Urban Legend Feature - What's In That Satay Gravy

Ask Singaporeans what they remember about the now-defunct Satay Club at the old Esplanade, and the answer would probably be: cool breeze, smoky air and delicious satay to die for. The cluster of 28 stall there, of which 21 hawked satay, was the favourite haunt of foodies and night owls during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Satay Club first opened in the 1940s off Beach Road, near a bus terminus in Hoi How Road, which no longer exists on the map. It then moved to the Esplanade in 1970, and began doing roaring business. By the late 1980s, however, it has lost much of its charm. Dogged by customer complaints of bad hygiene practices and rampant touting, it eventually closed for good to make way for the arts centre Esplanade – Theatres On The Bay and the Nicoll Highway extension.

But not every memory of the Satay Club consists of mouth-watering chicken, mutton and beef satay by the way. In fact, there is an unsavoury tale about the place that could put you off the sticks of skewered meat altogether.

Rumour has it that to keep customers coming back for more, satay hawkers went to great lengths to spice up their gravy. The story went that they borrowed from black magic rituals and added “special ingredients” like dirty underwear and soiled sanitary napkins.

“I’m not sure how it began,” recalled bank officer Janice Chen, 32. “but when I was a kid, I heard from a friend who, as usual, heard from a friend’s friend and so on, that someone had gone to the gravy pot for a second helping and fished out a soiled sanitary napkin. “from then on, I was quite wary every time I had satay. It didn’t put me off entirely, but I was sure to check for strange items”.

Mr Charles Goh, 37, the founder of Asia Paranormal Investigators (API), a Singapore group that studies paranormal activities and urban legends, said: “I used to eat there a lot and did hear people talking about the rumour. I agree that the satay there seemed to taste better than those elsewhere. But then again, this could have been due to the atmosphere.”

We first checked with Mr Fahmi Rais, who heads the department of spiritual research at Singapore paranormal Investigators. The group, which had about 500 members, also deal with paranormal activity. Mr Fahmi, 38, has studied Malay superstitions and magic for the past 25 years. He was not aware of the Satay Club rumour, but said the use of “personal wares” like underwear and sanitary pads to win favour with people is a popular Indonesian ritual.

These rituals, he said, date back to pre-Islamic times and are steeped more in tradition than religion. For instance, a popular custom that some still practices is for newly married women to cook a pot of rice and place it between her legs. She lets the vapour seep into her clothes and genitalia, then back into the pot again.

The belief is that once her husband eats from that pot of rice, the couple will enjoy a smooth marriage. “Genitals, underwear, sanitary napkins – they are all considered dirty things. The dirtier something is, the more potent the magic is said to be,” said Mr Fahmi.

Mr Kamil Kassam, 49, a Malay folklore expert with API, had a theory about the power of soiled sanitary napkins. “In black magic, blood is needed to summon evil spirits,” he said. His late father, a satay seller on Bedok North, was a non-practising bomoh (Malay for healer or witch doctor). lthough he was familiar with the Satay Club story, he dismissed it instantly. “Someone probably started the rumour about a competitor to cause the other guy’s business to suffer.”

So while these accounts confirmed that there was some basis to the story, did the hawkers at Satay Club ever act on those beliefs?

Tracking down former Satay Club hawkers was the best way to crack the mystery, but this proved to be an arduous task. After the makan haven shut down in 1995, many of its hawkers moved to other food hubs like Lau Pa Sat and Clarke Quay. Admittedly, stalls that claimed to be from the original Satay Club – either from Hoi How Road or the Esplanade – are aplenty. Many, however, are run by second- or third-generation hawkers who have no recollection of the old days. Others have long been taken over by outsiders.

But at Makansutra Gluttons Bay at Esplanade Mall, an open-air food centre with 12 stalls that opened in 2005, hawker Kamis Decon was able to shed some light on the rumour. The 62 year old, who claims to be the oldest living Satay Club hawker still in business, runs the Alhambra Padang Satay stall which was set up in 1962 in Hoi How Road.

At the old Satay Club, his stall number was 16. He shook his head incredulously when we asked him if the rumour was true. “It’s nonsense. In the old days, everyone used ingredients of better quality,” he said. “Although the same ingredients like coriander, tamarind and lemongrass are used now, they are of poorer quality. That’s why the satay tasted better then.”

He added, “The story about using underwear or sanitary pads, that’s all gossip.” Like Mr Kamil, he had heard of it, but believed it was simply the work of a disgruntled saboteur among the hawkers. Still, after some probing, he revealed that it was not uncommon for hawkers then to resort to black magic to ward off competition.

He recounted, to our surprise, that he “kena sabo before”. One day in 1972, he found his stall surrounded by ground kemenyan, a kind of fragrant crystallite used by bomohs to cast sharms or spells. Undaunted, he gathered the kemenyan and threw the particles into the fire. The culprit, he suspected, was a neighbouring stall owner whose plan of sabotage backfired. That day, Mr Kamis sold all his satay in one hour.

Another former Satay Club hawker, Mr Martoyo Ngawan, 49, had also heard of the story but never witnessed it. He used to help out at his late father’s business – Stall #1 at the Satay Club – and now runs Fatman Satay at Lau Pa Sat. “What I know is that hawkers sometimes use pieces of white cloth to skim off the ingredients from the gravy so that customers won’t end up biting into the spices,” he pointed out. This white cloth, he reasoned, may have been mistaken for a sanitary napkin or underwear.

We also checked with the National Environment Agency (NEA) in the hope that securing something more solid than an educated guess. Formerly the Ministry of Environment, it regulates hygiene standards at food centres, including the old Satay Club.

Surely the unlucky customer who had fished out underwear or a sanitary napkin would have lodged an official complaint? Archived newspaper reports from 1970 to 1995 showed that the ministry often stepped in to deal with errant hawkers who flouted hygiene regulations.

However, the NEA came back to say that its checks on Satay Club “yielded no returns as the records were irretrievable”. This deepened the intrigue and left us none the wiser. But whether or not “special ingredients” were ever used, Singaporeans’ stomachs are surely made of sterner stuff.

Said sales manager James Lee, 36: “Who cares, really? People go for good food. As long as they don’t end up getting food poisoning or a tummy ache, they won’t care what goes into the satay gravy.”.