Malai Mei, which sells mainly nyonya kuih (kuih means “cake” or “pastry”), is one of the companies producing Southeast-Asian pastries in Taiwan. Brand manager Koh Her Xin is from Malaysia. She originally came to Taiwan to study at university, and at that time began selling delicacies from her homeland on campus. After graduating she married in Taiwan and had a child, and having settled here, she transformed her experience of selling sweets into a food brand. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and Taiwan’s borders were sealed, her authentically flavored products helped many ethnic Chinese Malaysians who couldn’t return home to relieve some of their homesickness, and her products’ reputation spread by word of mouth.

From the tropics, settled in Taiwan

Nyonya kuih is a general term that in fact covers more than 100 kinds of cakes and pastries. Malai Mei produces dozens of these, including kuih lapis (nine-layer cake), kuih talam (tray cake), kuih seri muka (two-layered glutinous rice cake), kuih ubi kayu (cassava cake), and angku kuih (red tortoise rice cake). Each has its own level of fluffiness and chewiness depending on the proportions of rice flour, cassava flour, or wheat flour used. In appearance, they are colored with natural food ingredients, including green from pandan leaves, blue from butterfly pea flowers, orange from cape jasmine or pumpkin, and purple from purple sweet potato. Besides being sweet, they are also often flavored with the taro fragrance of pandan leaf or with coconut milk.

Koh learned the skills required for this business from her mother, who lives in Malacca and used to sell nyonya kuih in a night market in the city’s old quarter.

Koh says that producing nyonya cakes is very labor-­intensive. Many of them comprise multiple layers which must be separately steamed. Each layer has to be steamed for seven minutes, and one cake may require up to nine steamings. When you also consider that the maker is creating different kuih at the same time, “it’s incredibly busy,” she says. The reason she perseveres is that living in a foreign land, she couldn’t find what she wanted to eat anywhere here, so she had to roll up her sleeves and make them herself.

The founding of Pondok Sunny, a brand that is popular with Taiwanese consumers, was driven by similar motivations.

To enter the Pondok Sunny restaurant in Hsinchu City, you must first pass through a long hallway filled with plants. The balcony of the restaurant’s second floor is densely packed with pandan plants, creating a verdant ambience that is like strolling into a tropical forest.

The forerunner to Pondok Sunny was in fact a general store selling Southeast-Asian goods. Sally Michelle Yao, an ethnic Chinese Indonesian who married into a Taiwanese family, started her little business more than 30 years ago in a Hakka community. Besides selling Southeast-­Asian food ingredients and household goods, she also sold home-made snacks, and most of her customers were other Southeast-­Asian women who had likewise married Taiwanese husbands.

Yao’s strongest motivation was her desire to eat foods from her homeland, and she worked hard to replicate the flavors of home. Whenever she returned to Indonesia to visit family, she would bring back nearly 100 kilo­grams of raw materials to Taiwan. She honed her recipes through years of trial and error, and seeking advice and instruction from others.

Later, when Yao decided to close her shop, her daughter Jocelin Lee, who had grown up eating her mother’s pastries, thought to herself: “Doesn’t that mean I won’t get to eat these foods anymore?” So she combined her family’s immigrant experience with the dietary habits of Taiwanese to transform the traditional store into a Taiwanese brand.

Rempah udang, a snack made from glutinous rice and spicy shrimp, colored with butterfly pea flowers and wrapped in pandan leaf.

Southeast Asia too has red tortoise cakes (angku kuih). Their shape brings a smile to the hearts of Taiwanese, who have a similar food.

Koh Her Xin, who learned her craft from her mother, has brought the flavors of her Malaysian homeland to Taiwan.

Nine-layer cake and nyonya kuih

Taiwanese occasionally mistake the multi-layer ­nyonya kuih made by Lee for a traditional Fujianese Hakka snack. “Is this nyonya cake? Isn’t it just nine-layer cake?!” Lee says that when she sells her pastries from a stand in a department store or at a market, some customers insistently argue that this is the case.

However, a look at the history of nyonya kuih reveals that this misapprehension is understandable. The word kuih alone (kuih being the Hokkien pronunciation of 粿, a name for a usually rice-based cake, pronounced guo in Mandarin), tells you that nyonya cakes are an offshoot of Chinese dietary traditions.

Around the 15th century, men living along the coast of China began to head to Southeast Asia to engage in commerce. Being single and living abroad, they opted to marry local women, and their mixed-blood descendants became known as “local-born Chinese” or “Baba Nyonya.”

Nyonya kuih was a novel food born of the blend between two cultures. Colorful, meticulously crafted nyonya food developed its own styles in Southeast Asia. Nyonya cakes in particular became popular among all ethnic groups, and through centuries of development, more than 100 varieties took shape. Today these are considered a representative snack food of Southeast Asia.

Thus in fact one can say that nyonya kuih and Hakka nine-layer cake, both with their foundations in Chinese dietary culture, are close relatives.

Jocelyn Lee (left) and Sally Michelle Yao (right) have written a story of an immigrant family in Taiwan with food as the theme.

The nyonya kuih (nyonya cakes) produced by Pondok Sunny come in the traditional flavors and also in innovative flavors integrating local Taiwanese ingredients.

Hsinchu-based Pondok Sunny have combined their family’s immigrant story with Taiwanese ingredients to create a well-received Taiwanese brand.

Taiwan: Not far from Southeast Asia

Following the clues provided by food, we can often discover that the distance between Taiwan and Southeast Asia is much closer than we may imagine.

Liu Ming-fang, an ethnic Chinese Indonesian who immigrated to Taiwan with her family at age 15, has lived a life of continual “island-hopping.” She lived in Java, Sumatra, and Jakarta before relocating to New Taipei City and even the Penghu Islands.

How close are Indonesia and Taiwan? We arrange to meet with Liu in a coffee shop operated by Amo Bakery. The “thousand-layer cake” that comes with our tea, with its carefully arranged levels and firm texture, is the house specialty and a popular gift in Taiwan given in celebration of an infant’s first full month of life. But few people know that the origin of this pastry is spekkoek (kue lapis legit or spekuk in Indonesian), an Indonesian layer cake invented during the Dutch colonial period.

Liu, who is well versed in stories of dietary culture, has the tale at her fingertips. She tells us that spekkoek resulted from a fusion of Chinese, European, and Indonesian cultures. It combined the pastry-making techniques of the Chinese with the eggs and cream that Europeans liked to use and added the flavors of Indonesian spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves. However, when spekkoek came to Taiwan, it was again adapted to local tastes: The proportions of sugar and cream were greatly reduced and the spices were eliminated, resulting in a much less complex flavor and a drier and less oily texture than the original.

A longing for the flavors of her homeland was an important driving force for Liu to get to work in the kitchen. However, when we flip through her cookbook Authentic Southeast Asian Style Home Cooking, we are surprised to find that Liu includes things like grass jelly, tangyuan (sweet glutinous rice balls), adzuki-bean soup, mung-bean soup, and sweet potato balls in her list of “Southeast-Asian” snacks, for these are also all key elements in the shared dietary memories of Taiwanese. The difference is that in Southeast Asia these sweets are often cooked with pandan leaf and drizzled with a spoonful of coconut milk.

Liu Ming-fang, an expert on dietary culture who relocated from Indonesia to Taiwan, enjoys sharing the similarities and differences between Southeast Asian and Taiwanese cuisine.

The “thousand-layer cake” familiar to Taiwanese was originally an Indonesian invention.

Liu Ming-fang’s Southeast-Asian tangyuan come in various colors produced by ingredients such as sweet potato, pandan leaf, and cactus juice, and are served in a sweet liquid made with pandan leaf, coconut palm sugar, and fresh ginger. (courtesy of Liu Ming-fang)

A Southeast Asian version of the traditional Hakka dessert ngiu vun shui. The main differences are that the mochi rice cakes are colored with pandan leaf, the peanut and sesame are replaced by shredded coconut and desiccated coconut, and coconut sugar takes the place of brown sugar. (courtesy of Liu Ming-fang)

A graceful sweetness

This difference arises from the complexity of Southeast-Asian cuisine. For example, taro-scented pandan leaf can be used to make tea, cook rice, or make sweets—it is the most commonly used herb in the region. Meanwhile, food ingredients derived from the ubiquitous coconut palm include richly fragrant shredded coconut, coconut milk, and coconut oil. Also, the butterfly pea flower, which can give food a bright coloring, often appears in Southeast-Asian snacks.

Another element is palm sugar. Southeast-Asian palm sugars are subtle ingredients that play a key role in local pastries. Varieties include gula jawa (made from the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera), gula aren (from the aren palm, Arenga pinnata), gula lontar (from the palmyra palm, Borassus flabellifer), and gula nipa (from the nipa palm, Nypa fruticans). The plants from which these sugars are made are all members of the palm family (Arecaceae), but each belongs to a different genus. Their flavors are slightly different, but even Southeast Asians often cannot tell them apart.

The natural refining methods by which they are extracted produce sugars that are richly fragrant, are of relatively low sweetness, and have varied layers of taste. People never tire of them, and they add deep and subtle variations to Southeast-Asian food.

Angeline Tan, a culinary expert from Malaysia who is a long-term resident in Taiwan, often visits Southeast Asia to study dietary cultures. She shares the following with us: “[Austronesian peoples] begin gathering sap from the flower-­bud stems of coconut palms in the early morning before sunrise to avoid direct sunlight, which would turn it sour. They strain the sap into a large pan and heat it over a charcoal fire until all the water has evaporated. Then they pour the resulting syrup into a container woven from coconut leaves, where it solidifies and is preserved. The traditional production process is done entirely by hand.”

According to Tan’s research, the use of these natural sugars originated among Austronesian peoples and later spread to other ethnic groups. However, today, in different regions and among different nationalities in Southeast Asia, and even between different generations, people use sugar in different ways and their habits cannot be covered by a single description. In general, in the case of coconut palm sugar, because the biggest production area is Amphawa in Thailand, Thai cuisine frequently uses this flavor. Indonesia, meanwhile, has coconut palm sugar (gula jawa), aren palm sugar (gula aren), and palmyra palm sugar (gula lontar). In Cambodia and Laos, where the aren palm flourishes, they mainly use aren palm sugar. In Cambodia the economic value of this sugar is such that it is known as the “national sugar.” Why is nipa palm sugar (gula nipa) relatively rare? It is because people prefer eating the seeds that develop after flowering over cutting the stems to harvest the sap.

With economic development, people in wealthy nations such as Singapore have largely switched to refined white sugar. However in recent years gula jawa, which is representative of palm sugars, has been found by some scientists to have a glycemic index of only 35, making it “healthier” than white sugar. As a result it has become popular in the West as a health food and is selling so well that supply from production areas can’t keep up with demand.

The considerable commercial opportunities associated with Southeast-Asian sugars have attracted some Taiwanese to head to Southeast Asia to attempt to cultivate palm trees and produce these sugars, with some companies even coming out with sweets or pastries that use their products. We may not yet have noticed this trend, but like the graceful role that sweetness plays in Southeast-­Asian foods, these sugars and the desserts they are used in are subtly becoming part of our daily lives.

Angeline Tan frequently travels to explore the dietary cultures of different lands.

The palmyra palms of Southeast Asia are one of the sources of natural sugars. (courtesy of Angeline Tan)

The bubur cha cha served by Angeline Tan is made with ingredients that include bananas (symbolizing wealth), sweet potatoes (cut into diamond shapes), cassava (naturally colored with red from roses), and sago. Finally, she flavors the dish with gula aren sugar. The result is a layered taste and sweetness that never fails to please.