Mee Goreng Mamak.

Mamak is the Malaysian term for Tamil Muslims, whose families arrived on the peninsula from South India — many from the Tamil Nadu coast — over generations of trade and migration. Their food stalls, known simply as mamak stalls, became one of the most important institutions in Malaysian social life: cheap, halal, open all night, and one of the few genuinely mixed spaces where Malay, Chinese and Indian Malaysians sit at the same plastic tables. Football is watched at mamak stalls. Arguments are settled there.

The cooking is a hybrid that could not have happened anywhere else. Mee goreng mamak uses Chinese alkaline wheat noodles, Indian frying technique and chile paste, and Malay sweetness, plus tomato ketchup, which arrived through the British and stayed because it worked. Purists occasionally object to the ketchup; the dish has been made that way for as long as anyone can document, and stalls that leave it out produce something noticeably duller. The same kitchen turns out roti canai, nasi kandar, teh tarik pulled between two cups, and mee rebus, all cooked by a man at a burner facing the street.

Because mamak food is halal by definition, mee goreng contains no pork, and the standard version is often vegetarian apart from the egg — the protein comes from tofu puffs and sometimes a handful of prawns or shredded mutton if you ask for it. That makes it one of the easiest Malaysian dishes to cook at home without hunting down specialist ingredients: the only thing you really need from an Asian grocery is the noodles themselves and the tofu puffs. Everything else is in a normal supermarket, which is not something you can say about most of this cuisine.