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RESCUING TASTE FROM THE NATION: OCEANS, BORDERS, AND CULINARY F L O W S | Jean Duruz, University of South Australia

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Love in a Hot Climate: Foodscapes of Trade, Travel, War, and Intimacy

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Abstract: This article is about mapping—about charting dominant ways of seeing and understanding place, and the interruption of those ways. The argument traces a twentieth-/twenty-first-century culinary journey from Sri Lanka, through the Strait of Malacca, to the Pacific Ocean. Critical destinations on this route include the port cities of Colombo, Malacca, and Singapore. The journey, however, is not predominantly one shaped by oceans, nations, or the urban fabric of cities. Instead, we enter the “private” spaces of domestic kitchens to record glimpses of “mixed” food practices, characteristic of local Eurasian and Peranakan (Straits Chinese) communities. Drawing on traditional family dishes recorded in “cultural retrieval” cookbooks, the argument speculates that food discourses and meanings embedded in kitchens’ everyday practices evade incorporation into the national culinary imaginary simply as representative of a “Sri Lankan,” “Malaysian,” or

“Singaporean” heritage. Instead, the marriage of ingredients and distinctive flavors recorded in Peranakan and Eurasian recipes begs some unraveling of their complex histories. Within the intimacy of “mixed” marriages and the legitimacy of “mixed” cuisines, the article teases out how “the food of love” (Hutton 2000, 2007) becomes a powerful signifier of cuisine, tradition, memory, identity, and place—through and beyond the parameters of the “national.” Here, Yi-Fu Tuan’s “fields of care” (1979) provide rich possibilities for meditation on alternative ways to chart territories of difference and intimate connection, and to acknowledge, within these territories, the ghostly labor of mothers, aunts, and servants.

Claudia Roden’s now classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food . . . was written by a Sephardic Jew inspired by family memories of Cairo, her “home town”. . . . The poignant presentation of recipes from a world that has fallen apart reads almost like a tragedy, and yet in the very details of gastronomic and cultural sustenance there is a constellation of being that continues to survive. Dishes that are the distillation of centuries of cooking, of culture, of historical composition and combination not only evoke the aroma and tastes of a place; they also register what elsewhere has often been brutally canceled and institutionally ignored. The smells from the kitchen . . . can suggest connections, collusions, and subsequent maps of meaning that the rigid grids of national geographies are neither able to contain nor recognize (Chambers 2008: 130–31).

“aromas and tastes” of women’s labor and the “smells from the kitchen” suggests, subversively, other ways to map places and their points of connection than ones “rooted” in imperialist expansion or the supremacy of the nation-state (Law 2001; Marte 2007). In other words, I want to explore how the practices and rituals of everyday life, together with their affective landscapes, challenge meanings of the modern nation-state as a site of belonging. In this article, cooking and care become the critical warp and weft of connection within and between communities.

mapping—about charting dominant ways of seeing and understanding place, and the interruption of such ways. While Iain Chambers’s project involves a focus on the Mediterranean and its potential remapping in global consciousness (2008: 131, 132), I want to trace a twentieth and twenty-first century culinary journey from the island of Sri Lanka, through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, to the Pacific Ocean. Critical destinations become the port cities of Colombo, Malacca, and Singapore. In following this historic route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, nevertheless, my intention is to accept Chambers’s challenge to undo modernity’s vision of how the world works, and to opt, instead, for a more incomplete, “uprooted geography” (ibid.: 17). This is a geography in which attention to

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT

GASTRONOMICA : THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES , VOL .

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Keywords: sensory, food, cosmopolitanism, Eurasian, Peranakan

Conceptual Coordinates The specific route for my journey is traced through cuisine and its documentation—the relationship of people, food, and place and how this relationship is imagined and produced. Here, I am guided by Sidney Mintz’s reflections on the impossibility of food cultures that neatly align with political boundaries assigned to nations: Cuisines, when seen from the perspective of the people who care about the foods, are never foods of a country, but the foods of a place . . . . I think a cuisine requires a population that eats that cuisine with sufficient frequency to consider themselves experts on it. They all believe, and care that they believe, that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should taste. In short, a genuine cuisine has common social roots; is the food of a community. (Mintz 1996: 95–96, italics in original)

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1: A modern map of the Strait of Malacca, showing, for this article, its position in relation to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.

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If we follow the noticeable footprints left in the text of Mintz’s argument—its foods, place, and care—we find conceptual hints for reinscribing Chambers’s alternative mapping with its emotional economies: its patterns of managing feelings, its balance of emotional resources. A “constellation of being” becomes, in turn, a “constellation of affect.” In other words, care, in the form of attachment to place, to each other, and to the tastes symbolic of these attachments, has the potential to provide different, more immediate orientations to cuisine. In this journey the imagined national outlines of Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore fade (Anderson 2006), and different sensory and affective connections between port cities of the region emerge. At this point I am reminded of Bachelard’s phenomenological reflections on space, daydreams, and “the polyphony of the senses” as alternative means to trace people’s relations to material and psychic worlds and to each other (1964, 1971: 6). His focus on “felicitous space” (original emphasis), in particular, becomes an anchor point for memory, intimacy, and sensory meaning-making (1964: xxi, 7). In keeping with Mintz’s emphasis on food, place, and care and their interconnectedness, Bachelard draws our attention to the life of the imagination, the significance of shared memories and their capacity to haunt

(ibid.: 4–5). This emotional baggage of memories and daydreams, firmly attached to people, places, and sensory landscapes, provides a sense of belonging that, I would argue, is quite different from, or at least interacts with, conventional meanings of the national in place-making. Drawing together these reflections on alternative mappings, “uprooted geographies,” and the significance of shared culinary place-making and caring regimes, this article will focus on narratives of two communities (Eurasian—either Malaccan or Dutch Burgher in origin; and Peranakan—originating in marriages of Chinese traders and “local” women) in three port cities (Colombo, Malacca, and Singapore), and primarily through three cookbooks (Charmaine Solomon, Charmaine Solomon’s Family Recipes [1998]; Mary Gomes, The Eurasian Cookbook [2001], and Violet Oon, A Singapore Family Cookbook [1998]). In doing so, I want to leave aside mainstream accounts of the nations we will pass through, the histories of their surrounding oceans, and descriptions of the port cities themselves. Instead, we will seek out something more intimate. The choice of cookbooks for mapping kitchen cultures deserves a brief explanation. Certainly, I recognize that conducting close textual readings of published cookbooks involves different methodological and conceptual processes

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from those of “grounded” observation and conversation, typical of ethnographic research. Nevertheless, both approaches—textual, ethnographic—would appear to allow us to map alternatives to dominant histories and cartographies; both signal the presence of “other” ways of seeing, indeed of feeling. After all, according to Danielle Gallegos, the significance of cookbooks is that they “instil us with a sense of place, belonging and achievement,” and become “vehicles [of] the web of flows that is ‘culture’” (2007: 99, 109). Cookbooks, in this argument, become culture itself in textual form. “They tell us who we are, and who we want to be” (Humble 2005: 278). Furthermore, I want to suggest that published cookbooks, particularly those with a political mission to “save” an endangered cuisine or to represent a national one as more diverse and “different” than popularly imagined, are, in themselves, self-conscious representations of nostalgia and loss, and of hopes for the future. Chua and Rajah (2001: 172) describe this process in Singapore as a “public talking into being”: “Peranakan cuisine has since the mid-1970s emerged from household kitchens and entered into cook books . . . and restaurants. The inscribing of Peranakan domestic cooking as recipes in cook books and as a feature in restaurant and coffee-house menus, as well as hawker fare, has resulted in the formalization of a cuisine.” With agenda like these—to formalize, to preserve, and, perhaps, to proselytize—cookbooks take on an added significance, representing their “mission” to a consuming public. In terms of whom this “public” might be, in this case it is, as we shall see soon, an English-language one, and a classed and gendered one, that includes Peranakan and Eurasian communities themselves (whether younger generations in need of “education” or older ones engaged in nostalgic recollection) as well as members of the wider community for whom these culinary cultures are “performed.” At the same time, as with standard cookbooks, the market intervenes in the production of these heritage artifacts. Their form references an increasingly fashionable genre in publishing— storytelling through food—with culinary memoirs and “ethnic” cookbooks providing obvious examples (Duruz 2004; see, for example, Taouk 2011; Besa and Dorotan 2006). Of course, the three cookbooks chosen for discussion here are not the only possible examples of heritage preservation and storytelling, but, for my purposes here, they are telling ones. Trawling these cookbooks and communities’ cultures of remembering, we might speculate that meanings embedded in these kitchens’ everyday practices evade incorporation into the national culinary imaginary simply as examples of “Sri Lankan,” “Malaysian,” or “Singaporean” heritage. Clearly, something much more complicated is happening. Instead,

the marriage of ingredients and flavors recorded in Peranakan and Eurasian recipes begs some unraveling of their fuzzy, cross-border histories. So, to begin at the beginning, we first of all need to outline two travel stories, their landscapes stretching from the Indian Ocean back to Europe, on one hand, and across the Pacific Ocean toward Australia, on the other. These narratives will provide us with brief histories of people’s movements and exchanges, before we turn to the cookbooks themselves. The first of these imagined journeys captures deeply rooted meanings of “Eurasian” identity, and with these, nuances of “mixed” and “fusion” as dominant imagery of Eurasian culinary cultures.

Voyage 1: “Empire of the Senses” (Howes 2005) Wendy Hutton, commenting on current restaurant fashions for “East–West” cuisine, points to a long history of fusion cooking that challenges its celebration as a recent innovation: Ever since the first Europeans sailed to the East in the 16th century, setting up trading posts and colonies, intermarriage has taken place with local populations. This resulted in communities of people descended from two or more different cultures, variously referred to as Eurasians, AngloIndians, Indo-British, Anglo-Burmese, Malacca Portuguese, Macanese, Portuguese or Dutch Burghers, Belanda Kampong, Indos, Topass or Native Christians. For the sake of simplicity, the term “Eurasian” is used [here] . . . and is indeed a term widely accepted today by people of mixed European and Asian heritage. To varying degrees, the Eurasians combined the customs, culture and food of both the east and the west, creating a unique cuisine that blended different culinary traditions. (Hutton 2007: 8, 10; see also 12–17)

Other writers might agree with Hutton, at least to the extent that she provides a working definition of “Eurasian.” Nevertheless, the term remains problematic. Christine Choo and her co-writers (2004: 71; see also Ondaatje 1982), for example, reflect: “The varied backgrounds, experiences, and community and personal histories of Eurasians make it difficult to describe what constitutes ‘Eurasian-ness.’ There is not a singular common identity, but what is shared is a mixed race heritage and a history of minority status. Identity and life experience are shaped around transcultural negotiation.” It is that very ambiguity that became a point of contention for Michelle Burns (2008) when interviewing women of Eurasian descent in Perth, Western Australia: “All of my participants have broadly defined ‘Eurasian’ as being of mixed European and Asian ancestry. However within this popular definition, internal distinctions are made [for example] between the Burghers of Sri Lanka and the Eurasians of Malaysia and Singapore.” Here, meanings of “Eurasian” indicate, simultaneously, identities of inclusiveness and differentiation, and here, too, “Eurasian” identities are shaped by generalized and

Peranakan communities in Malacca, we might recall from earlier, resulted from marriages of Chinese traders to local women. In terms of Malacca’s Eurasian community, “[m]embers of this group were the progeny of intermarriage and liaisons

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between the Portuguese or Dutch and members of many Asian communities present in this thoroughly cosmopolitan place” (ibid.). Kirsty Walker, in turn, narrates the nineteenth-century history of movements of Eurasians to the island of Penang. Once again, Malacca has a strong presence in this narrative, with Penang reflecting similar traditions of cosmopolitanism, together with the hierarchies of language, religion, and education that had distinguished Malacca as a Straits Settlement under British control: “Significant numbers of Eurasians migrated . . . from Singapore and Malacca, and along with Anglo-Indians, Ceylon Burghers, and others, were incorporated into Penang family trees. For the largely Christian, Englisheducated Eurasian communities in the region, Penang had many attractions [including major centers of Catholic education and training]” (Walker 2012: 311). Drawing on quotations above from both Brissenden and Walker, I suggest the seeds of something very interesting are present here: Malacca, we are told, is marked by its “openness . . . to foreigners,” “rich eclectic” culinary experiences, “intermarriage and liaisons,” and a strong sense of a “thoroughly cosmopolitan” community in which such exchanges are possible, indeed welcomed. Penang, in its turn, supports “an ethnically and socially diverse collection of people, for whom being ‘Eurasian’ meant many different things” (Walker 2012: 311; see also Andaya and Andaya 2001: 117, 159). Malacca is a reverberating presence in both of these accounts,

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[I]t is the kingdom of Malacca, founded around 1400 on the Straits of that name, that modern Malays attribute their direct cultural heritage. . . . Malacca quickly became a great trading centre . . . and in the early 15th century embraced Islam. . . . In culinary terms the most important legacy of Malacca derived from its involvement in the spice trade, its openness to the ingredients and culinary techniques introduced by the foreigners who lived there and its cultivation of a rich eclectic gastronomy. . . . Apart from its contribution to Malay cuisine, Malacca was also the catalyst for the development of two other rich and unique culinary cultures found in Malaysia and Singapore today—cuisines known respectively as Nyonya [Peranakan] and Eurasian. (Brissenden 1996: 185)

FIGU R E 2: Malacca River, photographed here in 1907, was a vital trading route for the port of Malacca’s earliest establishment.


specific place-attachments and politics (Solomon 1998: 5; Hutton 2007: 26; O’Meara 2008). We will tease out these distinctions in “Eurasian” identity and place-making when dipping into our cookbook examples. While Hutton herself adopts the overarching term “Eurasian” for “simplicity,” the history of colonization that she outlines—colonization of peoples, their bodies, their lands, spices, cultures, and religious beliefs—in the Asian region is anything but simple. Following the West’s “discovery” of spice routes, with these hitherto the exclusive provenance of Chinese, Arab, and Indian Muslim traders, Europeans embarked on a colonizing mission “in search of spices and souls,” “with almost every major European power scrambling for once undreamed-of profits” (Hutton 2007: 12). This was a mission that, significantly, involved fierce competition between the Portuguese and the Spanish, and later the Dutch, British, and French (ibid.: 12–17). In this fervor of territorial claiming throughout the region, the savagery inflicted on local people, especially by the Portuguese, became legendary (ibid.: 15). Only a couple of historical moments can be noted here as examples of the complexity of this mission and its effects. The first of these is the arrival of the Portuguese in the seaport of Malacca [Melaka] in 1509, and their eventual conquest of that kingdom from its Malay sultan a few years later. The second moment to note is the movement of the Dutch into Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the late seventeenth century. While these are only a few threads in an intricately woven tapestry of opportunism, commerce, religious zeal, war, and subjugation, their significance for this argument lies in their heritage of “mixed” relationships (marriages and intimate partnerships), and in the distinctive culinary exchanges that such relations of intimacy produced. Malacca itself assumes a crucial position in our argument’s culinary mapping. According to Rosemary Brissenden:

Wayang, a company dedicated to preserving Peranakan culture through theatrical performances. While the Republic Ballet, trailing lengths of diaphanous fabric, reenacts the ancients’ setting out on perilous sea voyages across the globe, the full company intones the following: “In the spirit of our fathers/The legacy lives on” (Oon 2008). “The legacy lives on”: a mantra inscribed with hope. Elsewhere, I have written about the seeming decline of Peranakan presence, everyday rituals, and material culture in one of its former strongholds—the neighborhood of Katong in Singapore. At the same time, efforts to memorialize this culture—through building restoration, themed restaurants, cookbook publication, television series production, and museums’ curatorial efforts—have never seemed more vigorous (Duruz 2013: 127–29). What is at stake here, particularly in terms of Peranakan cuisine, nevertheless, deserves some explication. As Brissenden (1996: 185) reminds us, one of the “rich and unique” cuisines to emerge from trading ports focused on the Strait of Malacca—Malacca, Penang, and Singapore (Andaya and Andaya 2001: 126)—was that of Nyonya, the food culture of Peranakan communities. Who are the Peranakans? Elsewhere Duruz and Khoo (2015: 126) explain: 3: Peranakan wedding photo, Penang, 1941. Note the typical celebration dress worn by the wedding party, and decorative architectural features of the building framing it.

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at times receiving ethnically diverse populations, at times becoming a port of embarkation to “mixed” settlements elsewhere. As a tangible place, with its deep history of diverse people, ethnicities, and cultures within a geographically small, yet strategically significant location toward the midpoint of the Strait (Andaya and Andaya 2001: 39, 44–46; Sarkissian 2002: 217, 218), Malacca offers itself as a nodal point in these stories of “mixed” tastes and exchanges. In other words, “Malacca” is neither fixed nor bounded, but relational to other places in its region and to other communities’ intersecting histories. And it is these relations, the ties that exist below the radar of the national and institutional, that I want to emphasize here. The historical web of taste connections stretching between Malacca, Penang, and Singapore becomes more significant, culinarily speaking, than that of a national narrative, for example, of “Malaysian cuisine.”

Voyage 2: “In the Spirit of Our Fathers” (Oon 2008) Our second travel story takes us to Singapore where it is the opening night of Siapa Baba—a musical production of Main

[The Peranakan] community in Melaka traces its ancestry back to the 17th century and to intermarriages/cohabitation between Baba Chinese men and local Melakan women back then. The Peranakan Chinese or Baba-Nyonya identity is “an indigenized Chinese identity” symbolized by adoption and adaptation of Malay language, fashion, methods of food preparation (including the use of specific local ingredients) . . . (Tan 1993: x). Their men were known as “Baba” and the women, “Nyonya”. . . . [T]he [descended] Babas were local-born (as opposed to foreign-born) Chinese . . . . Their English education earned them positions in the colonial civil service and for their loyalty to the British, they were also known as The King’s or Queen’s Chinese. (Rudolph 1998: 83, 195; Tan 1993: x)

Like “Eurasian,” however, the term “Peranakan” suffers ambiguities in meaning, and Peranakans themselves might experience some ambivalence in identification. In Singapore, for example, one might assume that Peranakans are subsumed under the category of Chinese within the state’s project of multiracial nation-building (Henderson 2003: 30). Apart from the “loss” of a sense of specific ethnic identity within a broader political project of Singaporean nationalism (“We are all Singaporeans now,” wistfully said Mrs. Lee [mother of the then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew] in 1974, as she launched her now classic cookbook of Peranakan and Straits Chinese recipes) (1974: author’s foreword), there are other points of controversy. This is especially in relation to recent moves to retrieve “lost” identities—current attempts to reclaim Peranakan identity within specific Southeast Asian

communities. Meanwhile, the debate continues (Tan 2010: 30–31; see also Surydinata 2010: 2–3). Despite ambiguities of “Peranakan” identification, the food as “legacy” is heavily marked by a “marriage of Chinese and Malay cuisines”: Typical Chinese ingredients (such as bean curd, soy sauce, preserved soy beans, black prawn paste, sesame seeds, dried mushrooms and dried lily buds) blended beautifully with Malay herbs, spices and fragrant roots. Being non-Muslim, the [so-called] Straits Chinese cooked pork dishes Malay-style, and added distinctive local ingredients (coconut milk, spices and sour tamarind juice) to basic Chinese recipes. The Nonya [sic] pork satay, served with spicy pineapple sauce, demonstrates perfectly this felicitous blending of styles. (Hutton 2000: 22)

4: Laksa lemak, a Peranakan dish of Chinese ingredients, local spices, and “the creamy tastes of coconut milk.”

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of British colonialism, the significance of Malaccan-born Chinese traders throughout the region:

It is tempting to rework those traditional meanings of compradors—as cultural go-betweens—in service of a narrative of smooth transition to the modern cosmopolis. Meanwhile, history has proved anything but smooth, as the postwar decline of Peranakan influence (for example, in Singapore) or postwar racial tensions in the region (for example, in Malaysia and Ceylon/Sri Lanka) attest (Chew 2010: 114–15). Nevertheless, my argument proposes an alternative and often-neglected route, to that of trade, markets, and the spread of colonial administrators through the region, even though this less obvious route itself is shaped by these imperial relations. Instead, through the tangled relations of people, ethnicity, gender, class, food, and place, I want to trace the thread of intimacy and care—a thread tightly interwoven with the traditional labor of women in providing nurture through food. Here, “smells from the kitchen” call. So, through their cookbooks, we will now enter three kitchens not only to taste their dishes but also to experience in an embodied fashion their “intimate” taste economies. Adopting a different conceptualization of cuisine beyond attachment to the

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In turning to the “Malaccan-born” Chinese to be their middlemen to the Chinese and other Asian trading communities and their networks, the British traders were following the well established precedents of the Dutch and before them the Portuguese who termed these middlemen “purchasers” or compradors. In India the dubashes performed a similar middlemen function. . . . [T]hese middlemen then were co-opted to help administer the Empire as magistrates, councillors and in the case of India, form the core of the Indian Civil Service. (Kwa 2010: 52; emphasis in original)


This is not to say of course that Peranakan food was identical in flavors and ingredients in each of the Straits Settlements. The dish that serves as a classic example, of course, is laksa—a spicy soup that combines Chinese ingredients, such as noodles, with Malay seasonings. While similar spices form the basis of laksa in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, Penang laksa is known for the addition of “pink ginger, laksa leaf, black pungent prawn paste, shredded pineapple and raw onion” and, quintessentially, the sour flavors of tamarind juice—flavors that reflect their proximity to food cultures of the north [now Thailand]. Meanwhile the laksa of Singapore and Malacca is characterized by the creamy tastes of coconut milk, an ingredient that is absent in Penang laksa (Hutton 2000: 24). Within this “felicitous blending of styles,” nevertheless, the significance of place demands attention—place in the sense of contact with other cultures (such as those of Siam, later Thailand) and place in the sense of the availability of local ingredients (such as coconuts, fresh turmeric, and pineapple). “Felicitous blending” too not only occurs within Peranakan culinary cultures but also implies exchanges between communities living in close proximity, for example between Peranakan and Eurasian communities where a dish like curry debal, traditionally made from Christmas leftover cooked meats and usually attributed to Eurasians, is also eaten by members of Singapore’s Peranakan community, or a recipe for laksa may be passed from Peranakan cooks to their Hakka neighbors in Malacca (interview conversations: Raymond Wong 2008; Mr. and Mrs. Khut 2003; for additional examples of exchanges, see Duruz 2011: 612–13). The complex relations of people to each other and to places—“lived,” remembered, and imagined—haunt the “mixed” tastes of laksa and curry debal. A final note here returns us to the ghost of Malacca and its ties to modern meanings of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Kwa Chong Guan (2010: 52) discusses, under relations

imagined nation, I want to slide below the radar of economies of war, trade, and travel on behalf of empire or nation (while certainly not denying their shaping force), and focus instead on intimacy—economies of memory, of generational and gendered histories, and primarily, economies of love (whether of marital, familial, communal, and so on) and acceptance of difference. This approach through sensory place-making, and alert to other ways of seeing the world through an ethic of care, becomes at the end of the day a plea for “grounded,” alternative understandings of transnational identities (Bégin 2011).

Kitchen Scents: Finding Traces of Belacan

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If you walk past any Eurasian or Malay home in Malacca while a meal is being prepared, your nostrils will be assaulted by the pungent odour of dried shrimp paste. Known in Malay as belacan . . . this in-your-face seasoning . . . adds a distinctive accent to countless dishes. Be it a chunky paste, a sauce or, a firm or moist block—fermented shrimp or fish in many forms is found throughout Southeast Asia. (Hutton 2007: 18)

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There are traces of taste and smell of belacan [blachan] in all three of the kitchens we visit. In an earlier cookbook that was to win for Charmaine Solomon the title of “Queen of Asian cooking in Australia” (O’Meara 2008), Solomon provides recipes for prawn blachan from Sri Lanka and balachaung from Burma (Ceylon and Burma her own and her mother’s birthplaces, respectively) (Solomon 1976: 53, 280–81), declaring balachaung to be “the most popular of all Burmese accompaniments” (ibid.: 280). The ingredient of dried shrimp paste, Solomon claims, has almost magical properties, although the cook is advised to keep it well contained until needed so that its pungent aroma will not invade the kitchen (ibid.: 491; see also Harris 2004: 214). For Violet Oon, born in 1949 in Malacca into a Peranakan family that later moved to Singapore (Singapore Infopedia 2005), sambal belacan also has familial associations. A recipe for this condiment—chillies and heated dried shrimp paste pounded together and served with limes—is included in her cookbook in a section entitled “Grandmother’s Recipes.” On its culinary significance, Oon (1998: 22) comments: “For the Babas, sambal belacan is an indispensable part of a meal.” Meanwhile, Mary Gomes presents a similar recipe in The Eurasian Cookbook in a section on achars [pickles] and sambals [pounded chilli pastes]. In addition, as a testament to sambal belacan’s ubiquity as an accompaniment for traditional Eurasian dishes, it is listed no fewer than eighteen times within this recipe collection (Gomes 2001: 39; see also Asiapac Editorial 2003: 116).

The question lingers: what makes a cuisine, after all? Is it a range of similar “smells from the kitchen” that suggests some kind of shared appreciation for particular foods, particular tastes and textures . . . for the heat of chillies, the pungency of fermented fish, the sharpness of lime on the tongue? Is this enough? At this point I would like to return to Mintz’s definition of cuisine, particularly his emphasis on communities who care about food, and—I would add—communities who care for each other through food. While it would be possible to draw interesting comparisons among the individual ingredients, recipes, and annotations included in the cookbooks selected (perhaps, to follow the trail of “European” and “Asian” influences in these texts, or of “Chinese” and “Malay” ones?), this is not my primary purpose here. As well, it would seem that Chambers’s phantom “connections, collusions, and subsequent maps of meaning” demand more than a taxonomy of dish descriptions. Instead, I want to enter these kitchens through a different, sometimes difficult, doorway than one defined by tastebuds alone (though, as Seremetakis [1996: 14] reminds us, the senses, of course, are never entirely innocent nor are they without political baggage). So, while drawing on the tangible tastes and smells of food’s preparation and sharing, my alternative analytic tools involve avoiding the application of categorizations associated with fixed borders and territories to diverse places and food cultures (with the inevitable inaptness of some examples). Instead, I want to position these kitchens, quite differently and yet with some sense of connection to each other, within economies of love, and within the spatialities of these economies. And here I am using “economies” simply to suggest the give and take of resources. Interestingly, Hutton (2000: 22; 2007) describes the food of both Peranakan and Eurasian communities as “the food of love.” Although most cuisines, with their associations of nurturing communities, might be described in these terms, the “love” referred to here has particular connotations—of sexual and familial partnerships across the borders of ethnic, and at times religious, difference. The impact, of course, on “kitchen smells” is profound. Charmaine Solomon, for example, imagines her own identity, ethnicity-wise, as a “mixed” dish. She describes herself as a “fruit salad”—as Dutch Burgher on her father’s side of the family (with family members arriving in Zeilan [the Dutch name for Ceylon] from the Netherlands in the early 1700s), while her mother’s roots included traces of Irish, Anglo-Indian, South Indian, English, Dutch Indonesian, Goan, and French ancestry (Hutton 2007: 26). However, for the sake of expedience, Charmaine, born in 1930 and growing up in Colombo, Ceylon, would describe herself as Dutch Burgher (an identity of some status in that community). In fact, in 1959,

this dish called babi assam,” Mary adds, “but it has a different taste” (Gomes 2001: 84; see also 20, 30–31, 60). As a cookbook writer and owner of a Eurasian café in Singapore, Mary attributes her own culinary knowledge, first and foremost, to her mother. During a childhood with many hours spent in the kitchen, Mary had learned to cook through watching her mother and following her directions—none of the recipes were written down (AsiaOne 2008). Other good cooks, however, were to make significant contributions to Mary’s culinary expertise. Accordingly, Mary dedicates her book to “my mother, aunts, and my late [Peranakan] mother-in-law, who painstakingly taught me the finer points of their cooking skills. Not forgetting my cousin Pat Hendricks and Sister Dorothy Santa Maria of Malacca, who have shared recipes with me” (Gomes 2001: 3, 7). As well as a story of family relationships shaped through food, we should note that Mary’s story is one in which the bonds of religion and of a sense of belonging to a church community play their part, the reference to Sister Dorothy Santa Maria of Malacca hinting of this. Prior to opening her café, Mary had established a canteen at her local church in central Singapore, serving homely Eurasian meals after mass on Sundays. As Patrick Mowe says in the foreword of Gomes’s 2001 cookbook:

There are echoes of Mintz’s meanings of cuisine as a form of care in the above—caring about preserving the tradition, caring for each other—even when, or indeed because, communities are relocated. Meanings of places (such as Portugal, Malacca, Singapore), of inherited cultures (such as Catholicism, Eurasian ethnic identification), and of cultural nostalgia are among the many that inflect the complex tastes of curry debal. Violet Oon, in her turn, we remember, was born in Malacca in 1949 into a Peranakan family who, during Violet’s childhood, moved to Katong, Singapore. Katong, in Singapore’s east, together with neighboring Joo Chiat, is renowned— symbolically at least, if not the present reality—as the ancestral home of Singapore’s Peranakan and Eurasian communities (Kong and Chang 2001: 97). Like Mary Gomes, Violet Oon dedicates her cookbook to critical figures in her life, including “Assorted Aunts—in particular Aunty Claire Chong Soon Liat, my Ma Koh Nona Bong & Aunty Nanny Khoo Heng Loon— my late father Oon Beng Soon who taught me to eat with love.” She also references, in her acknowledgments, an imaginary

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St Joseph’s Church in Victoria Street Singapore is the last bastion of Eurasians of Portuguese descent in Singapore. . . . Presiding over the kitchen is the indefatigable Mary Gomes. The many volunteers . . . do a splendid job of keeping up traditional Eurasian dishes at unbelievable affordable prices. You don’t have to be a baptised Catholic to patronise it, nor do you have to go to confession to have the taste of Devil Curry!


Charmaine’s Dutch Burgher identity became a political question. Following race riots in Ceylon and wanting to migrate with her husband and children to Australia (de Witt 2006), this identity became Charmaine’s means of entry to the country, despite policies of racial exclusion (known as the White Australia Policy) being firmly in place. Clearly, however, her story of origins is more complicated than a simple attribution of Dutch Burgher might suggest, and her recipe collection reflects this complexity—from the mixed fried noodle dish, kaukswe kyaw, cooked by her grandmother and then her mother, its “flavours . . . distinctly Burmese” and redolent of visits to her grandmother’s house in Burma (memories of “lush garden . . . large house . . . ceiling fans . . . wooden blinds . . . the cries of the street vendors”) to the Dutch Burgher version of beef smoore, a pot roast of beef with distinctive “local” flavors—coconut milk, curry leaves, lime, lemongrass, ginger, cinnamon, Ceylon curry powder, chili, and turmeric, probably prepared by the servants in the household, a critical factor to be noted in Solomon’s description of the household’s economy (and whose absence she feels strongly later, settling in Sydney) (Britain 2002: 73). Meanwhile, in the childhood home, Solomon’s many unmarried aunts devoted themselves to pickle-making and preserves and to the household’s “fancy” cooking—cakes, pastries, and other “teatime treats” (Solomon 1998: 70, 95, 255; see also Britain 2002: 73). Here, gender, class, ethnicity, and relations of colonialism together inflect divisions of labor in the household and the taste economies embedded in these divisions. Not surprisingly, glimpses of complex family histories and their legacy in food cultures occur in both Mary Gomes’s The Eurasian Cookbook and Violet Oon’s A Singapore Family Cookbook. While these connections are not so explicitly drawn as in Solomon’s book, traces of cultures of intimacy are present, together with border-crossing of “mixed” communities and “mixed dishes.” Born in Singapore in 1949, Gomes grew up with the stories of her Malacca-born Eurasian mother—of the tok panjang (a long table set with many dishes for festive occasions) of the mother’s Peranakan neighbors, for example—and with the “smells of the kitchen” that her mother’s cooking produced. We imagine its tastes: those of streaky pork simmered in a thick, dark, sweet soyaflavored sauce, served on weekends to extended family gatherings or, perhaps, the taste of Eurasian chicken pie, with soya sauce added to a variety of meats—chicken, sausages, pork mince—and vegetables, traditionally served following Christmas’s midnight mass or, perhaps again, the taste of porku tambreneu, pig’s trotter, as Mary says, “done in my mother’s own unique style” with ginger, chili, tamarind, and rempah [spice paste]. “The Peranakans have their own version of

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generational and gendered cooking community—cultures of femininity vested in cooking and care (“AND Other People’s Mothers and Grandmothers”) (Oon 1998: dedication). The “Assorted Aunts” provided a rich learning environment for Violet’s first steps in learning to cook: “[I was] inspired by my Indonesian Chinese grandaunt’s unusual and wonderful cooking that she brought with her from Indonesia—different from the Nonya cuisine of Singapore that I grew up with. . . . My Aunty Nanny made such wonderful Kueh Lapis [an Indonesian cake considered a delicacy] that it was even sold in nearby Cold Storage . . . [and f]rom my father’s sisters I learnt Nonya cooking” (Oon 1998: 6, 7; see also Goh 2003). Traditional Nyonya flavors are well represented in this collection, along with the occasional fragments of memory (“my aunts would come visiting with a rich array of Nonya dishes contained in . . . tiffin carriers. Masak Kuah Pedas [fish simmered in a spice mix which includes belacan] . . . Babi Pong Tay [chunks of pork cooked in a spicy sweet sauce that includes dark soya sauce] and perhaps a Pong Tauhu Soup [bean curd with meatball soup] would be disgorged from these carriers for lunch”) (Oon 1998: 12, 20, endpapers). However, the striking feature of Oon’s recipe collection is that its purpose is not to present Peranakan culinary culture as fixed and bounded, but as fluid and open to the influence of others. Hence while every recipe is tagged to suggest its roots (“Nonya,” “Cantonese,” “Eurasian,” “Singapore Indian,” and so on), this is not to imply a lack of exchange or fluidity, as cuisines (and identities) may “bleed” into each other. Under “Eurasian,” for example, Oon includes a recipe for sugee cake. This is an iconic Eurasian cake, included in most Eurasian recipe collections (Gomes 2001: 158–59; see also Hutton 2007: 189; Chinese Women’s Association 2007: 21). However, Oon’s accompanying comment is, I feel, symptomatic of the “mixed” histories that characterize Peranakan and Eurasian families, together with the impossibility of definitive ethnic identification, presuming this is based on these family histories. She says: “My father’s favourite cousin is my aunty Claire. I used to spend weekends there in her home in Haig Road and remember many delicious meals she hosted after the tennis games there. Her sugee cake is easy to bake” (1998: 146). Was Violet Oon’s Aunty Claire Eurasian then? Presumably. We are reminded here of Solomon’s refusal of a singular national identity and adopting the metaphor of “fruit salad” in the face of unraveling a too-complicated story of origins, or Gomes’s mother-in-law whose “cooking style was more Peranakan,” although “unlike most Chinese, she used the Eurasian-style of using a rempah [Malaysian spice paste] to thicken her curry” (2001: 7). Fixed borders of “Peranakan,” “Eurasian,” or “Dutch Burgher” identifications then cannot be assumed, any more than those of “Malaysian” or “Sri Lankan.”

At the same time, individual cooks, while referencing culinary traditions, might have their own “take” on these. From these few examples then, it is obvious that cuisines themselves vitally reflect those involved in their production, with participants’ intimate histories inscribing collective culinary imaginaries. As well, the ties of cuisine to place mediate relations among people, and relations between people and food, whether in household kitchens, in communities; whether when traveling, relocated elsewhere, or traveling in memory. For my journey through port city kitchens of the region, however, the question is: are there actually ties that bind— ties within, and between, communities, and ties between communities and specific places? Are the cookbooks I have selected, with the culinary cultures these books embody, isolated examples of the practices of various “mixed” communities—communities established through cross-cultural relationships in that accident of place where relationships are formed and sustained? Given my arguments about “mixing” and fluidity, I would hardly want to hold to a position of stand-alone food cultures, however hybridized these might seem through the eyes of an enthusiastic ethnographer. The love cake that Solomon describes as a Sri Lankan birthday cake, and that travels with her when she goes to live with her Aunt Connie in London in the 1950s, contains much more complicated symbolic capital than this. This cake is not only redolent of local ingredients and historical “taste” exchanges, but is also a marker of culinary continuities and differentiations. While the Burghers’ love cake of Sri Lanka and the sugee cake of Eurasians in Singapore and Malaysia (“a typical Eurasian wedding cake”) (Gomes 2001: 158) are both recognizable in recipes for a European-style butter-based cake, with semolina and nuts contributing to its grainy texture and brandy or cognac to its keeping qualities, distinctive flavors contribute to the cake’s association with particular communities and places: “Burgher cooks normally add cashews and flavour the cake with cardamom and rose essence, while Eurasians from Penang and Malacca are more likely to use ground almonds, vanilla essence and brandy” (Hutton 2007: 189). In fact, as Michelle Burns points out, the love cake/ sugee cake becomes a distinguishing marker of identity among Eurasians in Southeast Asia with love cake attributed to those Eurasians of Dutch Burgher descent in Sri Lanka and sugee cake to other Eurasians, particularly those descended from the Settlements in the Strait of Malacca (Burns 2008). At the same time, this cake, in its different and distinct manifestations, might be seen, like belacan itself, as a trope of the interconnected, though not necessarily the same, ways that people might relate to each other at this time, in this place, in this geographic region—ways grounded

So, if we are to wrest cartographies of taste from the confines of national boundaries and the four-colored charts associated with modernity’s partitioning of the globe, what alternative forms of mapping are available? Narratives embodied in these fragments of remembering and cookbook recording might trace a looser, less definitive “region” than ones tied irrevocably to the broad outlines of nation and to the project of national progress. Instead, we sense the presence of a “region” linked by oceans, port cities, historic movements of people, cross-cultural and cross-religious relationships, and geographic propinquity (availability of similar ingredients, particular land uses, and shared climatic conditions, for example). Love and eating in a hot climate, perhaps, as an approach to redrawing boundaries, although a practice that is not, in itself, without borders? Drawing on the collective nuances of this article’s discussion of Chambers, Mintz, Bachelard, and Hutton, I want to reemphasize economies of “love” and “care”—those more nebulous, and possibly more intuitive, ways of conceptualizing “place,” particular places and their connections. Sara Ahmed’s “affective economies” and Yi-Fu Tuan’s “fields of care” might prove helpful here for a final, retrospective look at relations of food, place, and intimacy. Ahmed (2004: 119) is concerned with the materiality of emotions, especially with the ways these economies bind communities together, for example in the process of maintaining ethnic supremacy through racist attacks on ”others”: “In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.” Similarly, I would argue, just as Ahmed (ibid.) declares that “Hate is economic,” so is love and the ensemble of emotions tied to love—filial affection, neighborly reciprocity, and so on. These bonds take a very tangible form when food and the senses (of taste, smell, touch, sound, sight) become points of mediation. To rework Ahmed, “food does things . . . align [ing] . . . bodily space with social space . . . through the very intensity of . . . [its associations].” Tuan (1979: 418–19), in his turn, allows us to imagine place differently, freed from an overreliance on visual representation of literal landscapes and sensitive to the strength of people’s emotional regimes and to the histories of these: Unlike public symbols, fields of care lack visual identity . . . . Planners may believe an area to be a neighbourhood, and label it as such on

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within “mixed” cultures of familial affection and neighborly reciprocity. More interesting for my purposes though is not so much the degree to which similar ingredients or celebratory food items might link (or differentiate within) these “mixed” communities, but the extent to which a certain ambiance of “place” encourages an openness of palate. Colombo, Malacca, Penang, Singapore . . . all port cities, characterized by cosmopolitan encounter, and shaped by histories of migration, occupation, opportunism, and expansion—by relations of Western colonialism and imperial powers’ appropriations of the spice trade. Malacca, in particular, we remember for its “rich [and] eclectic” array of culinary experiences and Penang for its “ethnically and socially diverse” character. Singapore, we are told, is celebrated for its diverse food cultures, with its east coast neighborhood of Katong, the nation’s kitchen (“a potluck of authentic dishes dotingly cooked up by the island’s diverse Peranakan, Eurasian, Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures”) (Mok 2007: 71). Meanwhile, Solomon in Family Recipes and elsewhere writes of her Colombo childhood, in the 1930s and 1940s under British rule in pre-independence Ceylon, as one of harmonious relations between servants and masters and a felicitous “mixing” of European and Sinhalese food—“a soup and a light main [European-style] course at night . . . [while l]unches were more ‘native’ . . . We enjoyed the spicy curries” (Hutton 2007: 28).1 Any sense of harmony, however, was to be shaken by interethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils, particularly following independence in 1948 through years of civil war, to its uneasy resolution in the present (Edridisinha 2001: 244–46, 261). My point here is not to stand simply as an advocate for “mixed” cuisines as a plethora of tastes and indiscriminate food exchanges in particular places—ones that deem to have (or have had) “cosmopolitan” outlooks. Indeed, cultural and religious sanctions may preclude such exchanges, such as in the case of Malay Muslim communities, for example, in Singapore (Duruz and Khoo 2015: 114–16). Rather, I am speculating that, under particular historic conditions of “openness” (as in port cities of the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca), and within relations that allow such exchanges (for example, in communities drawing on Christian beliefs, where food taboos are less in evidence) (Hutton 2007: 10–11), the “place” itself represents important contributing capital to sustain economies of love and the “food of love” itself. Love alone, then, might not be enough. Where, when, what, and with whom communities eat together shapes the conditions of caring exchange and the meaning of care itself.

the ground that it is the same kind of physical environment and people come from a similar socio-economic class, only to discover that the local residents do not recognise the area as a neighbourhood: the parts with which they identify may be much smaller, for instance, a single street or an intersection. (Tuan 1979: 418–19)

However, it is not simply the case that people may draw different maps than public mapmakers, planners, and implementers of policy. The actual knowing and marking of place, Tuan argues, is a qualitatively different process itself:

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Public symbols can be seen and known from the outside . . . . Fields of care, by contrast, carry few signs that declare their nature: they can be known in essence only from within. Human beings establish fields of care, networks of interpersonal concern, in a physical setting . . . . What are the means by which affective bond reaches beyond human beings to place? One is repeated experience: the feel of place gets under our skin in the course of day-to-day contact. (Tuan 1979: 416–17)

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Memories, sensory knowledges, relations of affection and caring—this is the content of the often invisible “fields of care.” Place itself does not disappear in this conceptualization (“networks of interpersonal concern, in a physical setting,” Tuan reminds us [my emphasis]). Instead, for our purposes here, meanings of place are embedded in complex sets of relations—cultural intersections in which people, food, time, spaces and emotional regimes are implicated. Place becomes not so much an entity in itself but integral to “the human drama” of cooking, eating, and caring (ibid.: 418). The question, of course, remains: Who is doing the cooking and caring? This article has emphasized throughout the persistent gender of intimacy in relation to kitchen cultures—the cooking and caring of mothers, wives, aunts, female servants. This is not to imply a lack of male influence (as in the case of Violet Oon’s father) or male participation (as Charmaine documents the contribution of her husband and sons to the household’s cooking). It is simply to state that Chambers’s “smells from the kitchen” are not floating free from the relations of gender, as well as those of class, ethnicity, age, and generation. Instead, a powerful nexus exists between place and the politics of identity that, in turn, shapes the “food of love” itself. So, for those who cook and eat in a hot climate, “fields of care” offer alternative ways to chart territories of difference and intimate connection. Furthermore, unraveling, through the ethic of care, the “mixed” culinary cultures and histories of communities—Dutch Burgher, Eurasian, Peranakan—in “mixed” port cities of the Indian Ocean and Strait of Malacca, we begin to put some flesh on the bones of “grounded” cosmopolitan identities (Werbner 2008). These are “constellation[s] of being that continue to survive,” not as essentialized culinary cultures and identities or as familiar tropes of nation. Instead, these are identities shaped by continuing “transcultural negotiation”

(Choo et al. 2004: 71) within and between communities; between people, especially women, and place. Among the intersecting tastes and smells of “home,” however, my attention has been drawn to the distinct flavors of caring and intimacy emerging in the “mix.”

Acknowledgments Thanks are due to the editor of Gastronomica, Melissa Caldwell, and to two anonymous reviewers whose suggested interventions were extremely helpful in shaping the final version of this text. Thanks are also due to Krishnendu Ray, Cecilia Leong-Salobir, and Jaclyn Rohel for their insightful comments on a previous draft, and to InterAsia IV for supporting my participation in the Istanbul workshop that inspired the project in the first place.

NOTE

1. Hutton (2007: 27) is anxious to stress that servants were part of the family (“We treated them well. . . . [M]y closest companion was Jane, the Sinhalese girl who looked after me . . . and continued to be there until I left the house as a bride. I was also very fond of Josie, the motherly, elderly cook whose domain was the kitchen”). While Solomon might be accused of colonialist nostalgia—of romanticizing the mistress-servant relationship, it is obviously not a relationship without affection. For an interesting and provocative argument of the hardening of hierarchies, even within apparently intimate relationships and kitchen spaces in Indonesia under Dutch colonialism, see Ann Laura Stoler (2002). The problematic of “love,” and the power relations of its giving and receiving, remains, whether “love” is embedded in the cooking labor of servants or of women more generally.

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