Stir Fried: Peranakan food comes full circle

Chef Kyo Pang’s grandmother used to say, life is like kuih talam. There’s salted coconut on top and sweet pandan on the bottom. When you’re a kid, you only like to eat the sweet part, and when you’re an adult you appreciate the sweat. Only when you appreciate the flavors together does life come full circle. 

The cyclical nature of life defines Peranakan cuisine and culture. Pang is a third-generation chef and Baba Nyonya, also known as Peranakan, a hybrid culture stemming from generations of intermixing among different groups of traders and natives in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Singapore and Malaysia today, the term “Peranakan” typically refers to the descendents of Chinese traders who settled in the area beginning in the 15th Century and married local women. However, the term has come to mean anyone of mixed Straits-born heritage, including Tamil, Jawi, Arab, and Bugis Peranakans. The word “Peranakan” is a Malay adjective for “born of,” so to be Peranakan is literally to be born of all the cultural forces that shaped that area of the world.

Pang opened her New York restaurant, Kopitiam, in 2015 as an homage to her Malay Peranakan heritage in both dishes and name—a “kopitiam” is a coffee shop that serves food, traditionally operated by Chinese-descended people in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Her father inherited such a place from his father, turned it into a restaurant, and eventually owned four restaurants across Penang that Pang helped manage. Pang’s Kopitiam serves traditional Peranakan dishes such as nasi lemak (Malaysia’s national dish of coconut milk fried rice) and kuih talam, as well as Malaysian street snacks like pulut panggang (grilled glutinous rice stuffed with dried shrimp, wrapped in a banana leaf), pan-fried oyster omelets, and Malaysian French toast.

While every culture has certain superstitions and rituals surrounding their food, the ways in which Peranakans approach life are literally “baked into” their cuisine. One such tenet is patience and humbleness. Pang tells me these virtues can be exemplified in the process of making kuih lapiz, a nine-layer steamed cake made from tapioca rice flours. Pang’s maternal side hails from a line of master sweet makers, and as Peranakans are a matriarchal culture, her maternal grandmother engrained in her the rituals of kuih making as a form of prayer.

“Never rush,” Pang tells me over Zoom. “Each layer must be steamed an exact number of minutes. If you overdo it, the texture will be too old [overcooked or tough]. When you’re baking a cake and it’s expanding, you’re not supposed to say, ‘wow, it’s good.’ Then it’s going to sink."

Taking equal care with each layer of kuih lapiz is symbolic for not rushing through any phase of life, even if times are tough. Nine is an auspicious number for Chinese Peranakans and each layer of cake represents a different phase of life.

“We believe that things come full circle. You start with good energy, you’ll come back to good energy. Sometimes it can take a long time, but you’ll always come back to where your origin is,” Pang says.

Colors also hold a special significance in Peranakan cuisine, which brims with tropical hues of Pandan, tamarind, and kaya. Butterfly pea flour is widely used to give dishes like savory Nyonya Zhang (rice dumplings) or kuih pulut their signature bright blue tint. Kuih lapis can be any number of colors, but alternate layers of white and blue are reserved for funerals. The vibrant golden color of nasi kkuning, a rice dish steamed with coconut milk and colored yellow with turmeric, brings auspiciousness to celebrations like family reunions, birthdays, and weddings. 

Pang attributes such cultural practices to the Peranakan origin myth that dates back to the 15th Century, when legend says Chinese Princess Hang Li Po was sent by the Ming emperor to marry the Sultan of Malacca. 

“The reason why they were so colorful is because our [ancestors], especially on our maternal side, were princesses in the palace. So I would say that our cuisine is one of the very first generations of fusion cuisines in Southeast Asia, because it combines not only the food they learned in the palace but also from the locals and businessmen who traded on the piers,” Pang says.

Considering that Peranakans were birthed from a marriage of diplomacy and developed among trading cultures in port cities, it makes sense that Peranakan cuisine emphasizes how each ingredient plays a role in overall harmony, no matter how humble. “Peranakan cooking is about understanding the nature and character of ingredients. Sugar and salt, for example, are common to every cuisine. But to understand how they can enhance your food is vital,” Pang explains. “We believe that everything has its own role. My grandmother used to say, ‘Just because you’re simple it doesn’t mean you’re not special.’”

Pang’s own journey reflects these tenets. Like many Asian parents who didn’t want their children working long hours at a manual labor job, Pang’s parents did not encourage her to continue in their restaurateur footsteps. Pang moved to New York to study marketing in college and worked in the field for several years before finally coming full circle back to what she feels she was born to do. “In psychology, I learned about the actual self and the ideal self. When I came to New York, I did whatever I could to be my vision of the ideal person and realized it was far away from the actual me. When I opened up Kopitiam, I realized that the actual me is someone very simple,” Pang says.

She isn’t the only one re-discovering the value of her roots. While for decades Peranakan cuisine has been in danger of dying out due to the same reasons Pang’s own parents didn’t want her to go into professional cooking, Pang tells me that younger generations in Southeast Asia are now preserving their parents’ traditions.

“When I first started Kopitiam, according to my sister, news traveled and then it happens that a lot of people around my age go back home and take over their parents' place and reopen the kopitiam their family has run over the years. So I think that sometimes you just need a wake-up call,” she says. “My father served four generations of people in his restaurant…and sometimes I meet them again in New York City, on the other side of the world.”