Mee Rebus (Yellow Noodles in Sweet Potato Gravy)

Variations

• Why it is not a slurry. The rules thickening sauces gives for starch — mix it into cold water first, bring it to the boil at least once, do not over-stir it, add the acid after it has set — are all rules about starch added on its own. Sweet potato brings its starch in already gelatinised and still inside its cell walls. So this gravy is thick because it is full of soft cell fragments rather than because a starch network formed in the liquid, which is why it does not thin on reheating, does not slacken when the tamarind goes in, and cannot be over-stirred.
• What separates it from laksa is the body. The discipline of frying the rempah until the oil breaks out of it is identical, but laksa's body is coconut milk and this one's is sweet potato — which is why laksa must never be boiled hard and this can be boiled as long as you like.
• What separates it from gado-gado and satay is where the peanut sits. In those the peanut is the sauce; here it is a seasoning that adds aroma and richness. Double the peanuts and the gravy is no thicker.
• It has several names. On the east coast of the peninsula (Kelantan, Terengganu) it is mee kuah; in the south (Johor, Melaka, Selangor) and in Sarawak it is mee jawa — which has nothing to do with Java. Mee bandung and mee udang are close relatives.
• With beef: thin slices simmered in the gravy, or shin boiled and its broth used as the stock. With prawns it moves towards mee udang.
• About the photograph: there was a glass of bandung standing at the right of it — the pink drink of rose syrup and evaporated milk, and the standard thing to have beside a bowl of mee rebus in Malaysia and Singapore. It filled a third of the frame and blurred the subject at card size, so it has been cropped out.
• It was a hawker's dish. It used to be carried on a kandar, a shoulder pole with a basket at each end: a stove and the pot of gravy on one side, the noodles and the garnishes on the other.
• Alongside satay: skewers with it is a common pairing.

Tips

• Boil the sweet potato properly soft. Underdone, it keeps its grain through the mashing and the grain stays in the gravy.
• Keep the cooking water. The starch and sweetness that left the sweet potato are in it.
• Fry the rempah until the oil separates. Eight minutes feels long; cut it short and the gravy tastes raw right to the end.
• Judge the body with a ladle. Right when hot means thick when cool, so stop a little on the thin side.
• Boil the noodles apart. Cooked in the gravy they drink it and what is left behind is paste.
• Salt last. Twenty minutes of simmering takes water out, so the seasoning goes in at the end.
• The gravy is better the next day, and reheating does not thin it, which is the advantage of this kind of thickening. Boil fresh noodles for it, though.