Malaysia's melting pot cuisine: from Lea & Perrin's to Nyonya soup

Man's happiness, as Lord Byron pointed out, much depends on dinner, but so do weightier matters: the beautiful cities of the Malay Peninsula's west coast would look very different if it weren't for gourmands of one kind or another, and might in fact not exist at all.

They look out onto the Strait of Malacca, the slim strip of ocean that wends from Singapore up past Malacca City to Penang and the Thai border; for hundreds of years, this was a great spice route between India and China, and if Malaysia is now one of the world's finest and most varied places to eat, that channel of turquoise water can take some of the credit.

Everybody came to Malaysia: the Thais from the north and the Indonesians from the west; the Chinese and the Indians to work tin mines and tap rubber, and of course those hungry adventurers the Europeans: the houses on Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock in Malacca, also known as Heeren Street, are narrow but amazingly deep, thanks to the Dutch habit of taxing according to frontage during their 17th- and 18th-century occupation; the peaceful co-existence of Dutch and Malay names is again apparent on the touristy morass of Jonker's Walk, also known as Jalan Hang Jebat.

Down at Malacca port, in Medan Portugis, descendants of Portuguese traders sell superb fresh fish at a cluster of food stalls; in Kuala Lumpur, you can eat some decidedly odd, if delicious, hybrids of Hainanese cooking and the home treats their British masters demanded. One such is Hainanese chicken chop, best tried at Yut Kee, which has been turning out these fried chicken legs topped with cubed vegetables and spicy onion gravy for nearly a century; another local delicacy that looks decidedly familiar is Kaya toast, soft white bread with coconut jam, butter and sugar.

On Pangkor Laut, a luxury island resort halfway up the west coast, 81-year-old Uncle Lim, inset, sits in his circular, open-air restaurant, built on a rocky outcrop just above the Strait, and tells me about cooking for British sailors in the pre-independence Malaya of his youth: "They'd eat anything but they wanted English ingredients," he remembers: "mustard, Lea & Perrin's sauce, black pepper." The influence of Empire spreads wide, it seems: mustard is a Mediterranean plant, brought by the Romans to France; black pepper comes from India's Malabar coast – and Lea & Perrin's so-called Worcestershire sauce is a condiment that travelled from India to Britain and back to Asia where, until recently, Hainanese cooks made their own.

So did the Nyonyas: the women of the Peranakan people, whose Chinese immigrant forebears married Malay women and generated an entire culture. The legend is that Princess Hang Li Po of China was given in marriage to the Sultan of Malacca in the 15th century, after an exchange of political bicep-baring during which the Chinese Emperor sent a multitude of golden needles to indicate the immense number of his subjects and the Sultan responded in kind, replacing the needles with grains of sago.

It is also possible that the so-called Princess was a commoner on whom the besotted Sultan bestowed a title in order to justify marrying her: the origins of the Peranakans are as alluring a blend of vague facts and lurid legends as their food is of bland carbohydrates and thrilling spices. What is certain is that those Chinese-Malay marriages created a culture that was neither the one nor the other – a whole way of living, speaking and eating robust enough to endure five centuries, even if it is, inevitably, fading now.

Why, in a country so stuffed with amazing food that any time spent with one's mouth unfilled feels like a tragedy, is the Peranakan story so especially appealing? Perhaps because it embodies a wistful ideal of assimilation without compromise. The Malaysian government likes to refer to the country as a melting pot: in this scenario, Chinese, Malays and Indians cohabit peacefully and joyously in a bubbling mélange of culinary and cultural practices. This may be wishful thinking: in a 2006 survey of Malaysian racism by the New Straits Times, 34% of people said they had never had a meal with people of other ethnicities.

The Peranakans, or BabaNyonyas, (Babas are the men) are different. Themselves a blend of ethnicities, they became the conduit for other cultures – liaisons between the conquerors and their subjects, particularly once the British gained ascendancy in the 19th century. Their Anglophilia gleams from the long mahogany table, set with English crockery and cutlery rather than chopsticks, in the Peranakan mansion that is now the Baba and Nyonya Heritage Museum on Malacca's Heeren Street.

The spice wealth from the Malacca Strait flowed into this house and others like it (in Kochik Kitchen, a nearby mansion that's now a Nyonya restaurant, you can look up to see a black circle on the ceiling: a spyhole from which strict Baba papas could look down, in every sense, on possible suitors). It trickled into the food and transformed it, from the peasant cooking of Hainan or Fujian Province, or of the Malay kampong (village), into an immensely complicated and time-consuming cuisine befitting a wealthy group of integrating immigrants, keen to display their success and keep their servants busy – and unwilling to give up the best of home cooking just because they now had a new home.

"There are more dry herbs, chilli and garlic in Nyonya cooking," says Uncle Lim, who learned this style of cuisine in Penang, which is, along with Malacca and Singapore, the main centre of Peranakan culture, although the styles differ, with hot and sour Thai influences (lemongrass, bird's eye chilli) setting northern dishes aflame in contrast to the gentler coconut creaminess of the south. Either way, the food is pungent: the smell of the spices is meant to stimulate appetites, says Lim, presumably another requirement for a wealthy, overfed tribe – and one that we well-stuffed tourists can also appreciate.

The dishes are wonderful in their blending of flavours and textures. Pie tee are little crunchy top hat-shaped casings, filled with minced chicken or prawn, garlic, carrot and turnip. Assam laksa, the hot, sour Nyonya soup of Penang, has noodles and crunchy cucumber, powerful belacan, the ubiquitous spicy shrimp paste, and sweet pineapple, sharp lime and soft fish. Here is the Malaysian pot made deliciously real: a complex assemblage of tastes and temperaments, all as beautifully integrated and as deliciously weird as the Peranakans themselves.

It isn't hard, standing on the beach at Pangkor Laut, looking out at the Strait, to appreciate its beauty: white sand and turquoise waves framed by lush greenery, the quiet solidity of the trees contrasting with a silver streak of fish glinting briefly beneath the water. But the loveliness of the view is merely a distraction from the crucial importance of this swathe of ocean: dinner, after all, depends on it.

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While you're there

Visit the Batu Caves, just 13km outside Kuala Lumpur – a series of immense limestone caverns that is also a Hindu shrine. Very touristy now, but fascinating.

Field Guide

How to do it: Nina Caplan travelled to Kuala Lumpur on British Airways (ba.com), which has just recommenced direct flights to Malaysia after a hiatus of 14 years, and stayed at the Majestic Hotel Kuala Lumpur, the Majestic Malacca, Pangkor Laut Resort and 93 Armenian Street, Penang.

The restaurant: Uncle Lim's Kitchen is on Pangkor Laut Resort

What to read: The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw, a Booker-longlisted novel about 1940s Malaya by this young London-based Malaysian writer. The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither by Isabella Bird, an intrepid – and eccentric! – Victorian traveller.

What to pack: Suncream, mosquito repellent and shorts with an elastic waist: the Muslim population on the west coast is extremely tolerant of scantily clad Westerners, but your girth is liable to expand while you're there...