Luxury at every level in Singapore

My hands are covered in red paste – sticky and still hot from the boiling carcass. Connective tissue and bone matter and shredded muscle collect between my fingers in a gory pulp.

It’s a war zone on my plate. A battle over the best that nature has to offer. Protected beneath a tank-like carapace, flaming red, steeps the delicate white meat of an enormous crab. Claws and legs and sockets – Darwinian underwater armor – I bring the full might of human engineering to bear. With metal claws of my own, I shatter the beautiful red exoskeleton and coax the meat out in dainty mouthfuls, using a combination long metal poker and probing tongue, slurping the softened innards. I construct euphoria in tiny increments. Every bite is a battle won. The shrapnel and slaughter accumulate on a once pristine white plate in a mountain of decimated body parts as I bathe myself in the taste of chili and crab.

Chili Crab is one of the most famous dishes in a city famous for dishes. A large pot is brought to the table. In it: a fiery, soupy mess of disjointed crab. The boiled arachnid is separated into claws and legs, its reinforced bunker of a shell floats along for good measure. In between skirmishes with the beast, you can fill up with the fried Chinese mantou buns. A perfect sponge for the velvety sauce, as you sweep it through the pot, the airy interior is permeated with red. You can watch it change from innocent white fluff to bloody gloop, as little morsels of crabmeat floating in the spicy swamp latch on for the ride before being popped into a waiting mouth.

The dish is a luxury that isn’t. It’s expensive. Two crabs can run upwards of S$100 (close to $80 U.S.). And it tastes like the good life too. Delicate, rich, creamy – live boiled, enormous crabs are one of the finest proteins the sea has to offer. But it’s a dirty eating. A sloppy and embarrassing affair when your chin is covered in red muck and your lips are spice-puffed pillows cradling little fragments of another animal’s flesh in the corners and your nice shirt is sweat-stained and streaked with the bloody evidence of a battle well fought.

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If chili crab represents one end of the spectrum – messy and expensive – the equally iconic Singaporean dish of chicken rice attends to the cheap and easy.

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Boiled chicken. White rice. S$3. A deception. On paper and even in person, it looks like the quick snack for someone unconcerned with taste: colorless and dull. How wrong.

Chicken rice shows how deliciously complex tastes can be constructed in the mundane confines of the everyday. Hidden in the dripping pale flesh, in the unassuming plump grains of rice, concentrated bursts of flavor fold and mix and compound. Served in food courts and street side stalls, on stainless steel tables under fluorescent lights in any neighborhood, there are as many ways to make chicken rice as there are people to make it. The delicately poached chicken remains tender. The fatty layer under the skin is engaged by the heat while remaining intact: a soft, bird-lubricating cream. Rice is fried in even more chicken fat before being cooked in a rich chicken stock. Chicken flavor, that homiest of tastes, steeps into every facet of the dish. Succulence at every layer.

Mix the meat and the rice into a pale blend of fatty flavor. It’s served with an electric garlic-chili sauce. Almost florescent red enlivens the plate while kecap manis, the syrupy black Indonesian soy sauce, splatters cirss-cross over the steaming pile like a Pollock painting.

Everyone enjoys their own condiment combination in this universal Singaporean indulgence. Flavor for the masses.