Satay

Somewhere around dusk on the East Coast, the smoke starts. It rolls off a row of grills where men fan skewers over coals with a folded cardboard flap, and if you have never smelled a hundred satay cooking at once you have not smelled Singapore in the evening. But the dish on the plate is not a Singapore invention, and the first thing worth saying about it is exactly that. Satay is Javanese and Malay in its bones — spiced meat threaded small and grilled over fire, a technique that runs the length of the archipelago and has cousins from Sumatra to southern Thailand. Singapore did not make satay. Singapore made a place to eat it.

That place, for a couple of generations, was the Satay Club at Beach Road — a nighttime clearing of stalls and lamplight and shared tables that older Singaporeans still talk about the way people talk about a demolished cinema. It closed and moved and scattered, the way this island's food always eventually does, and its living descendant is the East Coast Lagoon, where the same smoke rises over the same skewers beside the water. Calling this a Singapore dish is like calling a great cover a new song — it is honest only if you name who wrote it.

The cooking itself is two crafts that meet on the plate. One is the marinade, a rempah of shallots and lemongrass and turmeric that stains the meat gold and seasons it from the surface in. The other is the sauce, a peanut gravy built on its own fried paste, sweet with palm sugar and soured with tamarind, thick enough to cling. Get both right and the grill almost cooks itself. The charcoal matters more than any single ingredient — the smoke is half the flavour, and an apartment grill pan, honest as it is, is always the compromise and never the equal.

Eat it the way it comes — skewers, a bowl of sauce, cold cucumber, raw onion, cubes of ketupat to sponge up what the meat leaves behind. It is a plate built for a table full of hands and no cutlery, which is to say it was built for exactly the kind of evening this island does best.