Hakka abacus seeds 算盘子
Before I jump into this week’s recipe, I have a quick announcement for everyone who has preordered my cookbook Plantasia or who is a paid subscriber of this newsletter! To thank you for supporting my work, I’m hosting a virtual cookalong where we cook one recipe from the book a full month before its release into the world. It’s been a while since we had one of these, so I’m excited to bring it back! To register, click here. Hope to see you there! 🥬🩷
In other book-related news, Plantasia has recently been featured on South China Morning Post, something I’m still reeling from. The book will officially be released on 21 October, but you can preorder your copy via my website (worldwide), Bookazine (HK), Honey Bunch of Onion Tops (AU), Bold Fork Books and Book Larder (US)!
When it comes to food, Wex and I are cut from different cloths. If you consider one’s dialect group to be the same as one’s father, then we’re both Hokkiens. Wex’s mom is Teochew, while my mom is Cantonese. But of all the times that I’ve eaten in his home, I don’t think I’ve ever seen steamed fish on the table, something that’s equally important to the Teochews as it is to the Cantonese. Instead, Wex grew up eating classically Hokkien dishes (think lor bak and fried glutinous rice) that revolve around the robust flavours of dried shrimp, soy sauce and dried shiitake, and he loves his food starchy, heavy and strong-flavoured.
The food that I grew up eating, on the other hand, involved lots of moist-heat cooking - steamed meat patties and nourishing soups. The flavours were light and subtle, but there was always a saucer of sambal belacan or chilli padi steeped in soy sauce on the side for some punch if you needed it. For that reason, on the rare occasion that we eat out, we hanker for different things. It’s almost always a restorative bowl of pho or dim sum for me, but Wex is always about the fries, schnitzels and bitterballen.
It can be frustrating to have different food preferences as a couple, but the good thing is that Wex’s family is just as discerning as mine when it comes to food. His aunt owned a couple of Vietnamese restaurants in Singapore, and his grandmother has an incredible repertoire - everything from Hainanese yibuah to Nonya rempah udang she has made.
Bonding with his grandma comes easily - put two avid cooks in the same room and you’ll never have to worry about conversation drying up - and occasionally she comes over to Wex’s place to teach me her signatures. One of these is her abacus seeds.
Abacus seeds are a Hakka dish of stir-fried, springy discs of taro. The name is derived from the way the taro dough is shaped like the pierced beads of an abacus. Because it alludes to having so much money that you would have to count it, the dish is traditionally cooked by the Hakkas for Lunar New Year to express their wish for prosperity. (A more practical reason for the shape is that the indents also encourage seasonings and aromatics to adhere better to the abacus seeds.)
Because food culture in Singapore is ever-moving rather than being confined to one dialect group, my mom cooked this dish occasionally at home. But see, her Cantonese inclinations towards simplicity and purity of flavours don’t quite work here, not when Hakka food is characterised as “strong flavoured, salty, [and] fatty” according to author of The Hakka Cookbook Linda Lau Anusansananan. The seasoning in my mom’s abacus seeds was always far too subtle and her abacus seeds were leaden and dense, just like the versions that you might come across at the hawker centres.
Abacus seeds, for that reason, had been to me this unremarkable dish that people made to stretch the little that they had. Then one day, on a trip back to Singapore, I tasted some abacus seeds brought over by Wex’s ahma that left me completely gobsmacked. They were light, tender and had just the right amount of Q. A completely different animal to whatever it was that I’d been eating.
The closest thing that came to mind was gnocchi that I had learnt to make while staging at a restaurant in Melbourne. The chefs had showed me how to bind the potatoes with just enough flour to bring it into a dough, and to poach them in barely simmering water as carefully as one would an egg. When Wex’s ahma demonstrated how she made her abacus seeds, I was surprised at the similarities between good gnocchi and good abacus seeds.
Just as a floury potato is always preferred over a waxy one, you’ll need a floury taro. To that, add just enough tapioca flour. Too much and the abacus seeds turn as chewy as bubble tea pearls, but used sensibly, it provides a bead with the tenderest, softest chew without masking the subtle earthy fragrance of taro. The hawkers use way too much flour because flour is cheap, she tells me. Then comes the poaching - the shaped beads go into their warm bath, and the minute they float, she transfers them to a bowl of cool water to arrest the cooking.
I’m now a convert, and when I make abacus seeds, it is not just because Wex loves it, but because once you have tasted homemade abacus seeds, there is no turning back. Over the years that I’ve cooked this dish, I’ve made it my own. I do away with the dried cuttlefish that Wex’s ahma’s version calls for, finding that I love the dish even better when everything is a heap of silky textures. My platonic ideal of abacus seeds is one where the nubbly bits of finely diced mushroom, dried shrimp and minced meat coat each abacus seed in a lightly thickened sauce - for that, I reserve the soaking liquid from the dried shiitake mushrooms and dried shrimp and add a generous splash towards the end. For garnish, you really cannot beat fresh coriander and lashings of chilli (ground or sliced), though I’ve seen cooks gild the lily with fine shreds of dried scallop too.
My recipe makes enough for 2 greedy eaters and not more, because it is a real labour of love to shape abacus seeds individually. If you have patience in abundance or family members/friends who are willing to help, feel free to scale the recipe up: