Voracious Verses
Eat your words in the company of strangers
19 March 2015
D335, Chapter 1, Verse 1 - WELCOME TO AN INTIMATE EVENING OF CHARMING COMPANY, FOOD-MAKING AND FEASTING WITH STRANGERS IN YOUR OWN CITY.
Dining with strangers happens every day everywhere around the world. At breakfast, we share tables with the Uncle and Auntie who have just finished their morning tai-chi at the community centre. At lunch, we stand next to six other people waiting for their Big Macs. The counter-top is greasy, but we’re too preoccupied with our Facebook news feeds to care. At dinner, we’re sat – along with may be 60 other people - by the side of a conveyor belt of sushi snaking its way through the restaurant.
Yes, dining with strangers is not a big deal. Not unless it happens in someone’s home and it isn’t quite a party party. It’s also a slightly bigger deal when guests have a hand in the cooking, with recipes conjured by guest chefs, and occasionally paired with a generous dollop of customised poetry or face painting or music-making to boost the culture quotient.
This is Dinner at 335 (D335) and these are the voracious verses wooed from one particular night of soul food – Singapore style – and sweet sweet poetry.
D335, 2:15 - ON THE MENU...
…Were dishes that Singaporeans have come to take for granted; dishes that take far too much effort to prepare; dishes typically made and eaten at a hawker centre and not at home.
The cooking was supervised by Stuart of ANDSOFORTH, nomadic dinner theatre organisers who we featured in an earlier story. who was, in turn, supervised by his grandmother. These are her recipes.
Appetiser: Acar (pronounced ‘arr-char’) - A vegetable pickle compromising cucumber, cauliflower, carrot, small white onion, whole chillies and anything that is within harvesting distance.
Lightly dehydrate vegetables with salt and dedicated squeezing.
Meanwhile, pound ginger and garlic – only a stone mortar and pestle will do; new-fangled wooden or plastic versions tend to dull the taste of everything. Fry together in a generous amount of oil and fold in chilli paste and white vinegar. The result: Rempah (spice paste).
Season vegetables in rempah and leave to steep for at least a day.
Entrée: Prawn noodle soup with pork ribs - That’s what it’s called. It makes complete sense in its original Hokkien or even Mandarin. It’s enough that generations of Singaporeans (and Malaysians) worship this dish to not worry about giving it a pretty name.
Put a pot of pork-bone stock to boil for, ideally, three days; three hours if dinner guests threaten to riot.
Wash, shell and de-vein whole prawns (keep tails intact); as many as one can handle without wastage. Remove prawn heads and boil separately from their bodies. Boil for as long as dinner guests can manage their hunger and add prawn stock to pork broth. Prepare supporting ingredients and condiments such as sliced fish cake, oyster sauce, chilli paste, fresh whole chillies, sprigs of kangkong (water convolvulus), bean sprouts, and noodles (usually a combination of round yellow egg noodles and thick-cut vermicelli).
Noodles can be eaten dry (with said condiments) or in the soup.
Dessert: Cheng tng - A refreshing and cooling (in the Yin-Yang sense) sweet soup defended by legions of grandmothers who know how best to deal with sore throats, chesty coughs and general irritability brought on by the prickly tropical heat.
In a giant pot, boil a litre of water with a pandan knot for that unmistakable yet indefinable Southeast Asian flavour that is a bit jungle and a bit city swagger.
Throw in all manner of bark or dried fruit or seed that takes your fancy. Traditional choices include ‘mata kucing’ (dried and sweetened longan lookalikes), barley, white fungus (really yummy), lotus seeds, angel hair fungus, dried persimmon and water-chestnut.
** Disclaimer: Mackerel cannot vouch for the quality of any of the above dishes should readers choose to attempt these recipes. We aren’t a cookbook.
D335, 3:22 - TOIL AND INDUSTRY
D335 doesn’t suffer lazy guests. One must be prepared to participate in both the cooking and conversation. On this particular evening, Mackerel’s Marc was invited to engage and enthrall guests with poetry. It didn’t matter to anyone that the beverage on offer was a non-alcoholic, albeit inspiring, lemongrass and ginger drink. The evening paired food with poetry.
D335, 4:27 - ATYPICAL DINNER CONVERSATION
Appetizers were personalised haikus written by Marc from stolen chats around the lemongrass bowl, passing remarks about hobbies and guessing the other’s real reason for signing up for the dinner.
Some samples:No regulations
Will hold you back from change; High
Life DefinitionIn this repose, breathe
Deeply then strike - the silent
Collapse, craft; your warYou great invention,
Heart opens to each new friend;
Give your balls awaySome solutions come
Easier than others; unpeeling
Problems like prawns
