Street Food Home

Singapore

Teh Tarik

In the process of writing this section, I realized that I could not tell LibreOffice that I meant teh instead of the. That would screw my spelling correction so badly. So, in this bit, where I explain what a teh tarik is, and how it's prepared, and so on, keep in mind that I had to go back and correct the to teh manually when I ported the text over to Dreamweaver. The term translates in English to “pulled”, and so a teh tarik is a pulled tea. Pulled from what? Out of the air, darn near, as it turns out.

You start with strong black tea, add a dollop of sweetened condensed milk, a splash of water, and then you pour the concoction from one mixing pitcher to another. The pour is known as a pull, and hence pulled tea, or tea that is mixed by pouring it from container to container. Some of the tea vendors will make a very big show of the pull, and if you check online, you can find some tea pullers doing serious dance moves with fluids swirling about them from pitcher to pitcher, at a stand on the edge of the street. The hawker centre tea pullers do not do big fancy moves. There's not room in the stall for it. They do however hand you a freshly mixed hot tea that, while you could make a similar one at home, tastes different from the aeration of the pull.

The Turkish Ice Cream Man

For truly fancy presentation, to the point where it's an entire show, you need to find a Turkish ice cream man. There's an entire act involved, although each vendor puts his own spin on it, and it's the closest thing I saw on the streets of Singapore to a Punch and Judy show. I've got video of one of these guys doing the entire routine with a Japanese tourist while her male companion shot video up close. Now, if there's a line, the act gets skipped, and people get their ice cream and pay and move along. If he gets down to one customer, though, the act goes on, and it draws attention, and that boosts sales. Remember what I said about playing the flute at a hot dog stand? These guys are a cultural reference, performance art that's part of the texture of the place, and it's fun to watch people who've never encountered one get the full routine. There's swapping of cones so that the customer keeps ending up with an empty cone. There's a whacking great ball of ice cream in one of the wells that's never actually served, just pulled out and offered, but of course that's far too much, that's ridiculous, let me have that back. The sleight of hand that these guys do is just a total thing to watch.