Singapore’s Everyman Breakfast
Singapore’s Everyman Breakfast
Three is a magic number, they say. The Fates. The Lord of the Rings. The number of toes on a sloth. Add to this the holy trinity of Singapore’s everyman breakfast: half-boiled eggs, toast slathered in a rich coconut-egg jam, and kopi. Echoes of its British predecessor live on in this breakfast as much as in Singapore’s architecture and mindset – you’ll detect whispers of half-boiled eggs and toast eaten in drawing rooms, presided over by the stern butler.
But years steeped in the hothouse of swampy weather and relentless immigration has imbued this breakfast with pungent whiffs of locality. The half-boiled eggs are not sprinkled with salt and pepper, but doused in white pepper powder and dark soy sauce. Strawberry jam is translated into kaya, its Southeast Asian cousin – a pale-green coconut jam plumped up with improper amounts of egg yolk and the tropical whiff of pandan leaves. And the coffee? It’s thick, dark and unctuous, made with coffee beans roasted in butter and sugar for an overpowering robust, caramelized flavor.
We have the Hainanese diaspora to thank for this. Immigrant cooks from the southern tip of China plied their trade in British households and barracks in colonial Singapore, absorbing the idiosyncrasies of their employers along the way. Today, eggs, kaya toast and kopi has reached an extraordinary level of ubiquity: found at coffee shops, hawker centers, food courts, and headlining wildly successful franchises like Ya Kun Kaya Toast and Toast Box.
So whenever you wash down a warm spoonful of coconut-spiked egg with thick, dark coffee, remember that you’re taking off a chunk of history – in this breakfast is writ the panoply of Singapore’s hodgepodge of immigration, our rich past, and our love for all things simple and comforting.