Abstract
This chapter considers the status of the Kari Kapitan (or Curry Kapitan) as a “heritage dish”. The history of the Kari Kapitan has been conceptualised within a Southeast Asian colonial context in that its assumed origins are believed to lie within the region’s long-established Peranakan (or Straits Chinese) communities, whose culinary practices are a confluence of Chinese and Malay traditions. In exploring the claims made by the Peranakan to the ownership of the Kari Kapitan, this chapter challenges the myths of origins and authenticity that underpin the heritage identity of the dish. It also asserts that this dish has a colonial meta-narrative that can be traced to the British Raj, thus allowing the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan as a heritage object to gain entry into a transnational past.
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Notes
- 1.
Fernandez’s article is mostly concerned with the evolution of traditional Filipino cuisine with regards to its rich cultural borrowings from the Spanish and Chinese cultures in terms of the names of dishes, ingredients, cooking processes, flavourings and the social position accorded to foreign foods after being assimilated into native cooking.
- 2.
The latter was first published in Australia by Ure Smith. Nunis, Melba. 2014. A Kristang Family Cookbook, 82. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.
- 3.
The books I consulted include: Leong Yee Soo. 2005. Nyonya Specialties. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish; Philip Chia. 2012. Peranakan Heritage Cooking. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.
- 4.
I formally interviewed a number of families in the Portuguese Settlement in Melaka, Malaysia, in June 2012 as a co-investigator for a project for which I was collecting data for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) funded by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. What I discovered was that none of the Portuguese-Eurasian cooks and housewives in the Settlement considered the Kari Kapitan as belonging to their culinary tradition. All of them believed it to be of Peranakan provenance.
- 5.
Lizzie Collingham, Curry, 110: “East Indian Company officials referred to themselves as Indians, East Indians, or Anglo-Indians. The latter name stuck” and so Collingham uses “Anglo-Indians” to mean the British in India. However, she qualifies this by adding, “It was only in 1911 that the meaning of the term changed and it was used to describe the people of mixed British and Indian parentage, who until then were known as Eurasians”. The term “Anglo-Indian” was rarely used later in the Straits Settlements and Malaya due to the fact the Eurasian community there did not wish to refer to themselves as “Indian” (many of them were obviously not) and so preferred the term “Eurasian”, which is still used as an identity marker today. The term “Kristang” (from the early Portuguese to mean “Christian”) is also sometimes used by and for them, although it also refers to the Portuguese dialect/creole still spoken by some members of the community.
- 6.
There is no standard Romanisation of the spelling of these Thai cooking terms and recipes. I have used the most common ones found online.
- 7.
Strictly speaking, the gulai is not a real curry, although many of its essential ingredients as well as its cooking technique resemble that which go into making curry sauce in Southeast Asia. The term “curry” and its attendant meanings are very much a British colonial product. In “‘To Make a Curry the India way’: Tracking the Meaning of Curry across Eighteenth-Century Communities”, Stephanie Maroney writes that the “concept of a curry was developed by the British East India Company while stationed in India. Members of the EIC would describe any spicy Indian dish as a ‘curry,’ and when these men returned to England, they brought back their desire for Indian food” (126). Having its origins in the Tamil language (“kari” meant any kind of spicy sauce), the term was co-opted or appropriated to include any kind of Indian sauce, usually with one or some or all of the following spices: chilly, turmeric, coriander and cumin. In modern parlance, the British colonial “curry” has been adopted to mean any kind of spicy dish or stew, without necessarily having to originate from the Indian subcontinent, although there is no colonial Indian cookbook from 1800 that fails to include dishes with a curried sauce.
- 8.
Leong-Salobir also adds that the versatility of the curry recipe and later the invention and wide use of the curry powder by the British made it a special food that travelled easily from colony to colony: “Even in its colonial heyday, curry was a dish that was the perfect example of food appropriation: it leapt from presidency to presidency in the subcontinent and across the colonies in the British Empire. Just as Anglo-Indian cookery was seen as the first pan-Indian cuisine, curry is the single most important dish that defines the culinary history of British imperialism. Specious claims of ownership and the authenticity of curry are contested and questioned by different communities. Curries were created, adapted and modified through the input of indigenous cooks, by the availability of ingredients in particular regions, by the social mores of the time and also by health and nutritional thinking of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Anglo-Indian, Malayan and Singaporean cookbooks, memoirs, diaries, travelogues and other primary sources I demonstrate […] that curry evolved as a hybrid, practical dish that could be made from leftover meat and poultry and which incorporated spice ingredients specifically selected for their preservative and nutritious qualities” (2011, 39–40).
- 9.
Curries were even more popular during the British era than we tend to think today. Leong-Salobir asserts that, “The fact that curry was eaten at least once daily according to many accounts, contradicts the notion that colonizers only ate British meals. In Singapore, curry was even more ubiquitous, consumed at every meal, as recounted by John Cameron, editor of the Straits Times in 1865. He asserted that curry made its appearance three times a day, starting with breakfast, with ‘[a] little fish, some curry and rice, and perhaps a couple of eggs, washed down with a tumbler or so of good claret,’ forming ‘a very fair foundation on which to begin the labours of the day.’ Tiffin comprised ‘a plate of curry and rice and some fruit or it may be a simple biscuit with a glass of beer or claret’. An everyday dinner in Singapore was a sizeable repast and was comparable to a special occasion dinner in Britain: starting with soup, then the ‘substantials’ of roast beef or mutton, turkey or capon, accompanied by side dishes of tongue, fowl, cutlets and a variety of vegetables. This course was followed by ‘two or more different kinds of curry, rice and accompaniments of all manner of sambals (a spicy mixture served as a side dish) or native pickles and spices’. Curry was even jellied, served probably either as a starter or a savoury at the colonial dining table” (2011, 51–52).
- 10.
Ong Jin Teong. 2018. The Hainanese Influence in Penang’s Cuisine. Penang Monthly Bulletin, June. https://penangmonthly.com/article.aspx?pageid=14963. Heng Pek Koon corroborates this by mentioning that the Hainanese main economic preoccupations were as cooks and in the hospitality industry (“Chinese Economic Activities”, in The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, ed. Lynn Pan, Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006, 175).
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Jeyam, L. (2020). Add Place and Stir: Origins, Authenticity and the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan. In: Gabriel, S. (eds) Making Heritage in Malaysia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_10
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