A few of us sat at the mamak stall this afternoon to have our "Christmas meal" of roti canai and teh tarik. Well it was more a Christmas tea than a meal. One of the things we joked about was to name a true, genuine Malaysian dish.
Years ago, I used to think that soto was Malaysian until someone corrected me. It is Indonesian. So is satay and nasi lemak - which apparently is called nasi uduk there. I rattled off a list of random Malay creations from cendol to belacan. Not one is truly Malaysian my friends said. They've all appeared in Indonesia, Thailand, China and India in one form or another.
Take the karipap, that traditional tea-time snack you find served in many kampung houses. It is actually an English idea (pie) with Indian filling (curried potato). As for mee (noodles), whatever version you had ever eaten must have been prepared somewhere in China before, where noodles first appeared a thousand years ago. Left to a billion people and a hundred generations, what are the chances that someone had never tried out your recipe before?
But what about dishes like rojak Penang or Ipoh sar hor fun? Don't the provincial names mean they are local inventions? Apparenly no. Most likely, the label will tell you where the dish was made popular, not where it was invented.
During the great food debate a few months ago, some people said chicken rice and chili crab are Singaporean inventions. Well, they must have some archeological evidence to be convinced that people never ate boiled chicken with plain rice before Singapura was discovered, although I am not so sure if the people of Hainan island will let them get away with such a claim.
But I still hope we can find a truly Malaysian dish, made with ingredients that can only be found in Malaysia and nowhere else in the world. That's the only way to be sure. Is there such a thing?
What really took the conversation for the afternoon was something one of my friends said: That chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow by a Bengali chef. I checked it up in Wikipedia and nearly fell off my chair.
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