The base is an intense fish soup, flavoured with tamarind, ginger flower, galangal, pungent belacan prawn paste, refreshing sprigs of mint and sliced shallots.
Soon our table was overflowing with dishes: chicken rice, bak kut teh soup, rojak (a salad of turnip, pineapple and bean sprouts, with a thick, brown sweet prawn paste sauce), fried oyster omelets and popiah (a spring roll made with a crepelike skin).
Mix the prawn paste with the salt, egg white, spring onions, ginger root, wine and cornflour.
Spread the prawn paste thickly on one side of each slice of bread.
A stall or a truck gets a reputation for the best gung pat sadtor (stir-fried sadtor beans with prawns, shrimp paste and pork) or somesuch and word spreads; they may also do other meals but the queues will be for the prawn dish.
Lieppert then doctors the broth with a few essentials from the hot-and-sour Thai soup: lemongrass, kaffir lime, chilis, shrimp paste and a bonus tom-yum-goong addition of fried prawn head, which bobs on the surface like a buoy.
This dish can be found across Singapore and Malaysia -- but Penang's version of these broad flat noodles stir-fried in pork lard with prawns and cockles, beansprouts, Chinese chives, egg, soy sauce, chili and shrimp paste, is without par.
Prawn mee, a noodle dish with spare ribs in a spicy shrimp broth, came with a Chinese spoon filled with sambal — a spicy condiment made with, you guessed it, shrimp paste.
After an appetizer of cereal-encrusted prawns, diners dove into a cold, spicy dish of glass noodles mixed with jellyfish, poached chicken, galangal flowers, Malay shrimp paste, and toasted coconut.
There are city-run hawker stands everywhere, and even refined dishes like char koay teow -- noodles with prawns, chili paste and cockles -- rarely cost more than $2. 23.
The version we tried was fairly mild, but that's not to say Melakans don't like heat - we enjoyed a fabulously spicy okra salad and cincalok omelette, with prawn and chilli paste at Kenny Chan's Peranakan cookery school, (well worth attending for Kenny's enthusiasm and knowledge of Nyonya history as well as the cooking).
