Onde-Onde (Malaysian Sweet Palm-Sugar Dumplings)

A favorite teatime treat for many Malaysians is onde-onde, a fluffy, chewy ball filled with melted palm sugar, the dough tinged green with pandan and covered with freshly grated coconut. I say “a” but it’s hard to stop at just one, as these emerald nuggets are extremely snackable. Onde-onde is one of dozens of types of kuih, lovingly and laboriously prepared snack items that have their roots in Nyonya culture. There are two things to define here now: What is Nyonya, and what is kuih? Let’s talk about Nyonya first.

Nyonya is a shortened form of the term Baba-Nyonya, which refers to the Peranakan Chinese, one of the most well known of Malaysia's many ethnic groups. The Peranakan Chinese are descended from Chinese settlers who integrated into local Malay communities and adopted many of their cultural practices. There are other Peranakan groups around the region, including the Peranakan Chitty and Peranakan Jawa (“Peranakan” means “mixed parentage,” more or less), but the Peranakan Chinese have arguably gone to the greatest lengths to preserve their culture and heritage, especially food.
 
As for the definition of kuih, in the most general sense it refers to snack foods both sweet and savory. Kuih means different things to different people, but according to Debbie Teoh, a renowned Nyonya chef from Malaysia, kuih is any snack item that very specifically can be eaten in “one—maximum two—bites.”

Kuih: Symbolism in Every Bite

The small size of kuih is significant, their daintiness reflecting the importance placed on refinement in Nyonya culture. This kind of symbolism is woven throughout Nyonya culture, from furniture to fashion to food, each item signifying something particular. Food is where this symbolism shows itself the most: Show up to a Nyonya wedding dinner and each dish will be curated to represent prosperity, fertility, and the like. 

These days, though, a lot of kuih offered outside the home tends to be larger in size, lacking the traditional symbolism of these snacks. When I spoke to Debbie Teoh about kuih, I asked her about the super-sizing that was becoming more and more common. “People are not so careful about symbolism and significance these days,” Debbie lamented. “More than two bites is not kuih—Nyonya would say kasar.” “Kasar” in this context means “rude” or “uncouth.” Small bites are necessary because traditional Nyonya etiquette dictates that you’re to be dainty and not open your mouth too wide when eating.

Beyond their size, kuih can function on multiple other symbolic levels. Different shapes, colors, and ways of presenting kuih are selected depending on the occasion. Happy celebrations like birthdays involve brightly colored kuih in red, orange, and yellow hues. Somber gatherings like funerals use the colors black, blue, and white. 

Onde-onde is specifically meant to be served at weddings. As for why, well, one might be able to guess based on the visuals of the fluffy balls. “The Nyonya are very crude! They’re actually very loud; they just don’t use their mouths to talk,” Debbie says, laughing, of the way these Nyonya symbols can simultaneously enforce good manners while indulging in some good, old-fashioned sexual innuendo. “I didn’t come up with these things. These symbols came about way before I was born.

The Building Blocks of Onde-Onde

If there was a cheat sheet of common Malaysian kuih ingredients, it would include some kind of rice flour (either regular or glutinous), palm sugar, fresh grated coconut, and pandan leaves. Onde-onde has them all. These sweets are made by wrapping pandan-scented glutinous rice flour dough around a filling of Malaysian palm sugar called gula melaka, boiling the filled dough balls, and then rolling them in coconut.

According to Debbie Teoh, the true Nyona way of preparing onde-onde uses gula melaka syrup. But since filling the dough balls with syrup can be tricky even for seasoned cooks, Debbie suggests using very finely shaved gula melaka instead. To ensure that the sugar melts into gooey, pops-in-your-mouth sweetness, it’s important to use the right ratio of dough to filling. If the skin is too thick, the gula melaka shavings will not melt while boiling, resulting in an unpleasant grainy texture. Many Nyonya aunties insist as well on using mashed cooked sweet potato in the dough (as does this recipe), as it helps keep the onde-onde tender after they cool down. 

When we chatted about the substitutions that diaspora Malaysians use when making Malaysian recipes, Debbie was supportive, saying, “Recipes will always evolve. You have to accept it.” For those without easy access to freshly grated coconut, she offered an ingenious tip she heard from Malaysians living overseas: microwaving desiccated coconut in a small amount of water. I tried this technique, and it rehydrated perfectly, producing an excellent stand-in for freshly grated shavings.

Of course we’d all like to make a dish with its "original" and "correct" ingredients in the "proper" way. But the further you get from the place and time a dish originates, the more it adapts. The Nyonya probably understand this as well as anyone, themselves being a diasporic community. So when you’re hankering for a taste for home, you do the best you can with what you have, even if it means microwaving dried coconut.