Talking of hawking - A guide to Singapore’s hawker dishes
Missing Singapore? Yeah, us too. For all its spit and polish, its Gardens by the Bay, its posh high teas and those eye-popping luxury chattels on Orchard Road, it’s to the humble hawker centres we high-tail when we’re there. So do the locals, despite all those shiny, Crazy Rich Asians vibes.
Singapore may be affluent now, but did you know that in the post-war 1950s and 1960s, unemployment and poverty were rife? Many residents took their pots, woks and blocks of belacan, hit the streets and started freelance cooking to raise some much-needed dosh. It was an accessible option as hawking didn’t take much to set up and good income could be had.
Most of the cooks specialised in one dish, or just a couple – by the late 1960s the number of food hawkers had ballooned to around 24,000. As hygiene was an issue, the government began relocating vendors to purpose-built centres that had proper amenities, making them centralised, regulated and sanitary. The last true street hawker left the streets in 1985. New centres were built into burgeoning public housing estates, providing dining options for swathes of locals; they remain an intrinsic part of the fabric of Singapore society.
While more hawker centres continue to be planned, with the median age of hawker cooks now hovering in the 60s and younger generations tending to prefer white collar jobs, questions remain as to how hawking will continue into the future. Some dishes are incredibly labour-intensive and there’s a risk of these dying out. Muah chee (nuggets of glutinous rice flour dough tossed in sugar and peanuts), for example, is now rare as the super-thick dough requires constant stirring over low heat for 1½ hours to achieve the correct consistency. Dishes like kway chap calls for intestines to be painstakingly cleaned by hand! Standing over a wok to stir-fry portion after portion of char way teow is back breaking. Singaporeans though are a pretty resourceful bunch and we reckon they’ll find a way to keep hawker centres thriving. Singapore without them just wouldn’t make sense.
The number of hawker dishes available is nothing short of mind-blowing. We’ve catalogued a few; here are some of our faves.