EDIT : Ah... That blasted book seemed to have been blasted away by someone blasted enough to blastedly burn it with the rest of those blasted disposables....
Without a proper citation, we apologize. For the tale behind the traditional delicacy, "Kueh Puteri Mandi" can only be presented here in the form of summarised short text based from memory. Aurally passed down by a sleepy grandmother to her granddaughter who was suffering from insomnia. The irony of telling stories to enable the child to sleep. The Kueh hardly resembled a woman taking a dip at her jacuzzi. So why is it called a bathing-princess-sweets? We can analyze the delicacy in a symbolic way. First of all, to make the sweet, one needs to have flour rice in glutinous form. Molded into the size of a ping pong ball and then made a deep dent at the center to insert the sugar. The sugar can vary from Malacca sugar or white sugar. Roll the balls into a pot of boiling water and then scoop them out to be rolled around in a bowl of grated coconut.
Here we can say that the symbolism played here are : -
Ball of glutinous rice with sugar inside = Princess
Grated coconut - the bath tub
The elders can't really explain why the Kueh has to be painted in green. They just dismissed it as a decorating thing.
And here's the story behind the naming of this sweet. You could say that it's just a random fairytale which doesn't really relate to the Kueh at all.
The story began about a Princess who likes to take daily baths at her tub full of milk. She believed that bathing with milk instead of water will whiten the skin as well as making her prettier. Vain.
One day, the King decided that his only daughter is grown up enough to wed the nearby prince. Problem is the Princess, like all tragic heroines from similar situation like hers, doesn't want to be married. Yet.
However it's a marriage which will be advantageous to the kingdom and the Princess was forced/persuaded/bribed/begged not to flee the castle and just be a docile bride-to-be.
On the wedding day, when the wedding ceremony started, at the last minute the princess finally ran away from her groom and the shocked Tok Imam. The guards and maids ran after her and the last time they saw her, she entered her
None of the palace workers find her, she simply vanished. But one maid realized that the princess's favorite bath tub is full of milk. And the milk has bubbles bubbling around the rims...
It was assumed that the princess fled away... but others speculate she drown herself and became milk herself.
It may sound like a foolish/sexist/total-escapism tale to adults, but for a young child. The open-ended ending does made one feel creeped out. Is this part of the reason why one of us became lactose intolerant?
So back to the Kueh. We established that the Princess is the round glutinous rice (with gula inside). Then that means that the scrapped coconut insides are like the bathing 'milk' from the story. In Malaysia there's varieties of Kueh Puteri Mandi now, some called Kueh Puteri Sebilik (Princess with two rooms) and Puteri Dua Bilik (Princess with two rooms) which hardly resembles a sweet with two beds or something).
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