Food

10 Nostalgic Food That Are Hard to Find in Singapore Now

2016-07-28 , 3:41 pm

Last Updated on 2022-09-18 , 7:02 pm

People from the 80s and 90s will always have our comfort food to fall back to. These days, we get so many variations and renditions of local food that we sometimes just crave the same old ones, or something that can allow us to hold back onto a piece of the past that make us feel young and free as children again.

We can’t turn back time for you, but what we can do, though, is tell you what nostalgic foods and snacks you should find before they are gone in the time to come.

1. Tu Tu Kueh

Tu Tu Kueh is a traditional snack made of flour and comes with various toppings such as chocolate, peanut, and coconut. The kueh is first prepared on a silver mould before placing it into a steamer. These little morsels of joy are always our go-to snacks whenever we see them parading on pushcarts. What about you?

2. Muah Chee

Muah Chee is essentially traditional glutinous rice balls coated with crushed peanuts and sugar, and it is very popular among the local crowd. These days, it is harder to find these morsels of heaven around in pushcarts, but we found one for you that is supposedly really famous for their Black & White Mua Chee.

3. Iced Gem Biscuits

These are no stranger to any Singaporean. These gems (pun intended) have grown so much with us, and are even coined as iconic snacks of Singapore, so much as that we even see them printed on life-size plushies these days. Thank god they’re still widely found everywhere!

4. Putu Mayam

Putu Mayam is one of my favorite snacks / breakfasts when I was a kid, where I got immense satisfaction pulling out the “bee hoon” and dipping them into the orange sugar. Even though I often made a mess, but it thoroughly enjoyed it.

5. Cash Cash Ice Pops

Do you remember meeting your friends at a local convenience stall or at a Mama Shop after school to buy one of these? Or how you and your friends gathered to buy one of these babies after a game of hide n seek? Yup, that’s how we remember it as well. Best part? It was only priced at S$0.10 a pop in the past.

6. Colourful Steamed Cakes

These extra light sponge cakes are usually what we could pack to school as snacks for recess breaks. Or even something our parents used to pacify us with when we were young, innocent and probably always crying. It’s a pity that we don’t see much of it these days, but thankfully, some old-school bakeries are still selling them. So try spotting them if you can!

7. Haw Flakes

Haw Flakes are disc-shaped candies made from Chinese hawthorn and packed into cylindrical stacks. This candy used to be a crowd favourite among children of the 80s or 90s, and would often be snagged clean whenever we brought it to school to share it with our friends.

8. Chocolate Eyeglasses / Fake M&Ms

Being a 90s kid myself, I am ashamed to say that I have never tried this before. Not even once. But I do know that most people refer to them as the Fake M&Ms, and always have a hell lot of fun trying to pierce them out from the silver foils.

9. Apollo Chocolate Wafer

I still remember receiving these in my Children’s Day goodie bags and thinking that these were just pure chocolate bars from heaven. Back then, we did not have Royce Chocolate nor Hersheys. These were the only thing that we could associate with in the past.

10. Yam Abacus Seeds (算盘子)

Something unconventional, but still widely loved by many. Abacus Seeds is a classic Hakka dish that are made up of morsels of yam paste which resembled that of Abacus. They are known to be served at restaurants or even at weddings as abacus has a close relation to money, which means that having this will bring you luck.

Featured Image: Shopee + Pinterest + kuehkueh.com.sg + laabicook.com