No Rib Off in Boundary Ville

Food nostalgia, that might be my problem. Singapore, where food is a national preoccupation, and eating the national sport. Food nostalgia was inevitable, attention to food is unrelenting on this island. Not just at mealtime, all the time.

Some day I want to teach a Sociology of Food course so I learn about this more systematically. But for now, I'm sure that I've got food nostalgia (a yearning for familiar tastes, rituals, and social relationships associated with food preparation and consumption). That nostalgia is probably pretty acute because I missed a food event (with the Ruskin Road Athletic Club [RRAC], six or seven couples who get together semi-regularly for dinner) that I really look forward to each year.

The annual RRAC Rib Off is a "friendly" competition among neighborhood grillers with different roads to the perfect rib: charcoal, smoke, gas. Each has a top chef wannabee who cooks ribs on her/his fuel of choice for accolades from other RRAC members (who supply the other fixings). The extravaganza traces back to a winter party, where our collective memories of summer evening cookouts morphed into a drunken series of escalating insults and challenges associated with barbecuing spare ribs. Who really IS the best rib chef in the neighborhood? We'd find out at a late summer ritual of porkly and saladish and dessertable delight, with lots to drink but no need for a designated driver to get home. We always have three winners, and WAY TOO MUCH really good food, drink, fun, and company. And I missed it yesterday for the first time, along with the companionship of my neighbors from Ruskin Road. Wah.

I wonder, were there ribs left over?

Missing that fed my food nostalgia, though it would surely have happened eventually, no matter what. I've been avoiding pricey western restaurants and eating like many Singaporeans in my determination to "be (as) native" (as possible) while I'm here. No western food for me (yet). But I'm definitely craving hot cornbread, cool tangy coleslaw, and a rib. Maybe two. One just rubbed, one with sauce. Yum.

Don't get me wrong. While I like all variants of Asian food in principle (at least I like Chinese, Indian, Thai, and Indonesian, in their western forms), I don't necessarily like all of Asian foods' potential ingredients in their authentic practice! Or maybe I only think I don't like certain ingredients. For example, what if I didn't know what an ingredient was ahead of time? I couldn't worry about it so I might just eat. Or, what if I would put certain known (but feared) ingredients in my mouth (even if skeptical)? Maybe I'd realize that I [irrationally] assume I don't like food that tastes really good.

The scars of past failure may feed my irrational food fears. I once tried to cure my childhood aversion to liver, convinced it was all in my head. Tony offered a bite from his appetizing restaurant meal of liver smothered with onions. Looked good. Smelled good. I chewed but just could not swallow. I fled to the bathroom and vomited. That's now a lifelong aversion. But surely some of my psychic aversions to certain food items ARE just untested prejudices, unlikely to inspire such visceral reactions.

When I see a picture of a dish at a stall and read what it is, I wonder, does the English translation fully capture what ingredients really are? Is the dish as benign as it sounds, or is the name a horribly misleading mis-translation of something truly awful? Both are possible in Singapore. Sometimes the ingredients SOUND awful (like bull's testicles). Sometimes ingredients SMELL awful (the durian fruit is so stinky it is banned on public transportation) but it's a local delicacy! I will try durian, just not yet. Other foods LOOK scary. Do I really want the FEEL of something that looks like THAT in my mouth? All goes to show that food isn't only or even mostly about taste; all of our senses and sensibilities are invoked. I wonder, would a companion possibly egg me on to be braver and to sample more scary and alien and discriminated against foods? Hard to say. But I often dine alone, and there sure are many food adventures and mysteries left to tackle.

Like, what exactly is a fishball? A local cooking show demonstrated a dish prepared with bull testicles and I've seen bull's balls with noodles or rice advertised in Chinatown. So sometimes ingredients are the sort of balls that seem what the vernacular suggests. Fish have none, so obviously fish is an ingredient made into balls. But what parts--flesh? Eyeballs? Skin? Are there bones? (fish bones scare me). I don't know why it would matter if it tastes good (they must be wholesome, people aren't dying from eating fishballs), but my food imagination goes into overdrive. I've seen them in dozens of stalls and while one stall's fishballs may differ in important ways (taste? texture) from their neighbors, fishballs everywhere look like squidgey ping pong balls to me. Perhaps I should discipline myself and try a bowl for lunch tomorrow. If I don't like it, I can always abandon it, right? Maybe I'll walk to a shop (with a queue, a good sign of good food) a little further away from home than usual to try...what I lack in peer support I can compensate with the courage of anonymity.

Exotic food worries aside, I've enjoyed several inexpensive and delicious meals recently. Last weekend I had lunch at the Chinatown hawker center (soy sauce chicken with noodles, and a mango milkshake). Yummy and only S$6.20. Interesting surroundings, a VERY busy place for lunch on Sunday.

Last night dinner was from Geylan Serai, the night market that runs throughout Ramadan in the traditional Malay neighborhood. Even busier than Chinatown. I ate from a stall run by two Malay women. Dish one was glutinous rice in a skinny package (about the size and shape of a hot dog) wrapped attractively in a palm frond, tied in ribbon. Maybe it's an acquired taste, or an acquired texture. It had the faintest whiff of banana, a tiny taste of coconut, but the overwhelming impression was bland and gummy. I picked out a couple of its dark spots before I sampled (thinking they might be bugs, see below), but (with glasses back on) the spots were just red beans. Whew. Even the beany parts lacked taste, and didn't seem to vary the texture. Maybe glutinous rice isn't meant to be eaten naked, needing something else for flavor. I'll have to find out.

The second dish was vegetables (yellow curried cabbage, onions and beans) and rendang chicken (sweet and spicy, coconutty), served takeway. A "refreshing drink" of strawberry jam on crushed ice with tapioca pearls tasted better than it sounds, drunk on the spot, what with a 16 stop bus ride home. I could smell my dinner, hot in my lap in its brown paper--and other bus riders' meals, too--all looking forward to breaking Ramadan fast with yummy Malay food. I was ravenous by the time I got home and dug in. Dinner (but for the glutinous rice, the shiny banana-looking thing in the foreground of the photo) was scrumptious. It cost S$4.80.

Breakfast today was the local instant beverage that's not so much coffee as a caffeinated drink that tastes warm and brown. The whole works comes in a little sachet. Just dump in a cup, add boiling water, and voila, morning caffeine. A (usually) much better choice is a cup of kopi, which I'll talk about some other time. That's because I don't think I can do kopi justice now, due to recent kopi trauma. Last time (Thursday) I visited my local kopitiam, my final mouthful ALMOST included a dead cockroach. I spotted it in the nick of time, just before it slid into my mouth. So I'm still recovering from my aversion to the idea of a dead cockroach being at the bottom of a cup of something I just chugged back. Come to think of it, that kopi with unexpected secret ingredient (up till then it was a particularly savory cup) might be another contributing factor to this little bout of food nostalgia.