A Deep Dive on 'Deep Diving'.
This newsletter will not exist without Pam.
Pam is Pamelia Chia is the ambassador of Singaporean food is the queen of ‘deep-dives’ is the author of Wet Market to Table and most recently Plantasia.
She is the reason 25% of you are here. Through Pam ‘recommendation’ on Singaporean Noodles, I get residual subscription, like the grease on your fingers when you make onigiri with salmon belly.
And without Pam, I would not have made pineapple tarts.
That’s a fair trade-off.
Once again, I don’t remember how we connected. My first impression of Singaporean Noodles was its odd name, only to discover it was a tongue-in-cheek joke that, there is no such thing as Singaporean Noodles (in Singapore). And in true anti-Singaporean-noodles fashion, she meticulously deep dives into hypernostalgic, hawker/home made South East Asian recipes.
If making a cookbook is like running a restaurant, then my Soy Sauce, Sugar, Mirin was akin to a pop-up truck-no, a noodle cart in Jakarta. COVID was the plague, and everyone was roaming the internet highway, eyeballs bulging, saliva dripping down the chin, like Dali’s clocks. They’d take any form of distraction, procrastination, even my rants on social media. And somehow, with a box of scraps and wheels, I made a crude yatai, serving bullshit as thoughts, typos as honesty, opinions as facts.
Pam’s cookbook, on the other hand, particularly Plantasia, is one of those 1-star 1-hat 1-woman establishments. She’d source the ingredients, pay the suppliers, seek the right cutlery and crockery, handwrite the application form to council, paint the wall with her sleeves up to the shoulder, dusting the lightbulbs after hours.
Her cookbook looks as fancy and professional as the other cookbooks on the shelves, and she did it all without the help of a publisher.
“You are wave-riding, drunkenly adopting this food scene. I was born in it, molded by it. We are not the same.”
Every time I chat with Pam, I see Gus’ ghost hovering behind her,
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