Thank you for a wonderful article of my hometown, Ipoh. I was born and bred in Ipoh but been living in Australia for the last 15 years. This article is bittersweet for me, there are always two things I look forward to every time I go back to Ipoh. 1) Family, 2) Food.
Hungry City: Eating Through Ipoh
Gingery dumplings. Coconut milk curries. Spicy noodle stir-fries. The city of Ipoh, Malaysia is a vibrant melting pot of Asian cuisines
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The next day Ahmad took me to the most famous of the city's dim sum palaces, Foh San, a sunny banquet hall. "It's packed every single morning," she told me. The place serves more than 100 different dim sum dishes; it was full of people happily noshing, using chopsticks to grab whatever tempted them from the various plates and bamboo steamers crowding their tables. We could have made a meal of the buns alone: big, fat bao stuffed with roast pork, or shrimp, or chicken and bok choy, or any number of other fillings. The yong tau foo, a Hakka specialty of vegetables or tofu stuffed with pounded mackerel, was light and delicately flavored. We ordered several rounds of this, including versions made with skinny eggplants and bitter melons, the mackerel stuffing seasoned with sesame oil and white pepper, and the whole thing steamed until meltingly tender. Over the course of several hours, we feasted on tender har gao (shrimp dumplings), custard tarts, and dozens of other irresistible dishes. I pointed out that, even though Ahmad isn't herself Chinese—her family's heritage is Indonesian—she certainly knows her way around a Chinese menu. "Well, I grew up eating this food," she said. "I've never thought of it as something foreign."
As delicious and exciting as all of this food was, after a week of meals at teahouses, cafés, markets, hawker centers, and street carts, I had to admit: I was craving an honest-to-goodness home-cooked dinner. And so I was delighted to be invited to the home of my great-uncle Chenna and his wife, Rato. They live in a town 15 miles outside of Ipoh called Batu Gajah, where many Punjabis first settled generations ago. My mother had lived with them while she was finishing high school, and they welcomed me into their home as if they'd just seen me yesterday.
After a few questions about my family in the States, they fell comfortably into discussing the latest local gossip. At the broad table in their dining room, they fed me Indian foods I recalled fondly from childhood: aloo gobi (sauteed cauliflower and potatoes with turmeric) and freshly griddled chappati flat-breads, hot and buttery as any Punjabi would demand. But we also ate rendang ayam, that slow-simmered, spicy Malay chicken dish. We all tucked in eagerly, and Aunt Manjit proclaimed, "We eat everything in this country, you know. There's no difference between this Indian dish and that Chinese dish. In Malaysia, we'll eat it because it's good."
I thought about the meals I'd enjoyed over the past few weeks and it suddenly came to me—in no instance did I see Chinese, Malay, and Indian influences fused together in a single dish. Instead, dishes from all three cultures share space on the table. But then there is always room for cooks of different stripes to bring their own interpretations to a recipe; the rendang we were eating, for example, was made in a soupier style than the classic Malay version. For dessert, there were Chinese pineapple tarts my aunt had picked up at the market. "We're Indian," she said as she served them, "but we're also Malaysian." Luckily, the same goes for me.
