Chinese New Year is coming fast, but there is still time to think about adding more festive dishes to usher in the Lunar New Year in the best possible taste. Be inspired by four local celebrities who share their favourite family recipes, plus the secret stories and memories they associate with the dishes. Because Chinese New Year is a time for family.
For television host-actor Ben Yeo, bonding with his family over reunion dinner starts not at the dining table, but in the kitchen.
One of his fondest childhood memories of Chinese New Year is helping his mother prepare the ingredients for shark’s fin soup with chicken, crab meat and mushrooms, one of his family’s reunion dinner classics.
He and his three siblings were in charge of shredding boiled chicken meat and peeling crab meat from shells, while his mother cooked other festive dishes, such as braised sea cucumber and mushrooms, steamed fish and stir-fried leeks.
Yeo, aged 43, says: “It was very tedious work, but it was fun, like playing with play dough.”
After years of observing his mother make the shark’s fin soup, the culinary arts graduate from hospitality institute Shatec came up with his own version when he started his own family seven years ago. He has two young sons sons with his wife, Ms Claudia Cheong, 41, who helps run Big Big Heart, a group dedicated to fostering positive social values.
After a delay caused by the pandemic and dining-in restrictions, Ben Yeo is opening his most challenging F&B venture yet – a stall called SG Umami, which serves Japanese izakaya-style food. The stall is opening in the hip 400-seat Kallang industrial canteen. This space is like a foodcourt, in that is has a kopitiam licence, but the stalls offer a sophisticated mix of cuisines.
Out of the seven food stalls at the canteen, Ben co-owns two, plus a spacious al fresco beer garden called Playground. A kopitiam by day, and a happening beer garden by night, the space opened in late 2021.
So you know that Ben takes his cooking very seriously. For example his family soup recipe omits shark’s fin for conservation reasons and also because he says “it doesn’t add much taste”.
Another modification is replacing tang hoon (glass noodles) with Japanese vermicelli. “Unlike tang hoon, Japanese vermicelli does not become too soggy when cooked. It has a firmer and more chewy bite, like that of konnyaku or Japanese jelly,” he says.
He also adds enoki mushrooms as they are a family favourite.
To reduce preparation time, he uses frozen crab leg meat, but insists on shredding chicken meat by hand instead of slicing it.
“Hand-shredded meat is finer and doesn’t fall apart easily. And the meat is more tender,” he says. “It reminds me of my childhood.”
He wants his children to learn how to prepare this dish. “They are old enough to start helping out in the kitchen and this also gives them a sense of what their grandmother used to cook.”
Besides the soup, Yeo also prepares a steamboat meal for his family with ingredients such as abalone, fish and sliced pork belly.
Other than feeding his family, another Chinese New Year tradition he observes is to buy them a new set of clothes “from head to toe, from inside to outside”.
He says: “The practice helps to spice up Chinese New Year. Or else it will become just another holiday day.”
For more than 30 years, actress Constance Song’s first meal on the first day of Chinese New Year is homecooked mee sua soup.
She eats a version of the thin wheat noodle dish at an aunt’s house, with other relatives.
The noodles are served in a pork rib stock brewed overnight and topped with ingredients such as fishball, abalone and black moss (fa cai). She says: “Although the mee sua is soggy and doesn’t have an al dente texture, I need to eat it to celebrate Chinese New Year every year. It is a family tradition.”
This is the taste of childhood for the svelte 46-year-old, who won fans with her work on Channel 5’s drama series, Tanglin. But she hasn’t been doing nothing since that series – far from it. In 2021 Constance gave birth to her second child, a little girl she affectionally nicknames LO or Elo. Little Elo joins Olethea, Constance’s elder daughter, who is now aged three.
So with two little girls around, good food naturally forms a big part of Chinese New Year for Constance.
The mee sua dish she loves, which is also a symbol of longevity and good fortune in Chinese culture, is also eaten on birthdays.
Over the years, Constance has perfected her own version. Her soup is a chicken stock spiked with hua diao jiu (Chinese rice wine) and topped with seaweed, peanuts, fried ginger slices, omelette slices and chicken.
“It is the only dish that I’ve learnt to cook from my mother two years ago, so that I can enjoy it whenever I crave it,” she says.
For Chinese New Year, Constance, who owns Spanish- Japanese restaurant Bam! in Tras Street, plans to whip up a noodle soup dish inspired by mee sua. The dish comprises chicken and gluten-free bee hoon in a vegetable stock.
Her other food highlights during the festive period are a steamboat reunion dinner with her family – with must-have ingredients of fiery mala stock, beef and fish – and pineapple tarts, which remind her of pineapple jam biscuits, a favourite childhood snack.
Growing up, actor, host and Chinese opera performer Nick Shen fondly remembers observing his late grandmother cook lunch. He would sit nearby, doing his homework after school.
Her special dish was steamed fish in Teochew style. That’s when the fish is served with ginger, salted vegetables and pickled plums.
These memories have inspired him to come up with a vegetarian version of the classic Teochew dish of steamed pomfret.
The dish features slabs of tofu beancurd that are arranged in the shape of a pomfret. They are laid out on a bed of dried seaweed that mimics the scaly texture and taste of the fish skin. Covering the body is a blanket of chewy oyster mushrooms, pickled plums, salted vegetables and strips of Chinese mushrooms, ginger and red chillies.
Instead of lard, fried soya bean crumbs are added for crunch.
One of the first few times that Nick cooked vegetarian “pomfret” was for a family dinner on the first day of Chinese New Year a few years ago. He cooked for 12 people.
The five-course vegetarian meal included dishes such as curry with mock chicken meat and potatoes, broccoli with mushrooms and his “signature dish”, lotus root soup with radish and corn.
The 45-year-old recalls: “It was pressurizing as it was my first time cooking for so many people. I spent the whole day in the kitchen chopping and cooking.
“It is my way of showing sincerity through the effort that I put into cooking.”
The actor eats vegetarian food most of the time as it is “healthier and environmentally friendly”.
The actor is also such a fan of Chinese opera that he founded the events company Tok Tok Chiang. A self-confessed perfectionist, he admits he fusses over the intricate decorations of his dishes. He likes to cut cherry tomatoes into traditional shapes like rabbits and he crafts flowers from shredded carrots and Japanese cucumbers.
One reunion dinner that he starkly remembers was the year after his mother died from cancer some years ago.
“She used to take charge of the festivities by cooking her specialities such as ngoh hiang and baking cashew and almond cookies,” he says.
“It felt so different without her. I particularly missed her that night.”
These days, the bachelor continues the tradition of decorating the family’s five-room flat in Bukit Panjang. He is also busy during the Chinese New Year season as he is hired for God of Fortune appearances and Chinese opera performances in companies and schools.
Nick also makes a point of collaborating with his neighbours to decorate the shared corridors outside their homes.
He says: “It always puts me in a festive mood.”
Long before it became trendy for restaurants to use laksa gravy as a steamboat stock, theatre director- actress Selena Tan has been tucking into laksa steamboat during Chinese New Year.
For 30 years, laksa steamboat has been a staple in the family’s reunion dinner and open house. In non-pandemic years Selena can see 80 to 100 relatives and friends dropping by throughout the day.
The star of the laksa steamboat is the tongue-tingling stock that is concocted with a blend of laksa rempah (spice mix) and prawn broth.
More than 20 kinds of ingredients are cooked in the soup, including yong tau foo, steamed chicken wings and tau pok (fried beancurd).
You may recall Selena played a wealthy and fiery auntie in the movie Crazy Rich Asians, so it’s fitting that her steamboat recipe is not complete without thick white bee hoon, cockles and a dollop of homemade fiery sambal “There was an astronomical amount of food at Chinese New Year, when I was growing up.”
Selena, who is the founder and artistic director of theatre company Dream Academy, says: “We like eating all sorts of ingredients that can soak up the thick and lemak (rich in Malay) laksa gravy. My siblings and I ate a lot of such rempah-based dishes as my mum grew up in a Malay-Peranakan kampung.”
While she will not reveal her mum’s original recipe for the homemade laksa rempah, Selena says it is a blend of seven ingredients, including blue ginger, lemongrass and candlenut.
As a healthier alternative, she uses evaporated milk instead of coconut milk and she says the laksa “tastes just as nice”.
She also squeezes lime juice into the laksa to inject some tanginess into the stock.
Tan is married to John Pok, 50, who helps run Dream Academy. They have a four-year-old son.
As part of their Chinese New Year tradition, her family gather for a reunion dinner comprising seven to eight main courses that “are enough to feed an army”.
The dishes include pen cai (treasure pot filled with seafood), ngoh hiang (five-spice prawn roll), roast duck, chicken rice and fish maw soup – all whipped up by her mother and Roy.
As well as producing theatre shows, Selena also appears in the upcoming movie Shotgun Wedding, which stars Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. It’s scheduled for release in 2022.
Text: Kenneth Goh/Straits Times