I don’t write on Substack as much as I would like to. Someone snarked that it seems like I write whatever I want to. Perhaps. Substack, or a blog, is a way to express myself - freely, creatively - grammar warts and all. It’s a stream of consciousness of what’s happening in my life and what I am curious or fixated about.
In January 2025, I made a resolution to pace myself, learn more and in doing so, be joyful. I have little choice now but to seriously slow down (just not me) because of a right hip pain that will require surgery in the fall. I am slowly going through my collection of cookbooks and filing away magazine clippings. I am also pruning my priorities to focus on the activities that bring joy. Hopefully, all this will clear the deck so that I can zero in more deeply into the food of my childhood and my current lifestyle so that eventually, I can meld the two and reflect more on the food culture and the legacy I am creating for myself.
I start my “train of thought” with one dish that is an old Peranakan recipe, seldom seen but which seems to be making a comeback. It is beloved in my family and was a regular feature on my mother’s Chinese New Year table where it took pride of place and earned a witty nickname that only my mother could have imagined. Cruel and politically incorrect, the nickname is the stuff of family secrets and a matriarch’s legacy.
This dish of meatballs comprising pork and diced liver with a heady dose of ground coriander, glossily basted with a weblike wrapping of caul lining, is called Hati Babi Bungkus (Wrapped Pork Balls). My family calls it Ati Babi. My mother’s recipe was titled “Arti Babi” and I reworked it for my cookbook. Over the years, I made the dish for our Chinese New Year lunch. The initial meatballs were gamey but my father was gentle enough to keep encouraging me. I’d like to think that I now do a pretty good job preparing these meatballs. This past CNY, I experimented with baking them in the oven but that did not pass muster with my sister Nancy. She fried them once again to achieve the caramel shine, took the leftovers home and ate one meatball for lunch each day for the rest of the week.
At that same lunch, my niece’s husband, a Scotsman, took a bite of one Ati Babi and loved it. It reminded him of haggis, considered the national dish of Scotland. Honestly, I had no idea what haggis really was.
Ati Babi came to mind a few days ago because it was going to be on the menu at the new restaurant by Violet Oon. One of the most prominent Singaporeans, Violet had published a landmark Peranakan cookbook in the 1970s and travelled around the world promoting Singapore food, including Peranakan dishes such as Laksa. She was gracious enough to write the foreword for the 2023 edition of my cookbook. I made an Instagram reel about Ati Babi but it also got me thinking more deeply about its origins and I researched further this past weekend.
Although my nephew-in-law thought of haggis, it typically consists of sheep’s diced offal, oats and spices boiled in sheep’s stomach. The stomach is not consumed. Haggis goes as far back as the 13th century when up in the highlands of Scotland, hunters cut up the killed animal to make it easier to transport. They removed and cooked the offal so that it would not spoil the meat.
Ati Babi could very well be an offshoot of fried meat rolls wrapped in caul lining just like those which exist in Chinese cooking. These were often longish rolls.
I also remembered that Ati Babi was sometimes associated with the English meatballs called ‘faggots’. Jane Grigson explained in her book “English Food” that faggots were a way of using up odd bits and pieces of the pig. Recipes varied across England with additions and alterations and ‘the word faggot means a bundle, like a faggot of kindling for a fire’. Also called ‘savoury ducks’, these could be made with minced pork liver and belly pork, seasoned with mace, wrapped in caul, and baked in an oven. Faggots and Ati Babi do look pretty similar and both include pork liver.
I asked around, including Adrian who features Ati Babi on his private dining menu. In fact, those meatballs were so delicious and refined, warmed up in the oven when I popped into the kitchen one night, that I was determined to make Ati Babi soon after. Adrian kindly spared the scarce caul lining when I could not find some. (The butcher told me that they come from Sarawak and it’s been a smaller supply in recent times.)
I also sought the thoughts of Peter Yeoh the Penang food writer. He replied, “My 91-year-old Dad says my grandma and grandaunt learnt to cook it from our family’s Hainanese chef, who learnt to cook it whilst working in the British army base in his previous employment.” Yet, the Penang Ati Babi is longish like Chinese meatballs.
Peter’s answer shed some useful insight into this beloved dish. Not exactly a Scottish haggis, often spherical like English faggots, spiced with coriander instead of mace, not baked in the oven but fried. Just as with many Peranakan dishes, Ati Babi is a little bit of everything East, West, foreign and local.
In an age when it might seem fashionably ethnocentric to claim the history of a dish, there are those who would argue that we cannot assume that one dominant cultural group influenced the lesser. This regularly arises in baking or in certain desserts, or even some aspect of fashion or material goods. If there are sufficient handwritten journals and recipes, old interviews and newspaper articles, recorded oral history, eyewitness accounts, we might be in a better position to make more concrete conclusions. Nothing seems definitive for many things we cherish. Time moves us all along and soon enough, a dish we love will continue to morph, taking on more influences and interpretations. There’s no point arguing.