Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Peach Garden is the big winner

I suppose every culture has its one holiday where diets get thrown out the window, and everybody is given to gluttony and excess. Americans have Thanksgiving, which I quickly learned was about eating as much as you humanly could throughout the day, and then lazing around while waiting for your body to be able to eat some more. We have something similar here in Chinese New Year; but we go one better, in that we (technically) have fifteen days of it.

The Chinese celebrate fifteen days of the New Year; and while only the first two are public holidays, the entire period consists of reunion dinners, and visiting one’s relatives and friends. And there is no better social glue among relatives and friends than food; so fittingly, there is a startling variety of traditional Chinese New Year foods and snacks that are part of this holiday. If you are lucky, or rather old, enough to have experienced Chinese New Year in a family that makes their own Chinese New Year snacks, then you will understand that a subtle nuance of visiting other people is the silent competition to see whose goodies are better. Whether they be pineapple tarts, love letters, kueh lapis, almond cookies – one of the reasons for visiting so many homes is to find out who has the best version of each snack, and then wheedling the recipe out of them.

Sadly those days are (at least for my extended family) long gone, and nobody that I know actually makes their own Chinese New Year goodies any more. Nowadays, there are many commercial versions of every snack for sale – produced by everyone from big-name hotel restaurants, through confectionery chains, down to the local bakeries and entrepreneurial neighbourhood aunties with a winning recipe and an army of maids to help to make these goodies in bulk. It is, I have to admit, a far more convenient option – because some of these New Year goodies are seriously labour-intensive (eg. kueh lapis), and nobody has the time or the inclination any more to slave for hours and days in the kitchen.

So I guess the annual competition takes on a slightly different slant these days, and (at least for me) the constant sampling of other people’s wares only serves to inform you which restaurant, or bakery, or New Year market has the best version of each New Year goodie – so that you can get it from them the next year. There are a few categories in which there is no contest (Lim Chee Guan still makes the best bak kwa in town, evidenced by the four-hour waits and the maximum per-buyer quota at their Chinatown outlet). In others, though, there is a lot more competition, and it makes the visiting so much more fun because there is always a chance that you could find a hitherto undiscovered gem.

Now, one of my favourite Chinese New Year snacks are pineapple tarts, which are small pastries either topped, or filled with pineapple jam – itself made by cooking the pineapples at medium to low heat for an extended period of time, then sweetening the mixture with sugar and thickening it with cornstarch. If done well these are absolutely delicious (and impossibly addictive). When she was younger my auntie used to make these from scratch and we used to get our supply from her. But ever since she fell sick and subsequently passed on, we would try a different version each year, never really finding one that could convince us to buy it again the next year. I liked the version from Le Café on Middle Road, but those were far too large (not to mention expensive) to buy in bulk. Also, the main draw of Le Café’s tarts was the filling, and their pastry – while quite satisfactory – was not stellar.

(One of the truisms about Chinese New Year goodies is that the home-made ones are usually better than commercially made ones. This can be attributed to many reasons. My hypothesis is that among other reasons – the people who make their own Chinese New Year goodies have the latitude to make their goodies with little regard for cost and profitability, and may use more butter, or more eggs, or do things that may not make commercial sense, resulting in better tasting goodies.)

All that changed this year when my sister brought home pineapple tarts from Peach Garden. While I am just a hack writing a blog and pretending I know something about food, my sister actually does write for a food magazine, and we sometimes benefit from her chosen occupation in the form of the freebies she gets and – more valuable than that – the information she is privy to. Now, my sister does not eat pineapple tarts (sacrilegious, if you ask me), but the word from her colleagues was that Peach Garden had an impressive version, so she ordered a couple of tins and brought them back home.

Peach Garden is what you would call an under-the-radar gem in Singapore dining. They have four restaurants around the island, and do a very good job of fine Chinese dining, but for some reason never get mentioned when foodies exchange pointers. I have only ever eaten at their restaurant in OCBC Centre, and it was only the one time; but I remember that to be a perfectly paced meal of food that was as filling as it was exquisite – a rare combination.

I will state for the record, though, that their pineapple tarts are very good. The first few (dozen) that I ate, I was reserved in my praise, for while very tasty they did not bowl me over at first bite. Gradually I came to enjoy them (perhaps too much) and the tins of pineapple tarts disappeared all too quickly. The pastry is crumbly and buttery like shortbread, and there is just the right amount of it to complement the pineapple filling, which is itself not overly sweet, and just the right tangy consistency.

As I went visiting the homes of various relatives and friends, I made sure to try everyone’s pineapple tarts, but nothing even came close. We are definitely going to get them again next year, which I suppose is the highest compliment that I could pay it.

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Taken with my Hipstamatic for iPhone:


(This is the "before" picture. There are, of course, none left at the time of writing.)

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Take that, Bourdain!



My sentiments exactly.
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