Laksa: one name, many bowls

Ask for "laksa" in the wrong city and you may be handed a completely different soup from the one you were dreaming of. In one place it is a rich, orange coconut curry that leaves a sheen on your lips. In another it is thin, sour and fishy in the best possible way, with pineapple and mint floating on top.

Same word, different bowl. That is exactly what I love about it. Laksa is less a single recipe than a family, and every branch has its own loyalists.

A Peranakan family

Laksa belongs to the cooking of the Peranakan people, descendants of Chinese traders who settled in the Malay world, in places like Malacca, Penang and Singapore, and married into local communities over generations. Their food, often called Nyonya cooking, brings Chinese ingredients such as noodles and tofu together with Malay spices and techniques.

Laksa is about as tidy a summary of that meeting as you could ask for: Chinese-style noodles in a broth built on a Southeast Asian spice paste. Even the word itself has several competing explanations, and I am happy to leave it as a small mystery.

What most laksa shares is the rempah, a paste ground from ingredients like dried and fresh chillies, shallots, lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and fermented shrimp paste (belacan). It is fried slowly in oil until the kitchen smells of it, and that step gives the soup its colour and depth before any liquid goes in. After that, the family splits.

Curry laksa: the rich one

Curry laksa is the version most visitors meet first. The broth is a spiced curry softened with coconut milk: rich, gently fiery and usually a deep orange-red. Into it go noodles, often a tangle of yellow egg noodles and thin rice vermicelli together, plus tofu puffs that soak up the broth like little sponges, bean sprouts, and some combination of prawns, chicken, fish cake or cockles.

A spoonful of sambal usually comes on the side so you can turn up the heat. Depending on where you are, a close relative of this bowl may be sold as curry mee. I think of curry laksa as the one you want on a grey day, when you need a soup that wraps around you.

Asam laksa: the sour one

Go to Penang and laksa can mean something else entirely. Asam is the Malay word for tamarind and, more loosely, for sourness, and asam laksa is built on a broth of fish, very often mackerel, flaked into a stock soured with tamarind. There is no coconut milk. The soup is thin, tangy and savoury, poured over thick, round, slippery rice noodles that remind me a little of a slim udon.

The toppings are what make it sing: shredded cucumber, onion, pineapple, mint, sliced chilli and pink torch ginger flower, finished with a ribbon of thick, dark, sweet prawn paste. Every spoonful is sour, sweet, salty and fragrant at once.

It is not a gentle introduction, but I suspect it is the more memorable bowl. If you love the sour heat of tom yum, asam laksa will feel like a cousin from across the border.

Katong laksa: the one you eat with a spoon

In Singapore, the Katong neighbourhood in the east of the island lends its name to a much-loved style of curry laksa. The broth is rich with coconut and dried shrimp, topped with cockles, prawns and fish cake, and finished with chopped laksa leaf, also known as Vietnamese coriander, a herb with a sharp, almost peppery smell.

The defining detail is the noodles. They are thick rice noodles cut short, so the whole bowl can be eaten with a spoon alone. It sounds like a small thing, yet it changes the experience: every mouthful arrives as broth, noodle and topping together, with nothing to chase around the bowl.

And that is before you reach Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, whose own laksa, built on a different spice paste altogether, has a devoted following. One name really does stretch a long way.

How to order and eat it

• Ask what "laksa" means here. If a menu simply says laksa, it usually means the local style. A quick question saves a surprise, though the surprise can be half the fun.
• Try one of each. The rich and the sour versions are so different that eating only one tells you about half the story.
• Add sambal slowly. It is often far hotter than it looks, and you cannot take it back out.
• Use the spoon. Most bowls come with chopsticks and a spoon. For Katong style, the spoon is all you need.
• Dress for the occasion. Curry laksa broth is oily and vividly orange. A white shirt is a brave choice.

Laksa asks you to let go of the idea that a dish has one correct form. It is a single word stretched across a whole region, and each place has poured its own taste into it. I find that more honest than any "authentic" recipe: a soup that has always been a conversation between cooks.