A Toast to Singapore

The City’s Sweetest Start Begins With a Bolt of Kopi and a Spread of Kaya Jam 

- George W. Stone

Here’s what my first breakfast in my new home of Singapore looked like: sticky, slime coloured coconut custard jam slathered over a thin crisp of toasted brown bread, served with a side of two eggs so undercooked that their whites retained the clarity of newly dead fisheyes. Alongside, a small cup of coffee with an oleaginous blackness that rejected the advances of condensed milk. It was not love at first sight.

And yet, in a way that only travellers can appreciate, a passion was born. The basis of a classic Singaporean breakfast, kaya is a custard of coconut milk,eggs, and sugar, flavoured with pandan leaf, which gives the jam the perfume of freshly cut grass and the flavour of the underside of a lawn mower. In the Malay language, kaya means “rich.” But the richness doesn’t end with the jam. It’s served with barely boiled eggs, cracked into a shallow dish and seasoned with soy sauce and white pepper. Hyper caffeinated coffee, made from beans sautéed in margarine and sugar, is sweetened to an unseemly viscosity. You can add iced Milo, a chocolate malt drink, for extra sugar. The whole meal— order it as “kaya toast”—is a staple in kopitiams (kopi is Malay for “coffee”; tiam means “shop” in Hokkien) and will set you back about SGD3/`145.