Growing Up In Trengganu #293, 116

During the break from the rain, as gusting winds lifted sodden paper scraps along the breadth of Jalan Pantai, when clouds of charcoal grey reflected in the puddles, our little town was steeped in melancholy.

In a gap between the tall bamboo panels that made her fencing, on a raised platform sheltered under nipah fronds, Mök Möh sprinkled a bed of cassava flour into the concaved dip in the thin china lid of a bowl. She pressed the flour gently to assume the shape of the mould, and then, in the dip in the flour, she sprinkled coconut sugar, brown as the fisherman come ashore. She heaped another layer of white over the brown, pressing it tightly into shape with another topping mould, concaved in the above as below. This she removed quickly to reveal the bulging top heap, and then, upturning the bottom dish and tapping it a little, out plopped the compacted shape of the cassava meal, like a mini flying saucer, into a muslin cloth that she now folded into a wrap that would soon lie alongside other wraps in the head of steam in her steamer.

The monsoons imbued us with deep pilu wrapped in bright sarongs that village men slipped into, top end hooded over their heads as their hands grabbed the hem sides below to trap some warmth around their body. Pilu and melancholia were close cousins, but it came in chilly winds sodden by the spray of the roaring sea. In atap houses the rain poured in torrents down the pointed nipah tips, cascading down in a curtain of glistening threads of rainwater. A sudden downpour clattering on corrugated roofs, and clattering as it did continuously, mesmerised already dozy heads into an afternoon of deep slumber.

Sometimes in the lull in the cloud break, as haziness melted in the light, I was sent out with a ringgit note in the pocket, to Mök Möh Merah's stall near the surau of Hajii Mat Kerinchi, across the road from Pak Mat Senani's morning stall of nasi minyak and beluda bread. The continuous lashing down of rain chilled the weather that shrank stomachs and caused hunger to gnaw on our entrails. It was Mök Möh who quickly warmed our hearts' cockles, opening lids and pulling putus from her steamer, peeling off their muslin wraps, shedding them like ectoplasm that she'd just plucked from the air.

She made putu ubi from the meal of cassava, she made crumbly putu from finely ground rice flour; and then for the discerning few, she made putu halba that came out piping hot in their fabric wraps, yellow as the fenugreek that she'’d mixed into the rice flour. Before they cooled down she stuck on each a little square mat of banana leaf before placing them on the tray. The mat kept them from sticking to each other when packed together, six putus or seven to the ringgit, in a newspaper parcel that you clutched and hastened home before the coming of the next downpour.

Putu is, I believe, a Tamil word for cakes made from peanuts or rice flour. In Trengganu we have extended our putuspeak to embrace the fenugreek and the cassava, but largely the putu convention is still observed because our putus are still generally flat, and generally crumbly in nature.

For some reason when we travelled to Besut we always came back with stacks and bags of their putu. There were putus the size of twenty sen coins, there were white ones and diamond shaped, and others were made to look like they were the foliage of mythical trees. There were round putus that fitted snugly into your palms, that crumbled and settled immediately in the bottom of your glass of hot Milo. Putus were dunk intolerant by nature and came with patterns passed down from many generations that were carved into their wooden beds of putu moulds. These were the putu beras and putu kacang of Besut, and another that came with the curious name of putu kua.

Mök Möh made discs of moist putu that sulked and curled when left out in the cold. These were steamed putu not baked, that came unadorned with embedded flowers or tendrils.

Picture: Old wooden mould for baked putu.