Yesterday’s gone…

Way back in the 50’s and 60’s when I was still little, sometimes my dad would send me to buy some tauhu chui (soya bean milk) and tee peang (40 sen each nowadays, 50 sen at some places)…

…from a guy at the junction of Market Road and Island Road – my dad’s shop was right around the corner at Old Street. The freshly-made soya bean milk would be sold in recycled glass (beer) bottles – plastic was unheard of in those days and I do remember him selling Chinese fried or koi (yam cake) too.

This man would set up his stall that looked something like this…

*I don’t know the source of this photograph – got it from a discussion forum and it was shared by someone in the group*

…on the pavement against the wall of Yu Chiong – the shop is still there to this very day but of course, you do not get to see the stall anymore. If I am not wrong, there was a cobbler there once but no tauhu chui and tee peang stall.

It seemed at the time that the two would always go together as they would use soya beans to make the tauhu chui and then use the pulp to make the tee peang…

…but I do not seem to see this correlation between the two anymore these days.

In Singapore , these Fuzhou delights are called oyster cakes for the obvious reason that they have oysters inside, among a whole lot of stuff – I saw a recipe that called for pork, prawns and so on. I have never tried those but there are those who have and they say that those aren’t quite the same and aren’t as nice – our Sibu tee peang is better.

We do not have those here but, yes, we have the ones with meat filling (RM1.50 each). Those first made their appearance here sometime in the 80’s or 90’s, I think, when somebody would fry them on the spot at his stall set up on a trishaw at the Tiong Hua Road end of the Sarawak House overhead bridge and people would show up by the droves to buy those from him, present company included.

Of course he is not there anymore but the ones with meat filling are also available at the shop where I got the kosong ones featured above or you can get them from that handsome boy stall at the pasar malam (night market) and I think there is a stall as well at the central market in the morning, frying and selling these. There is a corner shop at Rejang Park that sells these too but they only have the kosong ones, not those with meat filling.

Yesterday’s gone and all that is left of the street hawker’s tauhu chui & tee peang stall is the memories of it in my childhood days. In time to come, nobody would know it ever existed and hopefully, in time to come, there will still be people making tee peang…

…as nice as the ones we grew up enjoying and loved so well over the years.

SWEE HUNG (2.316161, 111.840441) is located along Jalan Ruby, in the block of shops on the right – next to a hair salon at the extreme end.