A Word from Hock Ko

Some recipes belong to no one. They belong to all of us.

Siao di — little brother — sit down. Let me tell you about a city that ate at hawker stalls for a hundred years before anyone called it heritage.

I sold prawn noodles at Maxwell Food Centre for nineteen years. Before that, my father sold them at a pushcart on Hokien Street. Before him, his uncle came on a bumboat from Xiamen with one packet of dried prawns and the recipe in his head. That is how Singapore food became Singapore food — passed down by hand, in the dark, by men and women who never wrote a thing down.

This book is what I would teach you if you came to my stall on a Sunday and asked me to. Five chapters of dialect kitchens — Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka — plus the Peranakan kitchens our grandmothers ran, plus the Foochow we sometimes forget. Thirty-five recipes. Each one is the version I would cook for my own children.

Where I am sure of the history, I will say so. Where I am not, I will tell you that too. We are not building a museum. We are putting a cookbook on a shelf for a young hawker to read at 4am when the stockpot starts. That is who this is for.

Cook well. Charge fairly. Give the auntie next to you free soup when she has had a bad day. That is hawker work. That is our heritage.