Champion noodles

Maureen Suan Neo may look Chinese to Western eyes, but she learnt Malay and English as her first two languages and has forgotten most of the Mandarin she studied at school. She is a Nonya. She belongs to the hybrid Singaporean community of Malay-Chinese which still has a strong individual identity despite the changes in modern Singapore.

Nonya cooking reflects the marriage of the two cultures from which it developed. At its simplest it could be described equally accurately as southern Chinese food with chillies or Malay cooking with Chinese seasonings. It's a varied style, with its own soups, stir-fries, stews, pickles and snacks: for instance, popiah, a Nonya version of the spring roll, is sometimes left unfried and is almost always more juicy than the Cantonese recipes.

Noodles form a basic part of the diet of all Singaporeans, whatever their ancestral roots. Hawkers of Chinese, Tamil, Malay or Nonya stock sell them on the housing estates with endless variations. There are several varieties, but the three most common are the round, oily, egg noodle familiar in the West, rice vermicelli (of which there are slightly thicker and thinner kinds), and flat, ho fun noodles made from ground rice, which look like tagliatelle.

There are probably a dozen distinct Nonya noodle recipes, all of which borrow or derive from other communities. Laksa lemak, "rich noodles", a kind of soup which has been adopted by Australia, owes much to its Indonesian origin. Char kway teow, a stir-fry, has links with the southern Chinese Hokkien culture. Mee siam, flavoured with tamarind, is Thai.

Hawkers and food stalls specialising in noodle dishes allow customers to choose which kind of noodle they want with their soup or stir-fry. So, it's OK to use egg noodles in a laksa, for instance, rather than the rice vermicelli. Custom, however, suggests that the latter is more effective.