Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Royalty and Peerages

    One of the most confusing parts of doing research on politics in Malaysia is getting titles correct.  It many ways the system parallels that of Britain, but in many ways it is quite different.  It must be said that we do not understand the system of peerages and hereditary rulership in Britain either, so Malaysia is not alone in being confusing.  However, titles are still all the rage here, and a surprising number of people have a title of some sort.

    Hereditary titles are confusing enough.  Malaysia is (on paper) a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the head of state is the King.  However, Malaysia is unique in its kingship.  The King of Malaysia–known as the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or "he who is most highly raised"–is elected from among the 9 hereditary rulers of the Peninsular Malaysian states for a revolving five-year term.  That means that the King is not the king until he dies, just until one of his peers replaces him. 

    That brings us to state-level hereditary Rulers.  There are 13 states in Malaysia.  The two Bornean states, Sabah and Sarawak, do not have a hereditary Ruler.  Two of the formerly-British Straits Settlements, Malacca and Penang, also do not have a hereditary Ruler.  In each of these four states, there is a "head of state" for the state known as the Yang di-Pertuan Negeri, or "he who is raised in the state."  (The other former British Strait Settlement is Singapore.  These three settlements were administered differently under the British.)  Seven of the remaining states have a Sultan (Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Terengganu).  One state has a Raja (Perlis) and the last one has a Yang di-Pertuan Besar (Negri Sembilan).  The nine hereditary Rulers of states are the folks who rotate in and out of the office of King.  Each Ruler has a family, and all of them have titles.  These are too confusing to get into here.

    Then there is the Malaysian equivalent of the peerage.  You get a peerage for, ostensibly, contributing to the development of a state or of the country.  Hence, there are two classes of peerage.  One kind you receive from a Ruler, and the other kind that you receive from the King, whoever that may be at the time.  Both men and women can receive a peerage, but if you are a woman who is married to a man who gets a peerage, you get a different name that signifies that you are married to a peer.  What’s more, in both the Ruler class and the King class of peerage, there is an upper and a lower level.  You can get many peerages, and many people have a couple Ruler-level peerages or a couple Ruler-level peerages and a King-level peerage.  In your name, you normally only list your highest level peerage, although some people list both their highest King-level and their highest State-level peerage.

    OK, from a Ruler, the lowest level is Dato’.  Some Rulers spell this Datuk.  The wife of a Dato’ is a Datin, no matter how her husband’s name is spelled.  If the Ruler wishes to really honor you, he can make you a Dato’ Seri or a Dato’ Paduka.  (Again, there are many spellings.)  The wife of a Dato’ Seri is Datin Seri.  There is no limit to the number of titles that a Ruler may grant.

    From the king, the lower level is Tan Sri.  The wife of a Tan Sri is called Puan or Puan Sri.  The very highest level is Tun, whose wife carries the title Toh Puan.  Adding to the confusion of titles, there is also a federal-level Datuk title, below the level of Tan Sri.  In theory, there are fixed numbers of each of these titles.

    The benefit of having a title, besides the fact that a title makes you sound important, is that some people believe they help out of things like parking tickets and airplane overbookings.  Given the sheer number of Dato’, these is probably not really true at the lowest level, but a Tan Sri and certainly a Tun would never deign to wait in line anywhere.

  • A Vain Attempt to Perfect our Roti Canai

    Having Betsy here re-acquainted us with the joys of South Indian-style breads here in Malaysia.  We are pretty sure that her single favorite dish from the entire time we were here was roti canai, the stretched, folded, flaky, flat, fried Indian bread whose recipe we posted here.  We tried it a couple times at several different places, and JM and I  agreed that our existing recipe is almost entirely unsatisfactory.  The problem is the thin flakiness.  No matter how thin you roll out those doughs, they will never have the light and airy quality of real roti canai as thrown by the roti canai man.  It’s not even close.  And the multiple-layered quality is what makes roti canai so good.  The outside layers are crisp and brown, and the inside layers are soft and chewy.  We can sort of get the crispy brown outside right, but our inside layers are doughy and raw, not soft and chewy.  Soft and chewy != doughy.

    So last night we bought a whole bunch of flour and ghee and spent the evening following some recipes we have seen online to make roti canai the authentic way.  Simply put, the theory is to make a dough, stretch it out incredibly thin, gently fold it a couple times (trapping a bit of air between the layers), and then toss is on the griddle.  We ran into all sort of problems, although we had a nice time.  The most immediate problem is that the dough recipe make a dough that doesn’t make sense to someone familiar with Western-style breads and pastas.  To us, the dough seems intolerably wet.  The dough recipe that we followed called for 2 lbs. of flour along with 2 cups of water and about a half cup of ghee and two eggs (along with some other things).  If you mix that together, you get paste, not dough.  You can’t even knead it because it just sticks to your hands.  When we made our dough, we didn’t even use the whole 2 cups of water.  Even a cup and a half seems wrong.

    JM tried another dough recipe that we saw.  This one was simple: 10 oz of flour, half a cup of water, half a cup of ghee.  This simply didn’t work.  We could not shape it into anything, even after letting it rest for 3 hours.  We just had to throw it away.

    We pressed on with my dough, though.  We used about a cup and a half of water, let it sit for half an hour, divided it into 12 balls, and then let it sit for a half hour more.  At this point, we tried to emulate the workings of the roti canai man.  In a very loose way, the roti canai man works sort of like someone tossing a pizza.  In this case, though, he stretches the dough far thinner, and his dough is very sticky rather than smooth and pliable like a good pizza dough.  So instead of tossing his dough, the roti canai man has to sort of spin it around his hand, gently but firmly, until he has a piece of dough about half again as big as a large pizza, but transluscent.  We couldn’t get this motion down without tearing the dough.  We also couldn’t figure out how to prevent the dough from collapsing back and sticking to itself instead of staying stretched.  We did manage to get it thin enough to see through, but only in the middle of the dough, and only when we gently stretched it out on the counter.  The corners still were far too thick, and this is fatal for roti canai, because it can’t cook right if this is the case.  We furthermore learned that with this dough, you only get one chance.  If you toss it and it tears irreparably, you cannot just kneed it again and start over.  The dough will just tear.

    So, we made a whole bunch of gimpy roti canai.  About half our dough attempts were unsalvageable.  About a quarter more ended up black on the outside and raw in the middle.  The remainder were a reasonable approximation, but without nearly the correct inner flakiness.  I (TP) have toyed with the idea of simply asking a roti canai man what his recipe is and how he does it.  I am not particularly optimistic, though.  I’m not sure what language I would use to converse with them, to begin with, as many working class Indians speak only limited Malay and English.  They also think that we are idiots at our favorite roti canai stall because we always order it at around 2 in the afternoon, and everybody knows that you eat roti canai before noon or after 4.

    We have found some illustrative pictures online.  Here’s a picture of roti canai on the griddle, and this picture shows the dough.  (Roti prata is the name for roti canai in Singapore.)  This series shows roti canai being made: Flattening, stretching, spinning.