Sup Tulang: Singapore's Most Obscene Food (And Possibly The World's)

Haji Kadir & M Baharudeen Sup Tulang
Address: 505 Beach Road, #B1-13/15 Golden Mile Food Centre, Singapore
Tel: +65 6294 0750
Opening Hours
Daily: 12pm – 1am

This is a blog post about Sup Tulang, which is one of the more viscerally carnivorous things I've ever eaten, and in the incredibly civilized locales of Singapore, to boot. It's a Malay-Indian dish of beef or mutton bones, which are cooked in a spicy cumin and chili infused (and BRIGHT red) stew until the marrow inside gets soft and spreadable. You may have seen Anthony Bourdain slurping down the marrow with a plastic straw on TV, which is where my Dad got the idea from.

Hell bent on consuming sup tulang in his lifetime, my father put me to the task of finding out the best place to eat it. The Internet food oracles told me that would be the Golden Mile Food Center, closeish to Singapore's Little Arabia district. After an Indian breakfast and a morning spent wandering Little India and buying all manner of counterfeit shirts, we headed for the food court and the Haj Kadir food stall.

The stall, thankfully, is easy enough to find - bottom floor of the shopping center, to the right of the entryway - and is advertised with big, slightly green-tinted pictures of gory looking marrow bones. The elderly stall-men took our order, we sat down at a picnic table, and ordered fresh lime juice and lemon tea, as well as a serve of chicken-rice for my mother, whose sensibilities are more delicate than those of my father and I. Soon enough, a plate of four marrow bones for 7 Singapore dollars were plonked down on our table. We were given plastic straws for the marrow and some bread for the sauce.

It's a pretty obscene food. Tasty enough, but pretty obscene. The sauce is delicious: it's got some gamey, mutton infused, smoky flavor, with chunks of chopped chili floating in it. The bones don't have much meat on them, but the meat isn't the point, really, it's the marrow inside.

I decided to go for the marrow first - the sounds you make when sucking marrow out of a big-ass bone in a public place, well, I'll leave those to your imagination. Then, I picked up the bone, which was really very slippery, and gnawed off the meat. I don't think I made any growling sounds while I was doing this but I also can't say I didn't.

It was a very happy experience for me, as I am a dedicated carnivore and everyone who knows me is pretty sure I retain ancient race memories of Stone-Age ancestors. In that I'd be super happy crouching by a fire tearing big chunks off a mammoth haunch while snarling and snapping at the semi-domesticated wolf pack that might bother me for scraps. Napkins, what are those?

The old men who ran the stall sat at the table next to us and watched me eat the marrow out of the bones while talking animatedly to each other in Malay. According to my mother, they appeared to be somewhere in between profoundly disgusted and impressed by the enthusiaim and verve with which I went at the marrow bones. Probably more disgusted.

Two cute little Singaporean ladies were eating sup tulang at a table near us, wearing cute little clothes, and they were somehow eating sup tulang *delicately*. I have no idea how but am fairly certain whatever dark magic they had been trained in to pull this off is far, far beyond my meager powers.

The real problem with sup tulang is encountered after you're done with it, when you realize that the red dye they use to color the sauce doesn't come off your fingers, even if you scrub them really hard with liquid soap in the cleanish dining hall bathroom sink. It sort of comes off your face, but only sort of.

Therefore, every Singaporean will know for the rest of the day that you have eaten sup tulang. This is not exactly embarrassing, but few foods we encounter in the Western world actively mark you for the rest of the day. I ended up taking a long bath with a lot of intensive scrubbing, and my fingers were still stained red for a couple days. Although at least it took care of the facial Marks of Doom.

Anyone even vaguely squeamish about eating meat should probably steer well clear of both sup tulang and the people who are willing to eat it, is what I'm getting at. I suffer from no such moral compunctions and think most cute animals are preferable roasted on a spit with a nice marinade, but I know I'm not speaking for everyone.

Horrifying Food Products I Have Seen

The Bacon Explosion



A fore-arm sized sausage patty ,latticed with bacon, then barbequed to a fine crunch on the grill? Why, I'll have two! The putting bacon on everything craze seems to have reached its zenith with this amazing taste-treat - no longer is is enough to put bacon in chocolate, bacon in macaroni and cheese, bacon in your chocolate chip pancakes! No, we're able to do lines of bacon, now - perform the equivalant of shooting the stuff right up our nostrils. I imagine the Explosion of Bacon will be ganked from the internet and marketed as America's next taste sensation by Carl's Jr or something in the near future. Pigs everywhere will quiver with the fear of the hunted.

Sausage Football



Speaking of Twenty-Five Ways to Debase a Pig, how about this sausage football? Bringing the notion of the pigskin into horrid and immediate relief, this tremendous lump of summer sausage in the shape of a football - complete with weaving! - unsettles me to my core, touching on a part of my pysche that would rather not consider these things. We're told not to play with our food from an early age, and then we're at the family Super Bowl party or something and Uncle Vern is slicing up the sausage football and we think, What? What? Prevent childhood cognitive dissonance. Avoid the Sausage Football.

Belgian Dark Chocolate Dipped Pork Rinds and Caramel Bars



Have you found yourself concerned about your weight, about your eating habits? Has the dawn of the new-year and the meteoric rise of your dress size compelled you to change your ways, turn over a new life, pick up some Tae-Bo videos? Another healthy choice for 2009: switch out your usual chocolate covered pork rinds for sugar-free chocolate covered pork rinds! Yes, you too will be able to fend off diabetes, heart disease, and an early death - just make sure it's sugar free.

All kidding aside, I really want to know how this tastes. Are there pork rinds in the caramel too? Is this like a pork rind Snickers bar? A sugar free one? I just don't know.

Chocolate Covered Cuttlefish



Produced by a Hawaiian chocolate company, this innovative treat combines everyone's favorite dried cuttlefish and delicious chocolate. I just don't see what could possibly go wrong.

I like dried cuttlefish and I like chocolate. Combining the two strikes me as so unwise as to be prosecutable. May be of use when at college drinking parties when you want to one-up the asshole eating goldfish.

Heinz Canned Curry N' Beans!



I have gone through my life with a horror of canned beans. Sometimes I've had nightmares where canned beans trail me throughout the house and dangle malignantly before my nose. This Heinz spec-i-ality combines Mulligatawny soup and the perennial English favorite of canned beans into one easy, convenient, and imperishable horror show.

Taco Bell Home Entrees: Chicken Bowl, SHELF STABLE!



Shelf-stable Taco Bell meat? What could possible go wrong? There is a photo of one of these on Heat Eat Review that tells you all you would ever need to know, will ever need to know about the nature of this MRE for college boys.

Gummi Chicken Legs



Further contributing to the debasement of food animals, we have gummi candy attempting to imitate meat, complete fake plastic chicken bone and "oranges and cream" flavor. Will they soon make meat that attempts to imitate gummi candy? The world's once clear-cut line between CANDY and MEAT is already being bridged wantonly as evidenced by bacon chocolate bars and sugar free chocolate pork rinds. What new frontiers lie before us? What then?

(I have eaten the Vosges Bacon Chocolate bar and very much enjoyed it. It was akin to eating a really high quality salty bacon bit that dropped in the fondue pot. If you think about it's a good thing. I still felt a bit ugly afterward but recovered quickly, happily.)