A Story of a Lost Taste
by Wei Chieh (he/him/they/them)
There is a dish that I no longer know how to find, and every time I think of it, my heart breaks a little bit.
It may surprise you when I tell you the name of this dish. After all, satay is one of those dishes from South East Asia that has captured the hearts and palates of the West like no other—skewers of meat, usually chicken or beef, marinated in a heady mix of spices like turmeric, galangal and lemongrass, barbecued over a charcoal flame and served with peanut sauce, raw onions, and cucumber. Variations exist, of course, but almost never depart from this core pattern.
The satay I speak of is a dish that I last tasted when my age was still in the single digits—aeons ago. Rather unusually in majority-Muslim Malaysia, it was made with pork—and intestines were also on offer. The marinade was heavy on coriander seed and possibly made with Five Spice, with the galangal and lemongrass fading into the background but still there as a nod to its influences. Neither the marinade nor the sauce was spicy-hot, and instead of peanut sauce, it was served with a rich, smooth, sweet potato-based sauce, with toasted bread basted with the satay marinade to mop it up.
It’s been so long since I last ate it that, for a little while, I almost thought I’d dreamt the whole thing up! Until I checked with my parents and they confirmed that, indeed, there used to be such a dish, and that the uncle selling it had finally retired completely a few years ago. And to their knowledge, he was the only man who sold it on the entire island of Penang, at his roadside stall on the corner of Bangkok Lane and Burmah Road, opposite the kopitiam with the famous mee goreng and Hokkien mee (prawn mee to you non-Penangites).
As is always the case with these things, I didn't know that the last time I ate this dish would be my last. I thought my uncle would always be there when I wanted to return. Somehow, with the smorgasbord of food available in Penang, there was always something else I wanted to eat—something new that I wanted to try—until one day I found myself in the United Kingdom and my uncle was no longer down the road from me. He was already semi-retired back then, which should have been a warning sign to eat it while I still could.
There is a glimmer of hope. I don’t know why I never thought of searching for it on the internet. Maybe because when I last ate this dish, the internet didn’t even exist for the general public in Malaysia (yes, this was THAT long ago), and so those two parts of my brain never connected. But, they finally did, and search I did!
I discovered that there were actually two vendors on Penang Island. And that this dish had a name: Hainanese satay. You may recognise that this is likely why bread is part of the dish. The Hainanese were excellent bakers and their bread remains popular, especially in the form of kaya toast.
It seems like Hainanese satay still exists in Singapore, although it is served with a pineapple peanut sauce, so is distinct again from the Penang version of my childhood. There are recipes online like this one—although I have yet to test them. One day, I will find the time to make it and adjust it to the point that it matches that flavour that I remember.
This is probably a Sisyphean task, especially as time goes on and memory fades. Until then, I will simply have to continue tasting it in my mind.
