Some of my earliest memories revolve around Chinese New Year preparations, when my whole extended family would gather around the kitchen table at my grandparents’ little terrace house, each chipping in (or trying to anyway) in his own little way, preparing the mise en place for the popiah which would be served during the Reunion Dinner. Popiah is not a difficult dish to master, but it is terribly time consuming due to the large number of ingredients needed and the need to have to cut everything into small pieces for ease of rolling into the crepes (or popiah skins). To further complicate matters, my family’s recipe consists of grating the yam bean for the main stew – chopping or slicing would have been much easier.
Popiah, for those who have never had it (ie non-Singaporeans or Malaysians), is probably best described as a Chinese burrito or fajita of sorts, except no beans, no tomatoes, and very lit
tle meat are involved. A stew of yam bean (jicama), tofu, French beans, dried shrimp and belly pork takes centre-stage (ingredients vary between families – some recipes include carrots, which my grandmother had always staunchly maintained was not authentic). This stew is cooked until tender and fragrant, and laid out in the middle of a large buffet of other ingredients like Chinese lettuce, bean sprouts, coriander leaves, sliced prawns, sliced omelette, shelled crab, sliced Chinese sausage, dried flat fish, ground peanuts, chilli sauce, garlic paste and sweet sauce. The large number of grated, sliced, peeled and pounded ingredients makes the dish a pain the prepare, but it is soooo absolutely worth the effort.(Mrs Lee’s Cookbook has a recipe for the stew which would probably work well enough for those without popiah family tradition, but hey, my grandmother definitely would not approve, not especially when it calls for the ingredients to be julienned… Julienned?!)
The receptacle that holds all of these ingredients together is a something called a popiah skin, a flour/water/sometimes egg concoction that resembles a crepe of sorts. Now when we make popiah at home, we always outsource the making of these skins (or crepes). One of the last surviving businesses of its kind, Kway Guan Huat is a little shop at 95 Joo Chiat Road which still makes these skins lovingly by hand (the frozen supermarket machine-made variety tastes like cardboard). My family has been buying popiah skins from this shop for as long as I can remember (at least 25 years?). Obviously, now that I live Hong Kong, I don’t have the luxury of popping down to Joo Chiat to pick up some, so I did the next best thing – make my own!
I used the popiah skin recipe from Mrs Lee’s Cookbook, which uses a liquid egg batter (The version my family eats has no egg). Once I had practiced a few times, I managed to turn out thin enough crepes sturdy enough to hold the designated filling, though not quite perfectly round and in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I also improvised a liquid non-egg batter but that turned out dismally. Later on, I researched further on the non-egg version later on and realized that a successful non-egg version requires a 600g floor to 200ml water ratio to make an elastic dough, which is then slapped onto the hot plate with just the right snap of the wrist. Sounds complicated? Well if I recall correctly, the movie Eat Drink Man Woman actually has a scene where the second sister gives an excellent demonstration of the technique.
So anyway that night I held a popiah party for some Singaporean, Malaysian, and not-so-Singaporean-or-Malaysian friends. The wave of déjà vu I get rolling and eating popiah with company never fails to amaze me. It was great of course, having friends over for dinner and having friendly competitions over who could roll the biggest roll without the crepes splitting. More than that though, I always recall funny childhood moments – how my younger brother would wrap his popiah with just egg, sausage, crab, prawns lots of peanuts and lots of sweet sauce (he wouldn’t eat veggies as a 5 year old), or how my uncle would be able to expertly roll the biggest popiahs with any given size of crepe, and wolf down 5 in one sitting, or even myself, how I refused to eat coriander or chinese sausage back as a kid (I’ve since outgrown the childhood pickiness).
That’s what popiah is all about to me – friends and family. Popiah never fails to bring a smile to my face.
