I'm sticking with my theme of Chinese New year for the first part of this post, and I also want to share with you some of my favourite places in Singapore - possibly even with a blurry photo or two. One of the disadvantages of the iPhone is that it has a camera, so I never take the real thing with me any more when I am out and about. Well, I say it has a camera, but it's not much cop really. A positive blessing when you want a soft focus shot, but less effective when you're after some nice sharp definition or if you're taking photos when it's dark.
The first is a picture of Yu Sheng (pronounced Ee Shung), which is a raw fish salad that is only eaten at the time of Chinese New Year. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, but there was an article in today's paper which gave some new insights into its origins, so I thought I'd refresh the Yu Sheng story. While the basic idea is Cantonese in origin, the dish is largely peculiar to Singapore and the story behind this is quite interesting - although it has very little to do with tradition and a lot to do with commerce.
Yu Sheng was basically the invention of four young chefs in the sixties. They were having lunch at a hawker stall and saw the seller put together a dish (which sounds pretty disgusting when you read the description, but they obviously saw the potential). The newspaper article tells the story like this:
"The four friends watched the fish porridge seller slices off pieces of swordfish. On the raw fish slices, finely sprinkled with the black dust of vehicles driving by the Chinatown alley, the hawker scattered some chopped carrots and pickles. He then drizzled some lime juice on it. Customers then drenched the dish with vinegar,oil and sugar before slurping away. There were houseflies swarming around the fish, and also smoke and dust because of the cars and motorcycles. It was bad ".
It sounds hard to resist, I know, but as I said, they saw the potential, tarted it up and started selling it in their restaurant. The modern dish still contains raw fish - usually salmon, but sometimes jellyfish - and carrots, as well as julienne strips of bizarrely coloured vegetables, crushed peanuts, sesame seeds and little hollow square crisps, representing moneybags. The whole thing is drizzled (I say drizzled, it's more like drenched) in oil and a sweet sauce, before being tossed using extra long chopsticks, with everyone at the table taking a turn, trying to toss the salad as high in the air as possible to the accompaniment of shouts of "Lo Hei" - an auspicious greeting.
Yu Sheng is a big thing - not only on restaurant menus at New Year, but at all manner of formal dinners and official functions. It seems that it has even been suggested as a Singaporean national dish - and all from such humble beginnings. Apparently there have been attempts at a fusion version of Yu Sheng, by including pig's trotters, for example. That is such a bad idea that I can't bring myself to say any more on the subject. Well perhaps just one thing - Yeeurgh!
While I really like some of the components, I find the whole thing a bit sweet, so I'm tempted to try my own version, with lovely smoked salmon, shredded vegetables and crunchy things. Watch this space for Yu Sheng reborn.
Some friends are coming to visit this coming weekend, so we will be introducing them to the delights of Yu Sheng at the Tanglin Club. These particular friends have been to Singapore before, but it was some time ago and they will notice some big changes. One of the changes falls into my list of favourite things about Singapore - the boutique hotels that have sprung up over the last few years. We stayed in one of them, the Scarlet, on Valentine's Day last year and we tried another of them, the Wanderlust, for Chris's birthday in December. We took a room - it was called the Rusty Typewriter - and invited some friends for champagne and nibbles there before we all went down to the restaurant for dinner. The restaurant is called Cocotte, and serves what it describes as rustic French food in a communal dining style. This basically means that you can order large plates of things for the whole table - a bit like the way that Chinese food is served. So, now to make you salivate; hopefully an easy task as the food was downright delicious. We began with most of the starters on the menu - a bit like that scene in Pretty Woman when Richard Gere tells Julia Roberts over breakfast " I didn't know what you'd like so I ordered everything". Talking of Pretty Woman, is it just me, or is that scene where she is wearing black undies under the hotel bathrobe and he hoists her up on to the piano keyboard one of the sexiest movie scenes ever? It's in my top three. The other two are the kitchen floor scene in 9 and 1/2 weeks and the one where Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey dance together in his room before they go to bed together for the first time........
Moving on, and back to dinner (but that digression was fun, wasn't it?), we had:
- Homemade pork rillettes
- Pissaladiere
- Chicken liver mousse
- Fried tripe. Well, obviously I didn't have any of this, given my food foibles, but those who did pronounced it utterly delicious. It was very un-tripey, which probably explains it, slow cooked until tender, dipped in breadcrumbs and then fried. A sort of tripe goujon, I suppose.
- Pig's trotters - thankfully served off the bone, and turned into little crispy medallions. Again, not for me, but everyone else said "yum".
- Escargot gougeres. Now I'm not normally a fun of the snail, but these were served as little profiterole sized choux buns, each containing a super garlicky buttery snail. So garlicky in fact, that I suspect they were reared on a diet of garlic, and probably nothing else.
- Mussels in cider cream sauce
More of my favourite things about Singapore in posts to come. I hope this will keep you going for a while. Thank you to those of you who wrote to tell me that my haiku on the prawn made them laugh. Here's a haiku on hotels:
Just a place to stay?
Much more than that if well done
Like the Wanderlust.
A bientot.
