Teochew Porridge

Teochew porridge is the plainest dish on this site, and one of the most quietly loved. It is not congee, whatever a menu might tell you — Cantonese congee is cooked down to a smooth, thick cream, while Teochew muay stops well short of that, the rice grains left whole and separate, swimming in a cloudy broth that is still, recognisably, water. It came to Singapore the way most of the island's food came, in the memory of migrants. Teochew people from the Chaoshan coast of southern China brought it with them, and with it a whole way of eating: a bowl of near-neutral porridge, surrounded by small, sharp, salty dishes eaten in tiny amounts. The muay is the calm centre; the sides do the talking.

The genius of the format is economy, and this is where the dish and the island's history touch. A thin porridge stretches a handful of rice across a whole family, and a few intense sides — preserved radish fried with egg, a halved salted duck egg, braised peanuts, a little steamed fish — season a lot of plain grain with very little. In ordinary times that is thrift by preference, the everyday cooking of people who did not waste. It is worth being clear that muay predates any particular hardship; it was already the daily food of Teochew households long before Singapore was Singapore.

But it would be dishonest to write about this porridge and the years it belongs to without naming what those years were. Under the Japanese Occupation, from 1942 to 1945, rice was rationed and scarce, and the island's kitchens stretched what they had with tapioca and sweet potato, made small salty sides last, and thinned the pot when there was not enough to thicken it. A porridge built to make a little rice feed many people is, in that light, more than a preference. Many who lived through those years kept eating muay long after, not out of nostalgia but because it was the food of getting through. We serve it here with that in mind — plainly, and with respect for what plain once meant.

Today Teochew muay endures as comfort food and as late-night food, ordered at porridge stalls with a spread of sides picked from a glass case. Made well it is genuinely restful eating: warm, loose, mild, the sides carrying the flavour and the porridge carrying you. It asks almost nothing of the cook and gives back a full table. That has always been the point.