Dumpling syndrome

Vivid blue or unapologetically brown, pyramid-shaped and wrapped in bamboo leaves, these traditional dumplings, Nyonya Chang and Bak Chang, are part of Melaka’s distinctive Baba Nyonya food culture. They are beautiful. They are delicious. And, as I discovered, they are addictive.

I walked past East & West Rendezvous Café several times before going in. The name was the problem.

Like many tourists from Kuala Lumpur, I was in Melaka looking for its centuries-old Peranakan food, or Baba Nyonya, an interesting mixture of Chinese and Malay flavours with a distinctly unique character. I wanted old shophouses and family recipes, things that had survived several generations and preferably had not been redesigned for Instagram. East & West Rendezvous, a small, nondescript local café set among a row of heritage shophouses, sounded suspiciously like a place where I might be offered a club sandwich. So I kept walking.

There was, however, one problem with my theory. People kept going in. Eventually, curiosity defeated prejudice. Names can be misleading. I should have known that. Koala bears aren’t bears. Flying lemurs can’t fly. And East & West Rendezvous had no club sandwiches on the menu.

Instead, I found blue dumplings. I should probably have kept walking. These blue dumplings, or Nyonya Chang, are impossible to ignore. These traditional Peranakan rice dumplings are pyramid-shaped, wrapped in bamboo leaves and streaked an improbable blue. They look less like lunch than something somebody has carefully gift-wrapped. The colour is natural, though. Glutinous rice is soaked with butterfly pea flowers, which turn part of it a vivid blue before it is packed into bamboo leaves with the filling.

East & West Rendezvous Café

Nyonya Chang, sticky rice and meat dumplings

Nyonya Chang, the Peranakan variety of Bak Chang, sticky rice and meat dumplings

Grace Tan from East & West Rendezvous Cafe and her dumplings

I was going to order some. “How many?” I wondered. Three seemed reasonable. “They are quite filling,” warned Grace Tan, the owner. I downgraded to two. This proved to be an unnecessarily cautious decision.

Inside was minced pork belly, pork fat, shiitake mushrooms and candied winter melon, the must-have ingredient that gives Nyonya Chang their hint of sweetness. The spices are more mysterious: every family has its own secret blend, although coriander seeds and pepper always make an appearance.

The first bite was sweet, salty, aromatic and slightly confusing in the best possible way. This was not the dumpling I knew. It had sweetness where I wasn’t expecting sweetness, spices I couldn’t quite identify, and something strangely homey about its richness that makes you reconsider whatever you had planned to eat later.

I understood why people kept walking through that door. I also understood that I would be coming back.

Cooking sticky rice for Nyonya dumplings

Washing pre-soaked bamboo leaves

Grace learned to make Nyonya Chang from her grandmother as a child. In 2003, she started selling her own, and they soon became well known in Melaka. Demand eventually grew beyond what one woman and a pile of bamboo leaves could reasonably manage. Today, Grace makes around 2,000 dumplings a week with the help of several assistants, including large orders for special events. Not every day, though.

Chang are not fast food. I was doing my best to prove otherwise. The rice has to be prepared. The filling cooked. The bamboo leaves soaked. Then Grace and her assistants fold each leaf into a cone, spoon in white and blue rice, add the pork filling, close the parcel and tie it with string.

Their hands moved without hesitation: fold, fill, close, tie. Another dumpling. Then another. And another. A few thousand repetitions apparently help. Watching them made my own attempts at wrapping almost anything look deeply inadequate.

Once wrapped, the dumplings still aren’t ready. They need several hours of cooking.

Grace Tan wrapping Nyonya dumplings in large pre-soaked bamboo leaves

“Come tomorrow morning,” Grace told me. By this point, I had apparently become someone who was now arranging the schedule around dumplings.

This is how I discovered Bak Chang.

Compared with the blue Nyonya Chang, they suffer from a serious public-relations problem. They are brown. Not golden brown. Not caramel brown. Just enthusiastically brown. Inside, however, things improve dramatically: sticky rice, pork that Grace marinates for two weeks, shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp, chestnuts, spices and a bright orange salted duck-egg yolk buried in the centre.

The marinated pork and chestnuts add texture and a touch of sweetness, while the rich, fatty egg yolk brings its distinctive flavour – and a welcome flash of orange to all that brown. Like Nyonya Chang, the dumplings are wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed. The result is richer and more savoury than the Nyonya Chang. Possibly even better. I felt slightly disloyal to the blue ones. Beauty, once again, had proved an unreliable way of choosing lunch.

Salted duck egg yolks are made by soaking duck eggs in brine or packing them in damp, salted charcoal paste

Bak Chang also come with a rather dramatic origin story. The tradition is associated with Qu Yuan, an ancient Chinese poet who, according to legend, drowned himself after his kingdom was invaded. People threw packets of rice into the river so that the fish would eat the rice rather than his body. Over the centuries, the packets of rice became the dumplings eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival.

It is difficult to think of many foods whose backstory involves poetry, political despair, suicide, hungry fish and sticky rice. The Peranakan version developed its own character.

Peranakan - or Baba Nyonya - culture grew from Chinese communities who settled in Southeast Asia and, over generations, incorporated local Malay influences into their customs, clothing and food.

The term “Peranakan” refers to the descendants of Chinese immigrants, mainly wealthy traders, who settled in Malaysia, as well as in Indonesia and Singapore. They intermarried with local Malay women, and their Chinese culture blended with Malay customs and traditions to become Baba Nyonya. “Baba” refers to men and “Nyonya” to women. The cuisine followed the same path. Chinese ingredients and techniques met Malay flavours and spices, producing dishes that belong completely to neither tradition and unmistakably to both.

Grace’s blue dumplings are a small edible example of that history. Though admittedly I wasn’t thinking about cultural hybridity while eating my third one.

I returned to East & West Rendezvous several times to photograph the dumpling-making. Each visit also involved eating them. Then Grace introduced me to her Nyonya cendol.

I normally struggle with many Asian desserts. My loyalties remain stubbornly attached to the butter-cream-milk school of thought. Cendol – shaved ice, coconut milk, green jelly noodles and beans – has never sounded like a serious threat to tiramisu. Grace’s version complicated matters.

She makes it with pure black Gula Melaka, the traditional local palm sugar. It isn’t cloyingly sweet. There is a slight saltiness, the deep caramel flavour of the sugar and enough ice to make it dangerously easy to eat in Melaka’s heat. For durian enthusiasts, Grace goes one step further: Durian Cendol topped with fresh durian pulp. So I came back for that too. The dumplings were already enough of a problem. Now there was cendol.

Only after several visits did I remember the question that had started the whole thing. “Why East & West Rendezvous?” Grace laughed. The café had already had the name when she took it over. Changing it involved administrative formalities. So she didn’t.

I had spent days avoiding one of my favourite places in Melaka because of paperwork. In the end, perhaps the name wasn’t so inappropriate. People really did come from different places to find Grace’s food. And I had found my own rendezvous there too. Mostly with dumplings.