Abdul Kadir, who came from the Indian village Thopputhurai, started Haji Kadir as a pushcart in the 1950s, selling dishes like Mee Goreng, Mee Kuah, Mutton Chop, and Bistik. Mutton Chop and Bistik were particularly popular in the period when “Western” dishes were getting increasingly common.

In the 1950s, his father noticed that bones were usually thrown away by suppliers.

“When the suppliers sell to the shops, they only take the mutton (the meat) without the bones. So a lot of bones is leftover, which they cannot sell.”

The base of the soup for Mee Kuah can be said to be similar to Sup Kambing (mutton/lamb soup), which typically uses ribs, mutton meat, and legs.

“So while he’s selling Mee Kuah, he finds that it is a waste to throw away the bones, cause there’s bone marrow inside and little bits of meat around it.”

He got the bones (with marrow) for free, and would use it for the soup base of Mee Kuah. Reasoning that the marrow was edible, he also served one bone marrow to customers who ordered his Mee Kuah.

You may have heard that taxi drivers know where the best food can be found. How the marrows then became a proper dish before exploding into popularity (relatively speaking) proves this myth to be true.

“One day, one taxi driver requested of my father. ‘Kadir, can you make for me this Tulang (referring to the marrows)? I like this Tulang very much ah. I pay extra lah, you just give me the Tulang with the bones lah, I don’t want the mee,” Iqbal tells me.

Satisfied with the meal, the taxi driver asked Abdul Kadir to cook more of the marrow the next day, when he’d bring his friends over to try the dish. Customers who saw the taxi drivers eating this new creation that they had never seen before got curious, and asked Abdul Kadir for the dish as well.

Demand for the dish rose to a point where suppliers who initially gave the marrow for free started charging 5 to 10 cents per kilogram. Patrons even started asking other Indian Muslim stalls along Jalan Sultan for Sup Tulang, and stalls specialising in Mutton Chops and Bistik saw demand for these dishes dropping. Consequently, these stalls asked Abdul Kadir to stop selling Sup Tulang in hopes that sales would go back up.

This obviously didn’t make sense for any kind of business, and there was no reason for Abdul Kadir to oblige. Eventually, other stalls started making their own recipes of Sup Tulang, each with their own Masala (spice mixture) for a different gravy taste.

For all its different interpretations, Sup Tulang would retain its signature red colour from a mix of tomatoes and sambal. Sometimes, food colouring was used as a tool for consistency since customers would complain that the Sup Tulang was “pucat” (Malay for “pale”) and that didn’t taste the same.

All of this, which Iqbal told me, is also the most commonly accepted history of the dish; it is even documented on the Singapore Government-run Singapore Infopedia, and echoed by the few writers or bloggers who have talked about the dish.

That was, until I visited Golden Mile Food Centre.