On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2025, KoozArch is proud to partner with the fashion brand MSGM and Berlin-based bookshop, do you read me? to host LESS NOISE. Amidst the frenzy, LESS NOISE carves out a space for reflection, focusing on the potency of publishing, through pivotal projects and intersectional conversations with designers, publishers, authors and editors who are redefining the field. Three conversations — under the titles Breaking Ground, The Laws of Attraction and Publish and Be Damned — will also be available as an audio series. In line with KoozArch’s ambition of making inspirational content accessible, we are delighted to share a series of edited excerpts from selected and critical publications.

The pages of Apartamento’s books and magazine offer readers a view into another life, critically observing material cultures all over the world. This is deliciously true with its series on recipes and wanderings, examining the diversity of cultures that produce memorable meals; in this case Anna Sulan Masing looks at the particularities of the Peranakan.

LAKSA, by Anna Sulan Masing

Laksa is impossible to pin down — a broth of many depths, layers, and flavours, with noodles, shrimp paste, and toppings. A spicy noodle soup that changes depending on the state, city, village, and stall holder, it has the ability to represent the entirety of a nation, to showcase a tangled history, to allow itself to be romanticised as a product of unity. It is ever-changing and yet fixed in the nation’s eye, globally seen as quintessentially ‘Malaysian’ — although it also has a home in Singapore and Indonesia. It is ‘authentic’ whilst throwing the idea of authenticity out the window. Laksa is breakfast, occasionally lunch, and is now on its way to becoming dinner.

To understand laksa is to look at the corner of the world in which Malaysia exists. Malaysia is a young nation stitched together in the aftermath of the British Empire, an agreement made between numerous communities, states, histories, and lands to build a sense of togetherness. What we now know as Malaysia was once part of an ancient trade route with links to Sri Lanka, India, and China, a passage for goods that also found their way to Europe. The area was part of various empires and kingdoms that brought influence and global connectivity — the Hindu-Buddhist empires of Srivijaya (700–1000 CE) based out of Sumatra; the Khmer (800–1400 CE) in Cambodia, which built what still reigns as the largest religious site in the world, Angkor Wat; the Islamic Malacca Sultanate (1400 CE); and later, European empires. The pre-European Indian Ocean trade, which the archipelagos of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines were part of, was thought of as the Silk Road of the sea. The influence of Sanskrit is still seen, such as in the naming of the islands Java and Singapore, and research points to streets in China being named after rivers in Borneo due to the extent of trading connections. The story of laksa is intrinsically linked to these histories.

The origins of laksa, including its name, vary depending on what research you read, or what history you prioritise. But what everyone agrees on is that it is the perfect dish to exemplify Peranakan cuisine.

Peranakan culture

There is a significant romanticisation of Peranakan food culture. It has been held up as the perfect example of ‘fusion’ foods, a harmonious blending of cultures — Chinese traditions with local customs. This is particularly resonant in the diaspora, where the complexity of food histories gets diluted as dishes are translated to a (mostly) white audience. Laksa sits at the centre of this idea of mixing cultures.

‘I suppose you could think of it [laksa] as Peranakan in that it unites the noodle (a Chinese/settler element) with a soup and manner of eating (with herbs, sambal) that is local/unique to (this part of, and beyond) Southeast Asia’, cookbook author and researcher Bryon Koh tells me. The trouble with a romantic view on food cultures is that it hides complex histories. Peranakan culture isn’t a simple combination of two specific worlds, but rather a continued series of events, peoples, and influences. ‘Peranakan’ can be loosely translated as ‘descendants’ and refers to those of migrant heritage, in particular Chinese men arriving to the region as early as the 15th century, but mostly from the mid 18th to late 19th centuries. The Peranakan are a community descended from those migrant men of different cultural backgrounds who married into various local families and ‘created a hybrid of “creolised” cultures with their own unique patois, dress, and cuisines’, academic Mark Ravider Frost writes. ‘However, the nature and extent of this process of acculturation still remains a source of debate’.

These early migrants were mostly from south China, coming to the region as traders. Many had strong links back to home; research shows that at times these traders had two families, one in Southeast Asia and one in China. This changed over time as people settled in the region. Some came as farmers, encouraged by colonial authorities, as in Sarawak, where migrants built pepper farms. The development of Peranakan identity reflects multiple migrations of various Chinese communities, such as Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew. There is no ‘one’ Perkanakan history, culture, or identity.

The flavours of laksa

Although the food culture is anchored in Chinese traditions, adaptation had to happen, as with all migrant communities. Combining familiar techniques and dishes with access to local produce means evolution happens. The food was creatively developed by the nyonya (women) as they occupied the private spaces of kitchens.

‘I am unsure if the Peranakans have “key flavours”, but they are meticulous flavour builders and place emphasis on the careful extraction of essence’, Koh tells me. ‘Frying the rempah until it is truly fragrant but not burnt, adding flaked fish but not always its broth to eschew fishiness, adding thick coconut cream at the end of a dish’s simmering to prevent it from splitting and releasing its fat’. Koh explains that there is a keen attention to balance in Peranakan cooking — the sweet, savoury, spicy, etc. They are critical when one ingredient overpowers another.

Chef Abby Lee, owner of the London-based restaurant Mambow, explains that she grew up with a very specific Penang nyonya heritage: ‘It leans towards spicy, sour flavours and a heavy use of lemongrass, galangal, pandan, and raw herbs’. For context, she explains that Melacca nyonya has more of a Javanese influence — creamier and sweeter. She also connects technique to the food: ‘I reminisce about the variety of tools in my household used to make the rempah [spice paste]: a grinding stone or a mortar and pestle; long-handled brass moulds to make kuih pie tee; a rice grinder that grinds glutinous rice to make so many of the beloved kuihs like ondeh ondeh’.

The Penang assam laksa is a fish-based soup (‘assam’ means ‘sour’ in Malay) made without coconut milk, taking on Thai influences and borrowing its tanginess from tamarind. Koh — whose mother is from Penang — describes assam laksa, one of his favourite dishes, as being ‘caught between a noodle salad and a fish soup’ and suggests using ikan parang (wolf herring) for its sweetness, the only downside being the fish’s fine bones. ‘Perhaps my definition of Penang laksa’, he says, ‘should be “a labour of love!”’ The most surprising laksa he has had was in Pahang, which featured white gravy paired with the traditional fish, coconut milk, red onions, garlic, and ginger. This iteration is often served with laksa gandum noodles (wheat), although some Johorean laksa use spaghetti. Sarawak laksa, Lee’s favourite, includes peanuts and sesame seeds in the rempah and is full of fragrant pepper, which the state is famed for.

Even when trying to find a common thread for laksa, there are contradictions— Koh describes laksa more broadly as ‘a noodle dish (rice, wheat, bean thread, though the first is the most common) involving a lightly spiced sauce (most commonly prepared with fish, though some versions do include chicken or shrimp)’. Lee describes laksa as ‘a noodle dish with a spice paste’, and ‘to build on that, the variations of each region’s laksa’, which can be assam or lemak or both.

But even if you can’t define what laksa is, that doesn’t mean any spicy noodle dish is a laksa. I once read a recipe by a white woman called ‘Easy Prawn Laksa’ that was made of red Thai curry paste with coconut milk, prawns, and noodles, completely erasing its Malaysian backstory. Laksa is a dish about place and history and the delicate interweaving of these things.

The joy of food

‘Malaysians live for food’, Mandy Yin writes in her book Sambal Shiok: The Malaysian Cookbook. ‘Class barriers or differences do not exist in the quest for satisfying food’. Yin goes on to explain how Malaysians have multiple meals a day (‘at least five times’), and how at hawker centres, places where stallholders specialise in only one or a couple of dishes, ‘a hawker may have been selling the same thing over a space on 30, 40, or even 50 years, often passing the business on to their children’. Laksa is complex to make and needs the specialised hand of a hawker stallholder.

This expertise allows for food to become deeply personal. A dish cannot help but take on an individual’s and family’s histories, palates, and surroundings. It is through this anchoring that laksa can be explored authentically. To pursue authenticity with a dish that has so many guises can be difficult to grapple with, but with laksa, we get to see how authenticity is about an individual’s relationship to a past, unravelling a journey through which the dish has grown and developed. Laksa then becomes a story of the future, where our relationship to the past can blend into new traditions. When you eat a bowl of laksa, understand that you are eating a reflection of the space and histories you inhabit. Enjoy and savour that moment, because it can only exist in each unique, flavourful bite.

Bio

Anna Sulan Masing is a big fan of a dry martini with a twist. She is an author, journalist, and academic who writes about food, drinks, identity, and colonialism. Her debut book, Chinese And Any Other Asian, is due out February 2025.