Early Mornings at the Laksa Café Brought Back My Wet Market Memories

I still have quite a bit left to finish Early Mornings at the Laksa Café by Janet Tay. I’m only at Chapter 9. But I felt like sharing this now, while the thoughts are still fresh.

There’s a paragraph about Ah Hock buying spices from an old shop at the Main Bazaar — “big plastic bags of shallots, garlic, dried chillies, candlenut, cumin, cardamom, clove, nutmeg. Thirty ingredients altogether.”

When I read that line, I paused. I even told my boyfriend about it straight away. Somehow, it reminded me of going to the wet market with my Mum.

To be honest, I never liked going to the wet market that much — especially the seafood section. The smell, the wet floors… not exactly my favourite place. But funny enough, those are the memories that stay.

Wet market memories are like that. You don’t think about them often. But one mention of spices, and everything comes back — the smell of dried chillies, the slightly damp floor, stall owners talking loudly over one another.

Image recreated with ChatGPT.

I remember standing quietly beside Mum at the spice stall. The aunty would scoop spices into small plastic bags without measuring anything. You just tell her what you’re cooking.

Maybe something like,

“Auntie, wa ai zhu kari hanga hu.” (stingray curry) Or “Wa ai zhu kari kay.” (curry chicken)

And she would just nod.

No recipe book. No weighing scale. No hesitation. Her hands already knew what to scoop.

Thinking about it now, they were like magicians.

I didn’t realise then that I was watching skill. I just thought it was normal.

There’s something about Asian food culture that carries so much unspoken knowledge. Experience passed down not through instructions, but through doing. Through watching. Through years of practice.

I haven’t even finished the book yet. Maybe the story will go somewhere else entirely. But today, at Chapter 9, it brought me home for a moment. So I’m sharing this before I turn the next page.

Sometimes reading isn’t about finishing quickly. Sometimes it’s about pausing when a memory knocks. Especially this one.

Do you have a food memory that comes back just from one smell or one line in a book?

May xx