Our Roots
The word “Peranakans” meaning “descendents” is colloquially used to refer to the descendents of the early Chinese community that settled in the Malay Archipelago around the 17th Century. Also known as “Babas” (the males) or “nyonyas” (the females), they are typically of mixed parentage (between the Chinese men and native women), as Chinese women were restricted by law from leaving the main land (China) until sometime in the 19th Century. These communities lived and engaged in trade within the Straits settlements of Singapore, Malacca, Penang and even Dutch-controlled Java resulting in another name being commonly used to describe them – the “Straits Chinese”.
Our Culture
The Peranakan culture has evolved over the centuries into a unique blend of customs and traditions with traces of Portuguese, Dutch, British, Malay, Indonesian and Chinese influences. This includes their own pidgin language – mixture between “Bahasa Malayu” (the native language of the indigenous people of the region) and various Chinese dialects such as “Hokkien” – and of course the world’s most universal language – Food!
Our Food
Peranakan food involves a unique fusion of both Chinese and Malay elements (It is Chinese in that it retains the use of ingredients such as pork and it is Malay in that it uses malay styles of cooking as well as Malay spices or rempah in all its various dishes).
True Peranakan recipes are complicated affairs, requiring hours of preparation – cutting, chopping, skinning, pounding and grinding of raw, local Malay home-grown garden-produce ingredients like lengkuas, assam, bawang, cabai, serai, cukur, daun pandan and santan. Common cooking methods adopted from the Malays included panggang (smoke), goreng (fried), tumis (lightly fried) or rebus (boiled).
Peranakan recipes are usually spicy, employing pungent roots like lengkuas (galangal), turmeric and ginger; aromatic leaves like daun pandan (screwpine leaf), daun limau purut (fragrant lime leaf) and daun kesum (polygonum or laksa leaf); together with other ingredients like candlenuts, shallots, shrimp paste and chilli. Lemon, tamarind, belimbing (carambola) or green mangoes are used to add a tangy taste to many dishes.
The Peranakans are also renowned for their scrumptious and colourful cakes and sweet, sticky delicacies to end the meal. Nyonya kueh or cakes are rich and varied, made from ingredients like sweet potato, glutinous rice, palm sugar and coconut milk.
If you are interested in finding out more about peranakan history, make sure you check out the Peranakan Museums the next time you are in Penang and Singapore.
Links to the Peranakan Museums
Singapore
Penang
Some Peranakan photographs to take you down memory lane.
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