Ingredients that are unfamiliar to me, that is. So far, these have been products that are no longer sold today, or else ingredients referred to by less-commonly used names (usually in a different language from that by which the ingredient is generally known).
I don’t aim to reproduce the excellent work of other internet resources (such as this) and cookbooks that illustrate and explain all the various cooking ingredients, but merely to identify ingredients and link them to the names by which they are generally recognised in Singapore.
A single ingredient can have many different names in the various languages – Asian (national languages as well as dialects) and English – spoken in Singapore and Malaysia. The Knowing Food website has collated the names of many ingredients in Chinese characters, Malay and English (but lacks the pronunciation of the Chinese characters in Mandarin and common dialects such as Hokkien and Cantonese).
These are unfamiliar ingredients/terms I’ve figured out so far:
1) ‘Spry’
Quick internet research revealed that Spry was an American brand of vegetable shortening introduced by Lever Brothers around the 1940s (although I have found Spry pictured in ‘The 1930s Scrapbook’) and is no longer produced. Its closest competitor was Crisco, which we can still buy today. Read more at my ‘Custard Sauce’ posting.
2) ‘Robin Starch’
The strange thing is that my internet research indicates it was a household starch mainly used for starching clothes and bedlinen, not cooking! Then again, clothes can be starched with a variety of edible products such as cornflour/cornstarch + water, sugar water, rice water or potato water; but I’m not certain what the ingredients in Robin Starch were. Robin Starch was produced by Reckitt & Colman (Reckitt of ‘Reckitt’s Blue’ and Colman of Colman’s Mustard, which we can still buy today, merged in 1938). By the way, I love this postcard of a little cat looking at box of Robin Starch! [Taken from my posting on ‘Krupok Udang’.]
3) ‘starch’
= tapioca flour
= tai she fun (Cantonese) / tua choo hoon (Hokkien) / 大薯粉
Once I found the recipe with the Cantonese & Hokkien names, it was no problem, I guessed immediately and confirmed the answer by asking a few people.
4) sak luk (Cantonese) – solved: 18.5.07
= candlenut/buah keras
= 石栗果 (Cantonese: sek6 leot6 gwo2/ Mandarin: shi2 li4 guo3)
= also known as 石古仔 [used in Patsie Cheong’s bilingual English/Chinese Malaysian recipe books]
= 月桂豆 [seen in a Singapore-published, Chinese language cookbook of Indonesian recipes, sorry I forgot to note the title]
= also 石鼓仔/馬加拉/油桐子 [info from Knowing Food website]
My Cantonese relatives said the recipes looked very nonya and didn’t know the answer. My Peranakan relatives said it was a Cantonese word and didn’t know the answer. My koo koo had a strong feeling it was candlenut as she had heard the word before, and guessed from the context of the recipes as I did. Then I went to look at the Chinese translation of Shermay Lee’s ‘The New Mrs Lee’s Cookbook’, and found the Chinese characters for buah keras. Coincidentally, a woman also browsing at the shelf was talking on her handphone in Cantonese, so I cornered her and asked her how to pronounce the Chinese characters in Cantonese :). Double-checked the pronunciation at CantoDict.
5) Loa may
= 鹵味
= lou5 mei6 [Cantonese] / lu3 wei4 [Mandarin]
My Ee Poh Peggy tells me that this basically refers to a braised dish, and this style of cooking used to be very popular in the past – there were many types of “loa may” dishes.
6) Yin sye mai
= 芫荽米
= jyun4 seoi1 mai5 [Cantonese] / 2 sui1 mi3[Mandarin]
= coriander seed
7) Park-kork
= 八角
= baat3 gok3 [Cantonese] / ba1 jiao3 [Mandarin]
= star anise
8 ) Kwai phay
= 桂皮
= gwai3 pei4 [Cantonese] /gui4 pi2 [Mandarin]
= cinnamon
This was the hard one, not everyone knew it and the ‘phay’ [skin] part of the phrase made us guess all sorts of other things, such as lemon peel, which didn’t sound right in the context of the recipe.
Aloha,
What is trassi? I have this asian cookbook and it contains a malaysian recipe for chicken and shrimp laksa. Trassi is something that somewhat important, from what I’ve gathered, and pivotal on the recipe’s success.
Please email me at your earilest opportunity. Thank you!
Aloha,
Tammy Wilson
TammyWilson808@aol.com
Hi Tammy,
I’m sorry, I’ve not heard of ‘trassi’. Maybe it is known by a different name here. If you provide the full list of ingredients in your cookbook, maybe I (or some other reader) may be able to hazard a guess as to what it might be.
It might also help to know where the cookbook was produced, so that we can understand the regional origins of the ingredient names used, and use that information to try and figure out what ‘trassi’ refers to.
“Trassi” is the Indonesian word for “belachan”.
Hi there,
I just found your site, and thank you very much for your recipes. I thought I’d give a suggestion after seeing this page.
Kwai phay (桂皮) is actually something called “cassia bark”, which is very similar to cinnamon in taste and fragrance. At my local Chinese grocery stores, there are even packages labelled “cinnamon” with a Chinese label “桂皮”, so it’s very confusing. It actually looks like bark peeled off a tree. From what I know, though, they are essentially interchangeable. If anything, the main difference might be price – cassia bark is cheap, where I am.
My reference is a wonderful book on Sichuan cooking by Fuschia Dunlop called “Land of Plenty”.
Keep blogging!
Dear Suihi,
Many thanks for that valuable information!
can loh may be “loh mai” as in glutionious rice?
Thanks for the suggestion, Nick. I’m not quite sure which ‘loh’ you are referring to. The Chinese characters for ‘loa may’ are 鹵味, whereas the characters for ‘loh mail’ are 糯米。
Hello and thank you for your research and the information you put out on here. I am in my 40’s, love to cook and have several of my grandmothers and great grandmothers cookbooks and a couple of the ingredients I needed to figure out were listed on here. And thank you also to the others who have commented here and added information.
Hi there! I hace a Book called ‘Home-made Nyonya by Patsie Cheong.
Unfortunately, I am unfamiliar with some of the ingredients.
Namely:
Candlenut, Belacan, Chilli Padi & Boh, Daun Kesam & Daum Rami, Buah Keras, and the list goes on…
I hope I am not being too forward asking for help.
I do look forward to getting some answers, or give ma a website that does.
Thanks so much.
Lekha
Hi
Will you know the actual ingredient translated ‘sar keong’ -required in the nyonya chung?