Still Feeling Peckish

Happy Chinese New Year everybody!

It’s the Spring Festival – in Singapore it’s vacillating between bright sunshine and heavy downpours…making it a slightly cooler Chinese New Year because I’ve always associated this season with scorching heat and sweating under scratchy new clothes. This year there’s a sense of energy and optimism, a long departure from the restriction of the Covid years.

Every Chinese New Year I tread the fine line of old and new. Food for Chinese New Year in Singapore is a mishmash of different regional Chinese cuisines with strong local Malay influences in the snacks and sweets that are laid out for entertaining visitors. This is a season for large gatherings and loud conversations; food is the fuel that keeps us going for meeting family members that pop out of the woodwork once a year and fills in the blanks for awkward exchanges. This time of the year we spring clean – heaven forbid our visitors see our usual messes, decorate our homes with garish red pops of colour and bake and slave over the stove to best each other in the cooking stakes. It is the time where cooks slave and shine in scenarios more fraught than Masterchef finales.

For many years I never worried about cooking for Chinese New Year. This was the job of my parents’ generation and we just needed to turn up at the requisite times to enjoy elaborately prepared spreads. But my parents are aging as are all the accomplished aunties who used to whip up traditional specials so effortlessly. Over the years we would visit different homes and enjoy the signature dishes each home would have. Uncle J’s home was notable for the vinegar pig trotter stew. Auntie I’s home for her incomparable fish maw soup and ayam buah keluak. Not forgetting Auntie P’s dumplings freshly made and served.

Several years ago I started cooking for the family at CNY. It helped that it was in the pandemic and my immediate family were happy guinea pigs. I’ve now got a couple of favorites that I’ve cooked repeatedly over the past few years; hopefully they will be part of the collective food memories for my kids’ generation. At the same time I ride the impulse to create and do new recipes that I’ve never tried before. So each time I host I also try out new recipes and decide whether they are worthy of keeping in the long run.

One of the things about CNY is that somehow Chinese are not that big on desserts. Yes there is 年糕 (nian gao or New Year Cake) that is a sticky sweet, but otherwise most homes just pass around seasonal mandarin oranges and other fruits to end of the heavy meals. Several years ago a friend taught me how to do 3D jelly art and now it’s a little tradition for me to make jelly to serve and also gift the homes that we are visiting. I recently found some fish jelly moulds and so this year I decided to add fish jelly to the repertoire of floral jellies that I usually make. Jellies are a brilliant sweet ending to any meal and can be prepared well ahead of time.

For this recipe I used a Vietnamese type of konjac jelly powder. In Singapore we can usually find this in baking stores or online shopping platforms such as Shopee or Lazada. The coconut flavor lends a very light and sweet layer of flavor over the usual konjac jelly mixes. Alternatively other mixes would do as well and agar powder can probably also give a firmer product if you want.

The fish jelly turned out pretty well – I’m still not too sure how to make blotches of colour stick to the jelly mould but the fish looked similar enough to real koi to appear seasonably appropriate. All in all a great experiment and this recipe is a keeper.