Malaysia Cuisine: Cendol
Cendol is a local delicacy basically made up of shaved ice, coconut milk, gula melaka and the long wormy green stuff (I don’t know what they are made of but I think it might have pandan as one of the ingredients). The whole cocktail tastes heavenly, especially on a hot sunny day.
This dish is named after its the main ingredient, Cendol , short strands of cooked dough made with green pea flour and the green juice of pandan leaves. When we were children we called cendol 'green worms". It is served with shaved ice and plenty of fresh santan (coconut cream) and gula melaka (palm sugar). I am not sure about its origins, and variations of the recipe appears in Malay, Indian, Peranakan, Eurasian and even Indonesian cookbooks. I remember, from my long-ago childhood, buying cendol from wandering Indian hawkers who sells the cendol from a giant pot; this was always a welcome treat especially if the weather is very hot.
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to buy a decent bowl of Cendol. Good food start with good ingredients, and in the case of Cendol, here's where things can easily go wrong. Most commercially available cendol is made of an agar-like substance rather than green pea flour, they look like cendol but taste of nothing at all and no matter how much you chew, you can never quite get them soft. As for the other two ingredients, tricks abound to compromise their quality. Santan has to be freshly squeezed from freshly grated coconut. Some people do not mind using pre-packed santan, like Kara, personally, I think Kara is OK for cooking curries, but would rather not have it in my cendol. Well, most cendol stalls would go further and dilute the santan with milk or just rice-flour water, villains. The third ingredient, gula melaka, is almost always contaminated with other cheaper sweeteners like white or brown cane sugar. Which explains why some Singaporeans go crazy when they come across a place that serves decent Cendol.
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