with the recipes that I demonstrated in the video, and it’s quite interesting, in Berita Harian, in 1978, there actually was a short article on just tips for making layered pastry for curry puffs. And to be honest, the rarest kind of curry puff nowadays is a curry puff that is not made with margarine.

Jimmy
Because it’s so much cheaper.

Christopher
Because margarine is cheaper, and also it is –

Jimmy
Healthier.

Christopher
It doesn’t melt as easily. It’s easier to handle in hot weather. It has become the most common fat in commercially made curry puffs, you know?

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
No judgment, you know, hawkers work with very slim margins, so if it makes life easier, I completely understand that. But margarine, as we now know, especially the kind that contains trans fat is not so good for us. And I find that a curry puff containing margarine, whether it’s baked or deep fried, leaves you with this waxy aftertaste. It kind of coats your mouth in what, to me, is a slightly unpleasant way, and I don’t like that. Animal fats will not do that. Animal fats will not leave you with that sort of waxy, slightly artificial kind of mouthfeel, so I never use margarine when I make curry puffs, personally. I wanted to demonstrate the animal fat pastry in the video, just because I think that it’s something that most people maybe didn’t even know, that curry puffs used to be made with animal fat.

Jimmy
So now, I guess it’s also rare. Would it be accurate to say that most of the curry puffs that we can get today are not made of animal fat either?

Christopher
No. It would usually be margarine, maybe a little bit of butter for the aroma, or it might even just be all margarine with fake butter flavour added, which is –

Jimmy
That’s interesting.

Christopher
A thing you can buy.

Jimmy
Oh, my God. Okay.

Christopher
You know?

Jimmy
What has the world come to?

Christopher
Go to any baking supply shops, you will find tubs of pastry margarine just sitting on the shelf.

Jimmy
Yeah, I understand that, but –

Christopher
Without refrigeration.

Jimmy
But fake butter or butter flavouring, that to me is. It’s like canned smoke, right, for barbecue.

Christopher
Butter flavouring goes into so many things.

Christopher
It goes into cheap butter to make it smell more like expensive butter. It goes into all the popcorn in all the cinemas around the world.

Jimmy
Oh my God.

Christopher
And if you eat too much fake butter flavouring, it can affect your health very adversely.

Jimmy
Okay.

Christopher
I don’t want to go into the details, but you can Google artificial butter flavouring and health, and you will probably find some very disturbing webpages.

Jimmy
This allows us to segue into how the curry puff scene has changed from the 1920s till today.

Jimmy
One, as you’ve mentioned, there’s less diversity.

Jimmy
Two, there’s not so much use of animal fat or no use of animal fat, and principally margarine. What other differences are there?

Christopher
Okay, so certain kinds of curry puffs, like pork curry puffs, as you mentioned earlier, you can’t find those now.

Christopher
Okay? But you, on the other hand, you can find things like otak-otak or taro puffs. So the diversity has changed. To me, I think they have almost receded too far into the background because we have so many other different snacks from around the world that are now easily accessible to us. Whether it’s a hot dog or a bagel, the curry puffs don’t loom as large in our imaginations as they used to.

Jimmy
Right. So previously we had no choice, so we just-

Christopher
Not say no choice, but they were a thing that almost everyone enjoyed. And if I want to point out that in that survey from 1935, it was very specifically mentioned that the Bengali curry puffs – and it’s the only one of which this was said – “Prepared by Bengalis, eaten by all nationalities.” They made that a point to include this in the survey. I found a brief write-up in the Straits Times in 1982 that made mention of Mackenzie Road, right? Which is the junction of, Sleightholme and Serangoon, and it used to be called Kalipup Lane. Okay? K-A-L-I-P-U-P.

Jimmy
Oh.

Christopher
In the Kalipup Lane, because at that time, there were three very famous curry puff stalls in close proximity to one another. Those being Old Chang Kee, which used to be at Albert Street, but then moved to Mackenzie Road, Selera Puffs, and then Rex Restaurant. And there’s more than one article around that time that mentioned these three stalls because they all sold potato curry puffs, deep-fried potato curry puffs, with their own slightly distinct styles, around then.

Jimmy
I was just thinking about potatoes being used as a filling. So that’s really just an effort to put in some sort of relative. If you fill the curry puff entirely with meat, that then makes it much more expensive than if you use less meat and more.

Christopher
Yes, and also it’s just heavier. It’s not as pleasant to eat.

Christopher
But of course, you know, many of the samosa types in India also have potatoes in them, and potatoes were brought to Asia by the Portuguese and Spanish. So, it’s a very good ingredient for a curry puff filling because it’s soft, it’s light, it provides bulk without being really heavy, and it counterpoints the meat nicely.

Jimmy
Right.

Christopher
I feel if we’re talking about the local curry puff scene, we have to mention, Polar Café, which was in a stall on High Street, Number 51 High Street, from 1925 all the way up until 1985.

Jimmy
Wow!

Christopher
And was very famous for its curry puffs, right?

Jimmy
Yes.

Christopher
And that was founded by Chan Hing Kee, who was a Hong Kong immigrant. He started the Polar Café, and then as long as it was on High Street, the curry puffs were very popular with all the civil servants who worked at Parliament House and in that general area. And, of course, Polar Café is still with us. After that shop closed, it was revived, in the 1980s, first as a takeaway counter, and then once again became a cafe around the early 2000s, and then now has several outlets. I don’t know how the curry puff has changed in that time, to be honest. I don’t eat them very often, but they are still a mainstay of the range.

Jimmy
And the Polar curry puffs are actually a little bit different from, say, like the Old Chang Kee type.

Christopher
So that would be closer to the subtype B, which is the more Western-style puff pastry, and then a curry filling. Yeah.

Jimmy
I like the little flaky bits, I have to confess. I have to say, whenever I talk to you, I feel like it’s simultaneously a history lesson and a science lesson. It’s really quite wonderful, actually. Your last book, Tales from the Yeast Indies, I keep getting it wrong because it keeps tripping on my tongue.

Christopher
Okay, don’t say last book, okay?

Jimmy
Yeah.

Christopher
I’m only in my 50s.

Jimmy
Okay, let me rephrase.

Christopher
But my most recent book.

Jimmy
Christopher, your most recent book, Tales from the Yeast Indies, was published in 2024. What can we look forward to? How was that received, and what can we look forward to next?

Christopher
That book was a pandemic baby, so that was born while everyone in the world was stuck in home baking, and that was actually inspired by all the sharing that I saw happening on social media.

Jimmy
Everybody’s baking sourdough bread.

Christopher
Everybody was baking and posting pictures of it, and then everyone was swapping tips, and there was a sense of global camaraderie among bakers. Bakers are a very specific tribe, I have to say. So that book, has been pretty well-received by people all around the world who bake. As for the next one, who knows? I always have various ideas bubbling in my brain like curry puffs in a wok. Who knows when or where or how the next one will pop up? I don’t know yet.

Jimmy
Okay. Can Isuggest a book on curry puffs? You’ve obviously done enough research for a BiblioAsia article. A bit more research and you’ve got an entire book. And then you can bring in empanadas and all kinds of…

Christopher
I shall carefully file that away and let it percolate.

Jimmy
Okay, at this point in the interview, we try and get our guest, I mean our victim, I mean our guest, to answer quick-fire questions. So can I ask you: for you, Christopher, savory or sweet curry puffs?

Christopher
Savoury.

Jimmy
Of course. I mean, sweet curry puffs. The thought of it is just... Kueh or cakes?

Christopher
All of them.

Jimmy
Okay, that’s a good answer. I like that. This should be a no-brainer: baked or deep-fried curry puffs?

Christopher
Deep-fried, for me, just has the edge.

Jimmy
It does, right? I mean, how can you compare baked to deep-fried? Always.

Christopher
But, you know, any puff in a storm.

Jimmy
Any puff in a storm, indeed. So, curry puffs are…?

Christopher
Essential.

Jimmy
Essential, completely.

Christopher
Fundamental.

Jimmy
Fundamental, certainly to my burgeoning waistline. Christopher, thank you very much for joining us on the BiblioAsia+ podcast. Don’t miss watching Christopher make the three types of curry puffs on YouTube in From Book to Cook. All links and information can be found in the show notes or on the BiblioAsia website at biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg. Christopher, thank you once again for joining us, thank you for baking bread for us. For people who cannot see, because it’s obviously audio, Christopher made bread. I’m looking forward to eating this, so thank you very much for that. Christopher, thank you.

Christopher
Thank you, Jimmy. Always great to be here.

[Music playing] 

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

J. L. Rosedale, Chemical Analyses of Malayan Foods (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1935).

Christopher Tan, Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2024).

Bonny Tan, “Of Belacan and Curry Puffs: A Taste of Singapore’s Past,” BiblioAsia 10 (no. 2), July–September 2014.

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done Nookcha Films. 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.

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