Eurasian Cuisine in Singapore Has Always Been Hard to Categorise

Where European Cuisine Begins

Ask someone to describe Eurasian food and the pause before the answer is telling. It is not that the cuisine is obscure, but that it resists shorthand. 

The largest and most historically documented strand of Eurasian culture in Singapore descends from the Kristang community, a creole people who emerged in Malacca following the Portuguese conquest of 1511. Portuguese settlers intermarried with local Malay, Indian and Chinese women, and over generations a distinct community formed, with its own language (a Portuguese-based creole still spoken by some today), its own religious practices and its own table. 

When the British established a trading settlement in Singapore in 1819, many Kristang families relocated from Malacca, carrying their recipes and domestic customs with them. British, Dutch and other European communities followed over the course of the 19th century, each adding further threads. What then emerged was not a single unified cuisine but a constellation of related cooking traditions held together by shared ingredients, shared techniques and a shared experience of navigating between cultures.

The Flavour Logic Behind Eurasian Cuisine

To understand what makes Eurasian cooking distinctive, it helps to look at what it actually does on the plate. 

Take Feng, the spiced preparation traditionally made from Christmas leftovers. Its use of vinegar and mustard recalls Portuguese pickling traditions that trace back to Malacca in the 16th century, yet its rempah base, ground from chillies, shallots, galangal and candlenuts, is unmistakably rooted in Malay and Peranakan spice practice. Neither element is decorative, both are structural, and the dish only makes sense when you understand that the cook who first made it was fluent in both languages simultaneously.

That same fluency runs through Debal, the Boxing Day dish prepared from the remnants of the Christmas feast: roast meats, smoked ham and sausages cooked in a spiced, vinegar-sharpened sauce that adds considerable heat and complexity while keeping the meat. This is not fusion in the contemporary sense, a word that implies novelty and intention. It is something older and more practical, the output of a community that had access to two distinct culinary vocabularies and used both because the situation called for it. 

Once you begin to see that logic, it appears everywhere. In Baca Assam, a slow-braised beef cheek pulled into tenderness by tamarind, the Portuguese technique of long braising meets the sour, spice-layered sauces of the region. In Chorka Tambrinhyu, squid cooked with chilli, garlic, tomato and English mustard, that mustard is worth pausing on. It appears in Kristang cooking with enough regularity and historical consistency to be considered a defining ingredient, one of several quiet markers that distinguish this cuisine from the Peranakan and Malay traditions it sometimes superficially resembles.

Why Eurasian Cuisine Resists Categorisation

The deeper reason Eurasian food is difficult to classify has less to do with its ingredients than with how it was kept alive. 

Unlike French cuisine, systematised through professional culinary institutions from the 19th century onwards, or Chinese regional cuisines anchored to geography and large, stable communities, Eurasian cooking was transmitted domestically. Within households. Across kitchen tables. Through handwritten recipe books passed from parent to child, sometimes with measurements, sometimes without. 

This means variation becomes a feature of the tradition. One family’s Sugee cake, the semolina and almond confection central to Eurasian festive occasions, may differ meaningfully from another’s in its ratio of ingredients or its degree of richness, and both versions will be considered correct by the families who make them. There is no canonical text, no single arbiter of authenticity. The cuisine is, by its very nature, plural. 

For much of the 20th century, that domestic character also made it largely invisible to those outside the community. The Eurasian population in Singapore has always been relatively small, and its food was prepared at home rather than served in restaurants. This protected the recipes from the homogenising pressures of commercialisation, but it also meant that generations of Singaporeans grew up without ever encountering a properly made Debal or a Kueh Bingka with the right crust. That is, unless they happened to know the right family.

The Table as Archive

What Eurasian cuisine lacks in institutional documentation, it makes up for in depth of feeling. These are dishes that were cooked for people who were loved, on occasions that mattered, by cooks who understood that a well-made Debal or a properly weighted Sugee cake carried meaning beyond the plate.

Gilmore & Damian D’Silva was founded on exactly that understanding. Chef Damian D’Silva spent decades studying and reviving the recipes his grandfather Gilmore, the longtime caretaker of Singapore’s Supreme Court, cooked from memory, preparations that trace their lineage back more than a hundred years. 

Today, those dishes are served within National Gallery Singapore, housed in the very civic buildings where Gilmore once worked. That the food found its way back to the place it came from is not something that needed engineering. It is simply, and rather beautifully, where it belongs. Reserve your table here.