Laksa Stories

Discovering Eurasian Laksa, Laksa Portugis or Laksa Serani

Tatler Asia names ten different kinds of Laksa in Malaysia. Six of them : Curry Laksa, Sarawak Laksa, Ipoh Curry Laksa, Nyonya laksa and Singapore laksa circle around a similar familiar theme of noodles in a spiced, coconut milk based curry broth. The rest are significantly different. Penang’s Assam laksa is a sour tamarind flavoured sauce thickened with flaked fish and poured over a thick rice noodle. Johor Laksa, similarly thick with fish flakes but unusually served with spaghetti noodles. Then there’s two from the east coast: Laksa Kuah Putih and Laksam, which have creamy white sauces. Laksa Siam being a hybrid of Penang and Curry Laksa.

When Anthony Bourdain gushed in 2023: Every time I come to Malaysia, there’s one thing I gotta have: Laksa, it’s everything I love in one bowl” he was talking about Penang Laksa . In an earlier instagram post in 2015 he described Sarawak Laksa as a ‘breakfast of gods’. In the episode of No Reservations related to this, Bourdain asks “where does this come from?” His local guide describes it as “100% born and bred here and specific to Kuching”. It’s been written that A Teochew immigrant from Guangdong, China named Goh Lik Teck is credited with inventing Sarawak Laksa.

Bourdain dreamed of bringing Laksa along with other “hawker food” to NYC in his venture Bourdain Market before his tragic demise in 2018. His Singaporean partner Seetoh realised the dream opening Urban Hawker but sadly Laksa didn’t make the cut.

When I visited Kudeejeen, the Portuguese quarter in Bangkok founded by Portuguese settlers 250 years ago during the Thonburi period, I was keen to try Siamese Eurasian food and had lunch at Baan Sakul Thong known for featuring 2 century old family recipes. It was a fixed menu that began first with an assortment of starters that seemed quite Thai (one of them looked a bit like Roti Jala) followed by a dish that completely bewildered me as it was almost identical to Laksa. Are the Portuguese involved in Laksa’s origin story?

I then discovered the dish described here as Portuguese kha nom jeen: A non-spicy version of red curry with fermented rice noodles, the dish may have been the attempt of early Portuguese settlers to make pasta with white sauce. Khanom jeen was substituted for the pasta and coconut milk-based broth for the creamy sauce. Kha Nom Jeen uses ground chicken in its sauce making it similar to a Bolognese type sauce.

At home growing up, we used to eat Laksa- curry gravy, served with bee hoon/vermicelli, homemade fish balls, cucumber julienned in a particular way similar to how it is prepared for Johor Laksa. One night I had dinner in the Portuguese settlement in Malacca, not in the waterfront shoplots but in a hawker area behind it and I had Laksa very similar to the one I grew up with - without bean sprouts and with a julienned cucumber garnish.

Is Eurasian laksa a thing ? It’s certainly evident in Eurasian cookbooks. In Kristang Cuisine by Joan Marbeck there is a recipe for Malacca Laksa. In Mary Gomes The Eurasian Cookbook there is Laksa Lemak. The base rempah/curry paste recipe is used for other Eurasian dishes like Prawn and Pineapple curry.

On youtube De Tempoe Doeloe Koken whose channel explores Indonesian food from an era when it was still called Indische or Oost Indische has an episode about Laksa Portugis sourced from one of the earliest written records about this dish in Indisch Kookboek published in Batavia in the Indoneseian language in 1843. It lists four kinds of laksa: Laksa Tjiena ( Chinese Laksa ) Laksa Bali, Laksa Goreng ( Fried Laksa) and Laksa Seranie ( Christian Laksa). The recipe for Portuguese laksa has shredded chicken, shrimp and also pork meatballs which seems like a Dutch influence.

Peter Lee in his piece Laksa - How a Persian Noodle became Peranakan published by the Singapore Peranakan Association in The Peranakan Magazine Issue 2 also references The Oost-Indisch-Kookboek but one published in 1845 with five Laksa recipes: laksa Bali (Balinese laksa with a prawn stock), laksa goreng (fried laksa),two versions of laksa Portugis (Portuguese laksa, both using butter), and laksa China (Chinese laksa).

He says: “The earliest reference that I could find appears in an English letter written way back in 1719 by Chan Jamqua, a Baba from Malacca, to an Englishman, John Scattergood. The letter concerns business matters but a post-script at the end has a most striking and odd request. Baba Chan asks Mr Scattergood to “Be kind enough to bring on my account two picos (piculs) of Misoa, called in that land Laqasi, for incidental expenses.” Misoa could refer to mee sua, Hokkien for fine wheat noodles, and laqasi might be laksa.

The word laksa itself has Persian origins lakshah and lakishah are terms for “vermicelli, or slices of paste put into broth” ¹ He further theorises that Persian words like laksa and kebaya appear frequently in Portuguese and Dutch colonial documents and books from the 16th to 18th centuries but cannot be found in any Malay text of the same period. It was therefore through the Portuguese and Dutch that the word entered the Malay language and became a general term for any noodle.

While the word Laksa describes the vermicelli type noodle, what about its accompanying sauce? In Khir Johari’s The Food of Singapore Malays he describes two types: acidic and cream based. Laksa Utara from the Northern states of Perlis Kedah and Penang, a sour, tamarind based variety now known as Penang Laksa (he says the name is a misnomer as it was enjoyed in all of the Northern States).

No mention of the East coast creamy types but he describes Laksa Johor as belonging to the creamier variety with its heavy use of flaked fish originating in the maritime world of Johor and Singapore. He says Laksa Johor may potentially have influenced Singapore’s Katong Laksa which he describes as a modern invention by the Straits Chinese. This doesn’t quite jive with information from the Indisch Kookboek. Peter Lee does note that the Laksa Cina in that book is notably more South East Asian in its ingredients than Chinese.

Laksa Johor also has an alternative origin story of having been concocted in the Johor Palace by Sultan Abu Bakar during his reign from 1886 to 1895. He was in Europe on an official mission and when in Italy fell in love with Bolognese spaghetti. On returning to Johor, he ordered the royal chef to make laksa with spaghetti and thus, Laksa Johor was born. Khir Johari does describe garnishing Malay laksa with spirally julienned cucumbers as I described previously - first cut into stumps then thinly carved out in a circular motion to produce a coil which is usually how Johor Laksa is garnished.

Laksa is now beloved here and abroad from NYC to Australia evangelised by celebrity chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Jamie Oliver. Its available in almost every hawker centre and a myriad of casual restaurants and kopitiams throughout Malaysia and Singapore. Popularly described now as Curry, Singapore, Katong, Nonya, Ipoh, Penang or Johor Laksa lets not forget its real etymological origins and how the Eurasian community also played a role in its journey to global popularity.

1. John Richardson and Franciszek Meninski, A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic and English, 1829, p. 1253).