Days of tapioca

Source: "Lifestyle"-The Star- 26 June 2005

BY PHILIP GOLINGAI

Tapioca, when combined with other ingredients, can be made into many types of delicious dishes and snacks. But, when these other ingredients are not readily available, PHILIP GOLINGAI discovers, a little dash of creativity can save the day, and please please the palate as well.

HOW many ways can you cook ubi kayu (tapioca)? One way is to boil it. Once cooked, you can dip it in raw sugar. Yummy!

73-year-old Chye Kooi Loong remembers when tapioca was a life-saving, if bland, staple during the grim days of the Japanese Occupation.

Take away the sugar and all you have is boiled tapioca and it tastes like the root of the cassava plant (which is exactly what it is) - tasteless.

Imagine having it as your main course for a week. How about a whole year, or the entire duration of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya?

And during the Occupation tapioca was available but sugar was scarce. So were meat, rice, vegetable, flour and most other food items.

To get a picture of what those who survived the Japanese Occupation ate, let's see what 75-year-old local historian Chye Kooi Loong had to eat day after day after day.

Breakfast: “In the morning, we had tapioca. It was cheap in the market. We ate it with salted fish or ikan kembong,” says Chye, who was in his teens when the Japanese ruled Malaya.

Lunch: It was porridge with sweet potatoes and sweet potato leaves thrown in. “Sometimes we had a little bit of sawi (leaf mustard) and some yam to go with it,” recalls the author of The History of the British Battalion – Malayan Campaign: 1941-42.

Dinner: “The same story. Porridge again,” he says. “We did not have enough rice so we could only cook porridge as we were only given 3 kati (1.8kg) of rice for a month for our family of eight.”

Rice was served on Chye's family table only four times a year, and these were the major festivals - the moon cake festival, Chinese New Year, Qing Ming (all souls day) and dumpling festival.

“And on those festival days we had a small chicken to be shared among us,” he says, adding “it (Japanese Occupation) was a very, very hard time.”

Before the Occupation, the Chyes ate well. Nearly every other day, they had chicken, pork, vegetables and soup for their meal. They lived comfortably because his father was an accountant in a French-owned tin mining company in Tapah, Perak.

Chye's diet changed when the Japanese occupied Malaya because his father's pay was a fifth of what he used to earn. The French company was taken over by the Japanese and his father was demoted to a clerk because he was deemed anti-Japanese.

“My mother used to tell us, ‘you must understand that now your father's income is lower and you have to learn to eat within his means.’

“And we were very understanding because our neighbours and friends were eating the same fare,” he explains.

There was no change in the diet of those who were rich - tin miners or rubber estate owners.

“On the black market, you could buy almost anything you wanted. But things were expensive,” says Chye, whose family was considered “lower middle class” during the Occupation.

As for the poor, there was not much on the menu other than tapioca.

“They simply could not afford other food items so there was a lack of variety in their diet and they suffered beri beri as they did not get enough vitamin C,” he explains.

Since a varied menu was not an option for many, they simply had to be creative to add some taste to the otherwise bland tapioca. Roasting and frying were alternative cooking methods, and any flavour enhancer that was available was pressed into service.

“Roasted tapioca is especially nice because when you roast it over a fire, it is tastier since the juices are kept inside the skin,” says Chye.

Belacan (shrimp paste) also worked well as a taste enhancer. “Cut the tapioca in small pieces and then fry them with belacan. It tasted wonderful and was a welcome change from the usual bland tapioca,” he recalls.

Fried tapioca was also popular but “good cooking oil was very expensive so we had to use red palm oil. And, in those days, it was not refined like the type that you buy in today's supermarket,” he says.

“The oil was thick and red. And you must eat the fried tapioca while hot or else the red palm oil would congeal,” he adds.

Bubur cha cha tapioca was a welcome, albeit rare, treat “but that was a luxury as sugar cane juice was expensive.”

Whenever Chye eats tapioca today, it reminds him of the “bad old days.”

However, he acknowledges, “without tapioca, I wouldn't be here today.”