The whole idea of har mee is, you know what, an excellent example of thrifty: The head and shell are used to prepare the broth, while the flesh of the prawn is served with the noodle. Like most of the cuisine in Southeast Asian, a large amount of hot spices is added to the soup to enhance the flavor. In the original version, pig bones are used together with the prawn shell to make the broth (which helps the taste a lot), and there are a few slices of pork in the noodle. Nowadays, most restaurants use chicken bone for that purpose – so that Muslim gourmets would not be turned away.
Similar to har mee, there is a traditional dish in Jiangsu (江蘇) called three prawn noodle (三蝦麵). In addition to a broth of head and shell, there are three parts of a prawn that are added to the noodle: the flesh, the brain (蝦腦), and the roe (蝦籽). It seems highly probable that when Chinese immigrants first settled in Malaysia some 300 to 500 years ago, they brought along with them the prawn noodle, which gradually got modified to suite the local taste buds.
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