The buah keluak nut takes weeks to prepare before it can be eaten. First it is buried in ash. Then washed. Then soaked. Then buried again. Then split and cleaned by hand, each one, individually. The flesh inside — if you have been patient enough — is black, rich, and tastes of nothing else in the world.
Most cooks do not bother. The process is difficult, the nut is expensive, and the uninitiated diner cannot understand why a curry should cost this much for what looks like dark mud inside a shell. This is, in fact, the whole point.
“My grandmother never explained a recipe. She simply cooked it in front of me until I understood it myself. The buah keluak took me eleven years.”
The kepayang tree — Pangium edule — grows in the swamp forests of the Indonesian archipelago. Its nut contains hydrogen cyanide in concentrations sufficient to kill if untreated. The Peranakan kitchen’s treatment process, refined over generations, is a piece of practical toxicology disguised as culinary tradition.
The Twelve Spices
The Khoo family recipe uses twelve spices in the rempah paste — the aromatic base that undergoes forty minutes of continuous stirring before anything else is added. Galangal and lemongrass are the frame. Candlenut provides the creaminess that coconut milk alone cannot achieve. Blue ginger — bunga kantan, the torch ginger flower — adds a perfumed note that sits on the palate long after the heat of the chillis has faded.
The rest remain, for now, between Raymond and his grandmother’s recipe book.
Three Days
Day one: source the nuts, begin the soaking. Day two: clean each nut by hand, mix the filling with minced pork and prawn, seal the shells with toothpick. Day three: make the rempah, braise the chicken pieces until they surrender to the sauce, add the stuffed nuts for the final hour.
The dish is never made for one person. A Tok Panjang long table demands at minimum forty nuts. It is a dish of community, structured as such from the beginning.
When it arrives at your table at The Peranakan Club, you are tasting forty-five years of practice, three days of preparation, and one family’s refusal to simplify a thing that deserves its full complexity.