Success In the Peranakan Food Business

By Vincent Gabriel

The world's best secret food is the Peranakan cuisine. It is, at once, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, spicy and rich in oil.

Peranakan food started as the Chinese food brought by merchants from the coastal regions of China, when they married into the local Malay coastal families, who had a cuisine of fresh fish and fresh vegetables.

The mixing of the two cuisines was the Peranakan food, that was consumed by the families of the rich and the powerful, and who could afford to ask that the best fish that were caught, the best pigs that were slaughtered and the best fruits and vegetables picked were offered to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456625948

Book preview

UNIT 1

The Best Kept Food Secret

Synopsis

At the end of this unit you will

•    Appreciate how Peranakan food evolved and became one of the most distinctive food in Asia

•    Understand the factors that led to the decline of Peranakan food

•    Know the challenges that you face trying to start and sustain the Peranakan eatery

Introduction

The origin of Peranakan food is a long story of evolution, adaption, adoption and today of transition.

The original Chinese traders, missing the comforts of home taught their new families how to cook Chinese food, which must have tasted as though it lacked something.

Their new families introduced the spices that would bring the Europeans to Asia, the islands of South and East Asia and eventually to China.

Wealth

The wealth of the Chinese traders brought in the benefits of:

•    Large households with much kitchen help who could do the back-breaking tasks of pounding the spices, till they were paste-like smooth

•    Time to enjoy food feasts every day for the wealthy

•    Wealth of the elite who grew rich on

•    Trading in spices especially pepper, cloves, nutmeg

•    Then establishing estates to grow pepper, cloves, nutmeg

•    Later moving to the growing of rubber, that was needed by Europe that was accepting the motor car and needed rubber tyres

•    Mining of tin, again to produce the containers to store all kind of goods

•    Handling the commercial activities like transport, insurance, banking and finance

•    Handling the basic services of administration on behalf of the colonial government as professionals: Doctors

Teachers

Police officers

Legal officers and judges

The sum total was that there were vast amounts of wealth at the top and enough in the middle to keep these immigrants who had begun to settle living and eating in style.

Even the First World War that devastated most of Western Europe did not affect the wealthy in South and East Asia.

The Great Change

The fall of the British colonies (in South Asia), the Dutch (in what is today called Indonesia), the French (in that group of countries now called Indo-China), the Americans (in the Philippines) brought earth-shattering changes to the lives of the local people.

The wealthy locally born Chinese suffered more than anyone else. They became the focus of persecution by the Japanese Imperial Army, the communists, the nationalists and the newly emerging political forces anxious to brandish their socialist and populist roots by robbing the wealthy.

In Indonesia, in particular, the local Chinese were not allowed legally to outwardly display their ethnic roots. The consequence was that Chinese food became more Javanese.

In Penang, Malacca and Singapore, the local Chinese found themselves in a situation where they were different from another set of immigrants, that were fleeing China. Their food and their language made them stand out. They began to call themselves the Peranakans.

This Peranakan food culture is known for what it is and for what it is not.

It is easier to start from what it is not:

•    It is not Chinese food as such

In the Chinese Eatery: Success I put the features of Chinese food in the mnemonic ‘KANT’.

•    Unlike the Chinese food, Peranakan food revolves around only:

Within each of these categories there are more limiting boundaries.

Example

The animal meat of choice among the Peranakans is pork. Few eat beef or lamb.

Example

The preference among the Peranakans is for chicken. Few eat duck or quail.

Example

The preference among the Peranakans is for table fish. Few eat shark, turtle, or even ray.

The reasons may be as simple as:

•    Availability

Only goat meat was available and, being rich, the Peranakans could afford to pay for pork.

Only buffalo meat was, once in a way, available. So the Peranakans avoid beef altogether.

•    Market structures

As the demand grew, local growers brought in better breeds of chicken and made these available to the Peranakans.

•    Association

Shark’s fin was popular among the rich Peranakans and was a compulsory dish in the Peranakan wedding feast. Shark meat was the choice of the lowly paid servants of the Peranakans as was turtle, tortoise, ray and the shell fish.

So what is it?

Peranakan cuisine is not a matter of tossing just say anything edible into the cooking pot. It is a carefully nurtured craft perfected through decades of …… perfection. (Last word is the author’s).

Tan Gek Suan

Copyright acknowledged

Copyright belongs to Tan Gek Suan

Used for education only

It is the every day food of a group of people rich enough to be able to afford the best meat and fish and to have the food carefully prepared in the kitchen by a big group of kitchen hands.

At that time, the best food came from the home.

The restaurants served the other communities because they had come out to work in the colonies without their families and they depended on the restaurants and canteens to prepare their meals.

Your role today is to be like the Peranakan home to prepare the best food. The Peranakan household has shrunk to a basic nuclear family and there are no household helpers to prepare and cook the food.

It is due to the fact that the Peranakan household cannot produce a memorable Peranakan feast that the preparation of that meal has become the best kept secret.

So the Peranakan Eatery is the keeper of the best kept food secret.

Is Peranakan a food fad?

In the food business, there are items that suddenly become popular, causing prices to shoot up.

The high prices attract the attention of producers and the curiosity of consumers.

Prices continue upwards as more consumers buy more.

Then there seems to be a limit and some producers undercut the market of a product that seems basically the same.

As quickly as prices go up, prices come down. With falling prices, the inefficient eateries go bust. As firms exit the market, the remaining firms adjust their supply to the market and prices stabilised.

The Peranakan food market did experience a boom in the prosperous years but have since become more stable and limited to not more than a dozen.

The Peranakan food scene of 2015 is a market adjusted to:

•    Boom of years earlier

•    Bust following the financial crisis of Asia, the Leman Brothers and the closure of weak, badly-managed eateries

•    Wave of nostalgia of the 2010 period as customers want their children to remember the past as they saw it

•    Labour shortages of the 2012-2013 as major restrictions in the import of cheap foreign labour were imposed

•    Rise of other types of niche market foods like:

–    Bakery eateries

–    Coffee eateries

–    Fruit and vegetable eateries

–    Hipster foreign food eateries

While not competing directly with the Peranakan Eateries, they attract the attention of the young and in doing so deprive the Peranakan Eatery of the growing spending power of the young guest.

Then the next question is:

Is the Peranakan Eatery going extinct?

The answer lies in understanding:

•    Why young people do not want to go into the Peranakan food business

•    How particular types of food go extinct

•    Why young people do not want to go into Peranakan food production and sales.

The mnemonic HARMS can be used,

Healthy food

A change in the lifestyle

Rentals and costs are not stable

Manpower shortages

Success in the family want to do other things

Healthy food

Example:

Fruit and vegetables and the food that contain less oil

salt

sugar

no MSG

no trans fat

no gluten

Peranakan food is rich and contains much fat in the form of coconut milk.

A change in the lifestyle of customers. People eat out more often than they did in the past and they want affordable food

Example:

The easily prepared fast foods offered by the casual eateries

They want quickly prepared meals.

Example

Street food like a bowl of noodles or a bowl of ramen (that take less than three minutes to prepare)

Rentals, cost of ingredients, the costs of doing business have all gone up more rapidly than the prices that eatery owners can charge their customers. Many owners of eateries say:

Sometimes I think that all I am doing is feeding the landlord, the supplier, the taxman.

Source: Anonymous

Copyright acknowledged

Used for education only

Manpower problems are not as simple as that explained in the Case Study. Only local cooks can be appointed but a serious shortage of trained experienced cooks, who can cook Peranakan food properly. There is a shortage of and trained and experienced staff who know Peranakan etiquette, and knowledgeable marketing staff who know how to sell the Peranakan lifestyle within the community.

Succession in the family. When a father wants to pass his successful Peranakan Restaurant to his children, he finds that they prefer to continue their professional practice as architects, doctors, engineers, teachers and professionals.

They cannot see themselves as being in the kitchen or being in the dining room.

The next question is:

Will Peranakan Food Go Extinct?

Let us look at Fig 1.1

Fig 1.1 The Pull and Push to Extinct

Difficult to make:

•    The Peranakan food is back breaking as the spices have to be grounded and mixed until a smooth even paste is produced

•    The stock has to be prepared from pork bones, chicken bones and from fish bones and the shells of prawns with yellow beans added later

•    Ngoh Hiang starts off as pork that is minced. Then water chestnuts are cut into small pieces and stuffed by hand into bean curd skin. The work is both tiring and time consuming

Inability to get the family members prepared to take over the Peranakan eatery.

There is no formal training for the young. They have to learn by watching and observing:

They have a traditional way of cooking. They measure one kg. of meat by hand. They scoop the spices in small bowls.

Copyright acknowledged

Said by the person who was understudying the cooks.

So I’ve to observe very closely how they work.

Copyright acknowledged

There are no formal career path or pay increases and no prospects beyond the family enterprise.

Limited market

The boom times of the Peranakan eatery have passed. The few remaining serves an every shrinking niche market. The good parts of the Peranakan eatery have been snipped away and commercialised like: Laksa

Peranakan kueh

Kaya

Pickles

Kueh Pai Ti

Satay Babi

Otah Otah

Chen Dool

Sayur lodeh

and sold either by themselves or part of other types of food.

Ingredients are difficult to get

The Push Factors

To the Peranakan guest, machine-made ingredients do not taste like the original. Examples include:

Customers Want Food Safety

Chicken’s, cow’s and pig’s blood are not permitted for use in Peranakan restaurants.

Guests want you to go easy on chinchalok and bak pok.

Banana Fritters, which is deep-fried and served with a thick layer of coconut milk has become less popular.

More healthy food

With a younger customer base, that focuses on quality of life rather than the quantity of food the guests of the Peranakan eatery have demanded that Peranakan food be

•    Less oily

hence the use of the rich coconut milk has been replaced by skimmed milk

•    Less use of sugar

hence the teh ang cho (red date tea) is no longer overpoweringly sweet

•    Less salty

hence the dried salted ikan kurau is not used so often

•    Free of MSG and artificial taste enhancers

•    Free of chemical colour enhancers to make the Peranakan kueh more blue and instead the blue pea flower is used as a vegetable dye.

•    Free of excessive trans fats and the lard oil has been replaced by canola oil, and even peanut oil and coconut oil are not used for cooking as they are considered to be rich and unhealthy.

Today the Peranakan eatery has adapted to keep the customer happy by using:

•    Fresh fish, mussels and flower crab from the local farms

•    Fresh vegetables and fruits for the Peranakan salad

•    Lighter soya sauce

•    Matcha, a form of powdered green tea

Still more can be done. In a 2011 food survey it was found that three in four patrons of Peranakan food exceeded the sodium intake of 3,000mg a day. In 2011 the average amount of sodium consumed was 3,527mg a day.

CASE STUDY 1

Only local cooks will do for local foods

Starting from 2016 the main cooks of local food, including Peranakan food must be locals according to the food licencing authority in Penang.

This move is

to help maintain the standard of our local food

Lam Tong Yam

Chairman Penang Hawkers Association

Copyright acknowledged

to preserve the authentic local flavours (including that of Peranakan food)

Author’s comments within the brackets

Lim Guan Eng

Chief Minister

Penang State

Copyright acknowledged

Owners of food stalls have been employing non-locals because they are

•    Paid lower wages

•    Prepared to work longer hours

•    Less demanding than local employees in the food industry

In Singapore, the would-be employer is required to advertise the vacancy for the cook for for two weeks on the approved website and to consider Singaporean applicants.

Only after these requirements have been