Laksa Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Laksa is a spicy noodle soup that took shape among the Peranakan Chinese of the Straits Settlements, in ports such as Penang, and became a fixture across the region during the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements era. Its date of formation is, by scholarly measure, largely settled.

Three ingredients carry the dish: chili pepper, rice noodles, and coconut. Of these, both the rice noodles and the coconut were already at hand locally. Only the chili pepper came from across the ocean, a New World crop that the Portuguese carried by way of Goa, which they reached in 1498, into Malacca in 1511, from where it spread through the Malay archipelago. A spicy noodle soup called laksa could only be cooked once that chili had arrived in Malacca.

The place where the dish came together was the home and street kitchen of the people known as Peranakan. They were the descendants of Chinese men who had crossed the sea and married local Malay women, the Nyonya, and they married a noodle brought from China to a ground spice paste of the Malay kitchen, the sambal or rempah, with chili and coconut. In this way a spicy laksa grew out of the Nyonya kitchens of Malacca, Penang, and Singapore. In time it branched into an assam style, sharp with sourness and made without coconut, and a curry style thickened with coconut. Singapore's National Heritage Board lists this Peranakan laksa on its inventory of intangible cultural heritage.

Laksa has long trailed a reputation for being very old, and the tales attach themselves to that reputation. Among them is the story that a Chinese sailor accompanying Zheng He on his voyages to the Southern Seas (1405-1433) devised the dish at a port of call. It is true enough that Zheng He's fleets increased Chinese migration and trade and laid part of the groundwork for later Peranakan society. But leaping from there to 'a sailor of Zheng He invented laksa' will not square with the dates. The chili pepper a spicy laksa depends on is a New World crop that reached Malacca, by way of the Portuguese, in 1511 — some eighty years after Zheng He's fleet had left the Southern Seas. The sailors had, as yet, no chili with which to make a spicy laksa at all.

The dish's supposed age is also argued from the age of its name. The word 'laksa' is traced to Persian lakhsha (noodle) or Sanskrit laksha (a hundred thousand, hence many kinds), and the Biluluk inscription of Java (1391) records a hanglaksa, a maker of vermicelli. That reading of the inscription comes down to us through the work of the French historian Denys Lombard (Le carrefour javanais, 1990). Laksa appears early in English writing as well: the Oxford English Dictionary gives its first attestation in an 1846 geographical journal.

What is old here, though, is the word 'laksa' as a noodle and the ingredient itself — not a dish of unspiced laksa recorded as a forerunner before the chili arrived. The written record says the same when read closely. In a Dutch East Indies cookbook of 1866, laksa means the rice noodle itself, and the spicy preparation is set down separately, as Kerrie Laksa. At the earliest stage where it appears in writing, a spicy laksa was already made with chili.

The old name and today's spicy laksa need to be kept apart. Neither the inscription of the vermicelli maker nor the tale of Zheng He's voyages stands as the origin of the spicy dish itself. The laksa we know first rose in a Nyonya kitchen, after the chili reached Malacca in 1511.