When describing the tropical islands in Southeast Asia, British novelist and playwright Maugham once became a tourism ambassador of Penang and expressed his love for Penang with a “slogan”. “If you have never been to Penang in your life, you will never come to this world”.
What kind of world is this? The sea breeze blows all day long on Penang Island; There are fireworks and blessings in the Blissful Temple; From the Spring Festival to the Dragon Boat Festival, every Chinese traditional festival has been completely preserved and passed down. Here, you can eat the meat and bone tea and Man Pan Fried Cake in Xiamen, the Buddha jumping over the wall and the noodle paste in Fuzhou, the wonton noodles and baked wax in Guangfu, the fried rice noodles and four fruit soup in Chaozhou, and the brewed tofu in Hakka… These are the ancient flavor from the land of China, and also the homesickness of immigrants.
Penang Morning Tea
Traditional Chinese flavor coexists here
Penang, Malaysia, has been trading with China as early as the 15th century. The vast “going to the South” has led to a surge in the number of immigrants from China, which in turn has marked Penang with a distinctive “Chinese brand”. The tea house in Penang still retains the taste of hometown for these Chinese who come from afar. On the street, you can find Cantonese style teahouses, Aberdeen Chezai noodles, Fujian shrimp noodles… At a glance, you can feel the warmth of your hometown.
In the teahouse, the elderly electric fan is still working diligently on the wall. Red plastic chairs are placed beside the randomly opened table. Sleepy eyed diners wear T-shirts and slippers, speak familiar Cantonese or Minnan, and order slowly. This leisurely atmosphere of morning tea is more than that of the tea houses in Fujian and Guangdong.
In Guangdong style teahouses such as Dadong Restaurant, after paying the tea seat fee, the tea set with hot water and the cart loaded with breakfast come to you successively. The refreshments in the shop are complete, including traditional Cantonese desserts such as braised wheat, pork chops with soy sauce, shrimp dumplings, vegetable cakes, glutinous rice chicken, shrimp dates, etc., and Chaoshan fried rice noodles and Hainan chicken rice with Nanyang characteristics, which are more diversified than local tea houses in Guangdong. Even the dim sum that many Chinese teahouses have lost can be eaten here.
Radish cake and steamed chicken feet are two kinds of snacks that can best test the foundation of Cantonese morning tea. There are innovations in Penang, such as adding bacon, sausages and other Chinese flavor to the radish cake, and pouring the chicken feet with Zhuhou sauce, a famous product of Foshan, instead of soy sauce. As for pork sausage powder, shrimp paste and chili sauce will be added, which is also the original of Penang.
At Guangtai Lai Teahouse, a cup of coffee was served together with shrimp dumplings, Shaomai and Nuomici. The coffee culture has long been engraved into the life of Penang people. The classic breakfast three treasures are charcoal toast, half cooked eggs and coffee.
After baking, spread the bread with butter and coffee and coconut sauce. These two ingredients dissolve when heated. Bite it down while it is hot. It is crispy and delicious. Knock one or two half cooked eggs, add white pepper and soy sauce, stir the yolk into a paste, and spread it on the bread to eat. Or pour it into the coffee, dip it in the toast, do not soften it, and eat it immediately. Although I am in Malaysia, I feel like coming to the old style Hong Kong Ice Room.
Diet is the emotional bond between the Chinese and their hometown. This morning tea of “homesickness” is mixed with various tastes from the land of China, maintaining a strong sense of amity for the Chinese who are far away from home. Since we are thinking about the same township, the regional boundaries are not so important.
Of course, the most surprising thing is that Yifu Noodles, the predecessor of instant noodles and the ancestor of doll noodles, can also be found here. The fried egg noodles are golden in color and slightly wider in flat shape. It is said that the inventor was Zhishou Yibingshou’s kitchen in Yangzhou.
Mixed wind and sand
Metaphor of a bowl of Laksha
In the era when the global marine trade system was constantly constructed and increasingly close, Malaysia was once famous all over the world. It is a port where merchant ships gather and an ideal place for Chinese businessmen to live overseas. Over time, in addition to retaining their original eating habits, Chinese people have created a catering culture integrated with the local community, which is also a strong proof of Chinese integration into the local society.
The Chinese in Penang today are partly the descendants of the Chinese who came to Penang in the 1950s, and partly the descendants of the early Chinese who intermarried with the local people. The latter is called “Baba” for males and “Niangrao” for females.
The girlhood of “Niangrao” was mostly spent in the kitchen. The dishes they cooked were Niangrao dishes. Niangrao Cuisine has the characteristics of both Chinese food and Malay food. It not only uses Chinese cooking techniques, but also uses Southeast Asian ingredients and spices (such as tamarind, ginger, lemon grass, etc.). It often makes people feel that they do not know whether they are eating Chinese food or Southeast Asian food.
There are more than 40 kinds of sauces in Niangrao cuisine, emphasizing the sweet and sour, slightly spicy flavor. This flavor has a certain relationship with the humid and hot geographical climate of Penang, and is also influenced by the cooking in southern India, Thailand and other places to a certain extent.
In terms of blood inheritance, Quanzhou’s meat dumplings, Chaoshan’s oyster pancakes and fried rice noodles continue to be vibrant in the world of Niangrao cuisine, blending out the “curry series” with southern Indian flavor, such as curry chicken, curry noodles, curry crabs, etc., as well as Niangrao cake and Niangrao dumplings with Niangrao flavor.
Laksha, a collection of Niangrao dishes. The soup base, staple food and ingredients of Laksha made by different companies will be different, but they can not be separated from the combination of spices and seafood.
The soup base constitutes the key point of Laksha: stir fry the Malay spices first, then add the boneless fish meat and coconut milk to cook together for dozens of hours, until all the ingredients melt, the soup is thick and gives out a thick coconut smell, which is qualified.
This dish looks like a hodgepodge, but every Niangrao who cooks Laksha has a supreme principle in mind, that is, to achieve harmony and balance of taste as much as possible while using complex seasonings. Tamarind fruit, fresh red pepper, citronella, southern ginger flower, yellow ginger, Laksha leaf… The goal is certainly not to have a large number of them. How to make these personalized tropical spices coexist harmoniously in a bowl is the goal.
The last step is to add the staple food and decorate the side dishes. Penang Chinese pour their love for rice food into Laksha. The most typical Laksha in Assay is usually accompanied by white rice noodles. In the old country, the golden rice on the plain represents the taste inheritance of agricultural civilization, and rice food has also become the leading role on the table of Penang Chinese.
Before eating Laksha, you should add pineapple meat and mint leaves cut into thin strips, and pour the juice of sour citrus or add a spoonful of special “shrimp paste” to make the taste even better. It is hard to find suitable words to describe such rich and mellow taste, but it is enough to make people unforgettable for life.
Laksha Tangdi is indeed very Nanyang style, but its cooking style is typical of Minnan style. Like the famous Fuzhou dish Fotiaoqiang, they all mix spices, fish and shrimp, meat and eggs for a long time and stew, which always contains a nostalgic taste.Eugene N. Anderson, who wrote “Chinese Food”, was also attracted by the talent of Penang Minnan Chinese for food health and harmony. He wrote in the article: “They are good at balancing cold and hot, and also good at grasping the harmony of taste. Fresh fish, fruits, plant spices, and land ingredients are all integrated in the stew”.
Shantou Street Night Market
Chaoshan flavor here has seriously exceeded the standard
△ At the Shantou Street Night Market in George City, Penang, many Chaoshan Chinese engaged in night market catering stalls and sold antidotes for homesickness.
Penang people’s life is full of a wet and happy atmosphere. On the beach, there are small fishing boats fishing for shrimp. On the road beside the jungle, there are cattle swinging. The voice of the imam singing sutras echoes the sound of the waves. The swaying palm trees, dark shutters, bright yellow Tang buildings, and white arcades are very quiet and silent in the sun. The shop opens at eleven in the morning and closes at six in the afternoon. It only does business for four hours a day.
When dusk begins to take a seat, the red sun sinks into the sea, and the sunset fades into the night, Penang enters another time. Shantou Street is already crowded. This China Street, named after a city in Guangdong, sells a wide variety of Chaoshan snacks. The Chaoshan flavors here are so familiar, yet unfamiliar.
Hokkien people like sweet, not spicy, only light flavors, while in Penang, Chinese immigrants have fallen in love with tropical spices after a long cultural adaptation. In the interaction with the locals, the Chaoshan flavor has taken root in Penang, breaking the boundaries and being loved by different ethnic groups.
The char kuey teow made by the Chinese who came to Penang in the early days is a wide kuey teow fried with charcoal fire, which is very popular among Indians. The kuey teow on Shantou Street carries steam, continuing the practice in the Chaoshan area, but there are also innovations.
The original Chaoshan Fried Kway Teow is light and only stir-fried with clams and chives, while the “Penang version” Fried Kway Teow is seasoned with dark soy sauce and fish sauce, and lemon juice, gravy and tomato juice are added to make it a “Penang version”. Char Kway Teow” (translated as “fried rice cake strips”).
Street stalls seem to be unremarkable, but their grasp of the temperature of the ingredients is consummate. A large pot was stir-fried so loudly that people could not help worrying about the bottom of the pot being broken.
The final product is different from the previous slightly dry and greasy taste. It is wet and sticky. It tastes slightly sweet and salty in the mouth. When eaten with refreshing wheat juice, it is cold and refreshing.
The fly shops on Shantou Street go door-to-door, with a sense of sight of the Chaoshan small town night market. Among them, there are long queues for the “Emperor Chicken Kway Teow Soup”, which is known as the “Four Heavenly Kings” in the night market. Chicken feet are the two signatures.
In a bowl of fresh and beautiful kway teow soup, there is a generous portion of chicken, pork liver and fish eggs in the soup. Braised chicken feet is another style of painting. The chicken feet have been completely immersed in the dark and thick marinade, and the bones can be easily bitten off.
Another great king, “Quan Kee Duck Porridge and Kueh Juice”, is said to sell 400 bowls a day. The kueh juice is generally based on pig offal, but Quan Kee’s kuey jelly consists of a combination of duck meat and pig offal.
This way of eating has also made it a star of the night market. The store is full of diners and there are long queues outside the store. The kueh sauce is drizzled with a marinade that has been boiled for a long time, which is different from the richness of the Thai kueh sauce and has a Chinese-style salty and sweet flavor. Experienced diners will add a duck leg that has been marinated until crispy.
Although “Shantou Street Stuffed Tofu” is not among the “Four Heavenly Kings”, it has also made a name for itself with its signature stuffed tofu. It is said that after the Hakka people moved south from the Central Plains to Lingnan, they could not make dumplings due to lack of flour, so they used tofu stuffed with meat, fried and then stewed.
This kind of food contains the intention of hope that the descendants will not forget the hometown of the Central Plains. Yong Tau Foo was brought to Penang by Cantonese Chinese. This food, which was originally born due to migration, seems to have become more meaningful.
Most of the stores behind the food stalls are scattered with a few sugar water shops. You can bring snacks and sit in the sugar water shop to eat slowly, but by default, you have to order another sugar water, and there are many choices here. The melt-in-your-mouth bean curd has a tender and fragrant bean flavor; the yuba and barley soup is said to be an ancestral secret recipe, with a strong milky fragrance, making it sweet and smooth to drink; the slightly bitter almond tea can be enjoyed with crispy fritters; There is a four-fruit soup with the most summer characteristics, and it tastes better when chilled.
Fruit is also a star item on the streets of Shantou. The most popular Musang King durian, as well as durian popped egg tarts, durian spring rolls, and durian pudding made from it are also full of streets and alleys..
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