Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Cap Cai

    Cap cai (“Chahp Chai”) is best known as a Straits Chinese dish popular in Malaysia and Singapore, but more generally, most Southeast Asian cuisines have some sort of version of this dish.  Overseas Chinese immigrants settled all over the region, bringing a dish like this with them.  It is not surprising to
    find something with a name like “chap chay” on the menu at Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Filipino, and Cambodian restaurants in the US.  Even in Indonesia, we often found cap cai available at restaurants that had no other discernable Chinese influence at all.  In many Cantonese or Shanghainese restaurants, you may also see this dish written as Char Chap Chye.

    Cap cai is a vegetable dish with just some noodles in it as well.  Done correctly, the dish is something between a soup and a stir-fry…it should be quite wet with a pretty thin sauce.  The taste depends very heavily on tauco and oyster sauce; please do not try to make this dish without using both of these, because it will taste like bland vegetables.  If you are a vegetarian who simply cannot eat oyster sauce, well, it won’t taste right.  You can use water instead of chicken broth with no problem, though.  Many recipes include different kinds of vegetables, but the heavy mushroom component here is essential as well.  You shouldn’t venture too far from this list of vegetables, although bamboo shoots or a couple baby corns or even some thinly sliced jicama probably wouldn’t make too much of a difference.  We add a little bit of egg to thicken up the dish a little bit, but that’s probably not authentic.  Leave it out if you like.

    Fresh and dried shiitake mushrooms are available at most gourmet
    groceries, and black jelly mushrooms are normally available dried at
    Chinese groceries.  Black jelly mushroom is our English translation of the Malay term, which is probably a translation from a Chinese word.  It refers to the fungus Auricularia polytricha, sometimes called wood ear fungus in the US.  Us both mushrooms fresh if you can find them.

    This makes enough for two dinner portions, or for four to six side dishes.

    Cap Cai
    4 cloves garlic, minced
    1 inch fresh ginger, minced
    2 Tbsp. tauco
    2 Tbsp. oyster sauce
    1/4 cup vegetable oil
    2 cups fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, halved
    1 cup black jelly mushrooms
    1 cup green beans, cut into 1 inch pieces
    1 large carrot, cut into thin rounds
    1 cup chicken stock or water
    1 cup loosely packed broken bihun
    1 large egg
    1 block tofu, thinly sliced crosswise
    2 cups Chinese cabbage, slice crosswise

    Start by heating the oil in a large skillet over medium heat.  Add the minced ginger and garlic and stirfry, stirring constantly, until very fragrant, making sure that they do not brown.  Add the tauco and oyster sauce and stirfry for 1-2 minutes more, until very fragrant.  Add both groups of mushrooms, green beans, carrot, and water or stock, raise heat to high, and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat again and cook for 10 minutes, adding water to ensure a soupy consistency.  Add the broken bihun and cook for five minutes more, again adding water to maintain the consistency.  Crack the egg and add to the wok, and mix thoroughly so that the egg thickens the mixture.  Add the tofu and Chinese cabbage (again, adding water if necessary), and simmer for three minutes until the cabbage has wilted.  Ladle into soup bowls and serve, or into a serving dish as a side dish.

  • The New Economic Polic

    In the news these days is Malaysia’s New Economic Policy, the name for a political project that set to (1) reduce poverty across Malaysia and (2) eliminate the identification of race with economic status in Malaysia.  Originally, the NEP was supposed to run from 1971 to 1990.  Technically, the program did lapse in 1990, only to be replaced by the National Development Policy and then PM Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020, which sought to make Malaysia a fully developed country by 2020.  But everybody knows that the spirit of the NEP lives on, if not in name, then in the myriad laws and institutions still on the books that stem from the NEP period.  Indeed, the very way that government and society works reflects the NEP.  It is telling that politicians still say NEP when they mean NDP, as the NEP has fundamentally transformed the country.

    If you are a regular reader of our blog, you’ll be familiar with the main aspects of the NEP.  Bumiputras (basically, non-Indian and non-Chinese Malaysians) get favorable treatment in most matters that have any economic or political connection.  The government invests heavily in rural development schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Malays.  Malays can invest in special government-run unit trusts that always give high dividends.  When the government privatizes public services via the stock market, it reserves discounted shares for Malays.  It’s easier to get into the universities here if you are a Malay, it’s easier to get a government scholarship if you are a Malay, it is far easier to move up the ladder in the public service if you are a Malay; the list is endless.

    So why is the NEP still in the news today?  Well, simply, its project has not worked.  The targets for bumiputra participation in the economy through equity ownership have not been met, even 15 years after the project was supposed to be finished.  There is a well-known, and oft-lamented, "subsidy mentality" among some Malays.  Rather than eliminating the identification of race with economic function, the NEP seems to have strengthened it.  In all, we have all of the problems that you’d expect to find with a coarse tool like race-based affirmative action.  The demands from some sections of the ruling party, though, are for more "positive discrimination", and a strengthening or re-establishment of the NEP.

    JM and I, living in KL with its large population of Chinese and Indian Malaysians, have seen first hand evidence that, contrary to the government’s claims, poor non-Malays do indeed lose out under this system.  We also see the Melayu Baru–New Malays–who have grown rich on government favoritism, and yet still get first crack at discounted shares because they are Malays.  We think it’s time for Malaysia to scrap the NEP and "positive discrimination" based on race.  The government could still help poor Malays and intervene in the economy while doing so without the blatant racial favoritism that it shows.  (Let’s bracket the question of whether or not government intervention to ensure equality of opportunity is a good idea for now.)  A non-racial policy would still overwhelmingly benefit Malays, but it would also pick up the large poor Indian Malaysian community, the true losers under the NEP, and the non-negligible numbers of Chinese Malaysians.  We also believe, by the way, that affirmative action in the US should be based on income, not race or ethnicity.

    Just FYI: If we were Malaysians, what we just said would be seditious.  We are not kidding, even in the slightest, and the government’s record of arresting people for criticizing the NEP is proof.  It is a violation of the Sedition Act of 1972 to criticize or even question the rights and privileges of Malays.  By extension, that includes the NEP.