Anchovy Seasons

See the difference viewed East or West.

While Australians associate owning a car as gaining the liberty to go on an extended road trip, often to unwind, explore new terrain or find one self, car owners in Singapore see their vehicles as a means to convenience: they will even drive down just a block to get to the nearest hawker centre! Such a contrasting difference can be said too of the way anchovies are used in getting a dish up from scratch.

In this part of the world, the anchovy serves not as a garnish but a main ingredient in many local dishes. So you have a hearty serving of these fish deep-fried to go with the nasi lemak, mixing it up with spoonfuls of fragrant coconut rice and rich spicy sambal; as you would too when the deep fried fresh catch is eaten by the Teochews with watery but grainy porridge. Or you can take to the dish the Cantonese way, by stir frying the freshly raw anchovies in sweet dark soya sauce and sliced red chillies, and accompanying that with steamed jasmine rice.

But when you go west, this humble fish, preserved in brine, takes an invisible twist: most dishes require you to finely chop them up, so that the flesh of the fish will evenly melt into the sauce, strongly lending to a dish just its obvious flavour. And often it’s a major seasoning, as it is too when tiny slivers of this finely chopped catch from the sea are stirred fried with florets of cauliflowers. Then there’s this linguine dish, where you doublet into steaming tomato passata generous amounts of rapidly melting anchovies.

And you are by no means confined to using the brine preserved anchovies with just reddish pasta sauce. The anchovies melt just as well into cream based gravy tossed together to garnish those parcels of freshly steamed prawns and koo chye raviolis.

And as these varied, but all equally yummy, dishes exemplify the differences in the way we use this unassuming  fish, it is worth noting too that that variety is driven by this basic disparity: In South East Asia, we use the fish freshly harvested from our seas. Look west, and they pull together delicious dishes with only anchovies preserved in an ingenious variety of ways. And so when taken as a holistic perspective, the culinary world becomes a lot richer and tastier.