Hainanese western food - a taste of Singapore

I was waiting for my beef noodles to cool, and rested my eyes on the two young men looking smart, alert and pleased about their stall at the clean, spanking new foodcourt. Above them was their brightly lit signboard, "Hainanese Western Food".

At first, I didn’t give it another thought. Like most Singaporeans, "Hainanese Western Food" did not strike me as an oxymoron. It’s very clear, in fact, what kind of dishes the 2 young men offered. If anything, it’s too generic, they should have given more prominence to a brand name for their stall. How are they going to capture customer loyalty without an easy but unique name for themselves?

Slurp.

Ouch, the noodles are still too hot. Got to wait some more.

I looked around again, but my thoughts kept coming back to their counter. And then it hit me: How many non-Singaporeans would understand "Hainanese Western Food"? Wouldn’t they be stumped?

My guess is that it would be as enigmatic as if we ourselves, on a trip through Hungary, saw a stall saying "Sicilian Asian Food". What could that be? we might wonder.

"Western Food" is a very broad category, as broad and diverse as "Asian Food". To add the qualifier of Hainan (an island off the south coast of China) to Western, or Sicily (an island off the south coast of Italy) to Asian, would compound the enigma.

And yet, "Hainanese Western Food" rings clear to Singaporeans -- because there’s a history behind it. And it must be one of the few things that’s genuinely Singaporean.

This cuisine is never going to take the culinary world by storm, what with its limited menu. There’s beef steak, chicken chop and lamb chop. Sometimes, pork chop. Often there’s chicken cutlet and pork cutlet. What’s the difference between chicken chop and chicken cutlet? One is breaded, the other is not (I can never remember which). Mostly they come with brown sauce. Sometimes you’d have a choice – of brown sauce or black pepper sauce (oh, luxury!). Oh yes, and they always have the all-time favourite: fish and chips.

Generally, all dishes come with fries and baked beans. If the stall takes some pride in its offerings it might add a (deluxe) choice of coleslaw or fried rice on the side, both being relatively recent innovations for Hainanese Western Food. The truly authentic chefs would offer mashed or baked potatoes, but nowadays that’s getting rarer and rarer. Both -- the authentic chefs and the style of potatoes.

If a stall pretends to some class, you’d get a small, cold breadroll, and a serving of soup as well. One of the Heinz or Campbell’s soup flavours, such as cream of mushroom or cream of tomato.

And that’s about it. Bon appétit.

The history?

Ah, the history. Well, the menu gives you a clue. It’s just basic Anglo-saxon grub.

Singapore used to be an important colony in the British Empire, and tens of thousands of soldiers and naval enlistees were based here. However, many of the support personnel were locally hired – clerks, storemen, drivers and cooks.

For some reason unknown to me, many of the cooks hired were immigrants from Hainan. Well, actually, I can postulate one reason why they were not Cantonese, Teochew or Hokkien, for these other communities – and they were more numerous too – had stronger trading and entrepreneurial cultures. Many from their communities set up their own businesses which then tended to hire their own. The Hainanese could possibly have been more content to draw a salary from British paymasters. [1]

But once the Hainanese got a foot into the mess kitchens, they tended to own it, for in those days, employment was often by way of personal recommendation. Should there be a new position on offer, the incumbent cook would recommend his brother, nephew or some fresh immigrant from the same village in Hainan. So the Western kitchen became a province of the Hainanese.

As you would expect, cooking for a mess hall did not exactly stretch one’s culinary repertory. And cooking for working class English, Scottish or Welsh lads meant even more circumscribed possibilities. 

Gradually, some of these Hainanese cooks moved out to work for private sector employers, such as hotels. A few even ventured to open their own restaurants. But since the clientele was still mainly British, if a tad more upper-crust, one couldn’t stray too far from the old formula. Perhaps minestrone soup, or boiled broccoli might be helpful additions. Perhaps cheesecake might be needed to please the civil-servant class, instead of the biscuit that the corporals had with the tea.

Not that it ever really was Western food. There was something Chinese about it. I've once wondered if there was any distinction to be made between the brown sauce on the chicken cutlet, and the brown sauce found on stir-fried chicken, Chinese-style.

Whatever it was, Singaporeans gradually adopted it, but by then, the sun was already setting on the British Empire. The bottom fell out of the pound in the mid-sixties, the IMF had to come to the rescue, and with that humiliation, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson decided to close the bases and pull his troops back to the UK, to save some money for the Exchequer.

With that, the heyday of Hainanese Western Food also drew to a close.

Still, the British left a mark on our local palate [2]. "Western food" cooked "Hainanese" style lives on, though no longer in uppity restaurants serving British officers and their wives, but more often than not, as 3-metre counters in foodcourts alongside char kway teow, nasi padang and beef noodles.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. My friend Russell Heng pointed out that the Hainanese were mostly among the later immigrants from China. This fact can be seen from the urban geography of Singapore. Whereas the Hokkiens, Teochews and Cantonese had their sections of the old Chinatown, the Hainanese quarter was in the "New Town", North of the Singapore River. Quite possibly, as a late arrival, the Hainanese would have had a harder time breaking into the trading business, and thus more readily took up paid employment.
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2. Another reader pointed out that Hainanese Western food is just as common in Malaya. Indeed, this is certainly so, and explained by the fact that the British also had garrisons in peninsular Malaya.
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3. Russell Heng also thought I was not up to date with Jack's Place. Clearly I haven't dined there as recently as he must have. He reported a more adventurous menu than I recall.
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Addenda

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