Pasta alle vongole, chilli crab-style
a 30min weeknight meal
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Last week, I had an inexplicable urge for chilli crab that wouldn’t let go. One of Singapore’s most well-known dishes, this was invented in the ‘50s by Madam Cher Yam Tian, who lived with her family by the sea. Her husband loved to catch crabs and she would steam them, until the family grew tired of this style of preparation and asked for something different. She experimented by cooking the crabs in ketchup and bottled chilli sauce and the results must have been spectacular for, before long, she was peddling chilli crab from a pushcart with her husband. Other chefs began selling chilli crab as well, but it was Hooi Kok Wah—a Cantonese chef—whose version audaciously changed the way chilli crab would be enjoyed in Singapore in the coming decades. His most notable contributions to the dish was the way he added stock and sambal (a condiment traditional to Malay cooking) to the gravy, thickened it with cornstarch (as is common in Chinese cuisine), and, as a final step, streamed in beaten egg white so that it formed delicate white threads that provided a silken quality to the sauce and visual contrast against its fiery redness.
Today, chilli crab is perceived more as a once-in-a-blue-moon treat that you enjoy at a restaurant with friends or family, rather than a dish to be cooked at home, ostensibly because mud crabs—the type of crab that is used in the dish—are pricey. Luckily, the dish’s flavours lend itself to other, more affordable forms of seafood. Just as an example, below’s a plate of prawns, cooked chilli crab-style, that I enjoyed at a humble roadside eatery when I visited Singapore last:
I typically go for mussels when making chilli crab at home. It is one of my favourite ingredients to stock our fridge with. Throw them into a large pot with some aromatics, slap on the lid, and leave them to steam. In minutes, the black shells that are tightly pinched shut would begin to open, releasing their natural juices—this is gold, akin to an instant mussel stock. Throw in some pasta and you have yourself a meal. This is why my go-to, dead-easy, tried-and-true dinner solution is pasta alle vongole, time and again.
If I were cooking mussels chilli crab-style on the weekends, or when I have friends over, I prepare them the traditional way: with a homemade rempah. But weeknight meals are more relaxed, and frankly, I can’t imagine patiently frying a spice paste when it is so hot outside. Here’s the thing: when I cook food from my heritage as an overseas Singaporean for my private enjoyment, it doesn’t always have to be a perfect recreation; it just needs to hit that flavour spot. In fact, one of my go-to weeknight meals, which also happens to be one of the most popular recipes in this newsletter’s archive, is chicken rice-style glass noodles. You put in a fraction of the effort and get a plate of food that quells that craving in 30 minutes flat. And for me, the easiest way to get close to eating chilli crab on a weeknight is by preparing pasta alle vongole, with those same evocative flavours.
The way I prepare the dish, there’s no spice paste to grind and the ingredients are available at every supermarket (even Western ones); just a handful of basic pantry ingredients. It embodies all the wonderful simplicity of vongole, but with the oomph and kick from the ketchup, chilli, ginger, and chopped coriander that’s stirred into the pasta; any Singaporean would easily identify the flavours of chilli crab if they were to taste this pasta dish. In a perfect world, after all the pasta and mussels have been eaten, a plateful of crusty deep-fried mantou for sopping up the broth would appear, but that’s asking a little too much for a weeknight dinner.
Pasta alle vongole, chilli crab-style