A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  In my family, store-bought versions of bak-zhang were taboo, of course. The only dumplings that mattered were my Tanglin ah-ma’s. As the years passed and her reputation grew among neighbors, friends, and friends of friends, she began taking orders and selling them. I’d disliked sticky rice as a child and had not really looked forward to eating bak-zhang every year. My father, however, had always adored the dumplings, having grown up eating only the best, of course. “Daddo,” I said to him one day in May. “Auntie Khar Imm is going to teach me how to make Tanglin Ah-Ma’s bak-zhang.” There it was again: silence.

  “Oh?” he said after a moment, looking bemused. “Okay.”

  The pork was what got me.

  By the time I arrived at Auntie Khar Imm’s home in Hougang, a traditional working-class neighborhood in Northern Singapore that has been a Teochew enclave for decades, she’d assembled all the ingredients. Her kitchen was a few times larger than mine in Brooklyn and crammed with appliances, pots, pans, and baskets. This was a kitchen for a serious cook. I had some of the same appliances—the Cuisinart food processor, a large black wok—but mine looked brand-new compared to her weathered pieces. I wondered how many dinners they’d put out. Even though it was mid-morning, the kitchen was fairly dark—being on the third floor of a building surrounded by many other tall apartment towers. What it lacked for in light it had in space, though—enough for two large refrigerators filled with homemade sauces, stews, vegetables, and meats. I imagined both those refrigerators in my own kitchen; there wouldn’t be room for anything else. The garlic cloves and shallots had been set out, and the dried Chinese mushrooms were already soaking in water and were well on their way to softening. As Auntie Khar Imm pulled out the slab of pork belly she’d bought, I couldn’t help but wince. Although I prided myself on trying to be fearless in the kitchen, I had largely stuck to cooking with meat that didn’t resemble an animal in any remote way. I’d make exceptions for fried chicken (my absolute favorite food) and once a year for Thanksgiving, but even then, I delegated any touching of the turkey to the heroic Mike. Generally, I like my meat or fish faceless and in the form of a rectangular slab. All the better if there’s not a whole lot of blood, which gets me to thinking of the animal that once owned that flesh. On Auntie Khar Imm’s kitchen counter, however, lay a large brick of pork belly with a thick layer of fat. And on top of that fat was skin bearing bright pink markings—Chinese characters that had been branded on the poor pig at whatever farm it had spent its relatively short life. I started to feel ill.

  I had vowed to be brave, however. Or at least learn how to be brave from my aunties. So I trained my eyes on the pork, readying myself for the inevitable touching. For distraction, I asked what time Tanglin Ah-Ma would typically get up to make bak-zhang. “See how much she is making lor,” Auntie Khar Imm said in Mandarin. “Make more then wake up earlier.” Which made perfect sense, of course. I was reminded of the futility of my pineapple tart interrogations. Perhaps I needed to not focus so much on the specifics of time and quantities. Living in New York, in all the jobs that I had had, I had found it hard not to be consumed with minutiae. When exactly was something supposed to happen? What exactly was to happen? What exactly were the details of Every Single Thing? I always needed to know—for work and also for my own sanity—before embarking on anything. Perhaps this had been the wrong approach to cooking all along. Perhaps it was time to start letting go.

  With this new determination, the reformed, loosey-goosey me bellied up to the counter, ready to help. At first, this involved a great deal of watching. I watched Auntie Khar Imm mince the garlic cloves. I watched her dice the softened mushrooms. I watched her run the shallots through a food processor. Then I watched her bring a pot of water to boil, placing the pork belly and chunk of pork leg into the water for a quick boiling. After a few minutes, she whipped out a sharp chopstick and gestured for me to look as she jabbed it into the pork to see if it was cooked enough. “If it can go through easily, it’s done,” she said. I’d always wondered how seasoned cooks gauged how meat was done. In my own kitchen, my eagle-eyed staring at a grilling pork chop or simmering chicken never seemed to work out quite right. As I’d watch my guests start eating, I was never able to shake the feeling that, somehow, my meat had ended up overcooked or undercooked. (Eventually, I started delegating the monitoring of meat doneness to Mike—I just couldn’t handle the stress.)

  “You don’t want it fully cooked,” Auntie Khar Imm warned, as she carefully hoisted the pork slabs out of the newly cloudy water. “You just want it cooked enough so it makes it easier to chop.” As I watched her chop up the pork belly with grace and ease, it looked simple. So I volunteered to take over and do the rest. Of course, the moment she handed the knife to me, chopping turned out to be anything but easy. Between wrestling with the squishy and slightly slimy pork belly while trying to angle the slender knife to slice the meat and worrying about using too much force and sending the round wooden chopping board flying off the counter, I was managing to cut up about five little cubes of pork a minute. (Or so it felt.) Auntie Khar Imm didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare look up to meet her eyes. If I had wondered before whether she doubted that I’d ever actually cooked anything in my life, I was pretty sure this display was confirming it all. Patiently, however, she watched. And slowly, I plodded, dicing and slicing until an eternity had passed and a mound of cubed meat lay before me. I’m convinced that process took about three hours—but I was feeling good about my meat. In fact, I was so pleased with myself that I stopped to take a picture.

  Next, Auntie Khar Imm grabbed a massive bottle of cooking oil and turned it over, sending large ribbons of yellow into a large wok. I called out, asking her to stop and tell me how much oil she was putting in. And once again, the a words tumbled out. “Aiyah, agak-agak lah!” she said. “If you use more garlic, then you use more oil.” Which, of course, made perfect sense. Sort of. Until I started to think But how much garlic should I be using? Is ten cloves enough? Not enough? I was still determined to learn how to make the perfect bak-zhang, and my head was nearly exploding from trying to conjure precision from the imprecise. I reminded myself to breathe and let go. But not before staring really hard at the oil in the wok and thinking that the amount looked an awful lot like about a quarter of a cup. Slowly, it seemed, I was learning to agak-agak.

  Auntie Khar Imm heated the oil and tossed in the minced garlic, gently frying up the sputtering mixture. “You want it to be slightly brown but not too brown or it will be bitter,” she said, slowly stirring. When the garlic turned gold, she carefully removed it from the wok, placing it in a bowl. Next, she fried up the shallots in the same oil, adding some more oil—as I watched closely, trying to agak-agak along with Auntie Khar Imm—then removed them. Next, the mushrooms went into the oil for about ten minutes of frying. I may not have been measuring out the amounts, but I was studiously watching the clock and scribbling down starting and ending times. Auntie Khar Imm clucked, however, and firmly instructed me to make sure to look into the wok. “You want to fry until the mushrooms are soft and all the water that comes out of them has disappeared,” she said. Next, my wonderfully diced pork went in, then the garlic, shallots, some sugar, white pepper, ground coriander, and dark soy sauce, a sweet and thick mixture that looks like molasses and is common in Singaporean Chinese dishes. With the wok almost full now, Auntie Khar Imm summoned up more strength as she fried, swirling the ingredients about the pan as I watched. Finally, she paused to taste a spoonful of the mixture before dumping in more white pepper and sugar. And with just a few more firm stirs, we were done.

  The filling looked lovely—it was the shade of bittersweet chocolate and smelled peppery, garlicky, and porky all at once.

  The meat would cool overnight; the next day, dumpling wrapping would begin.

  The wrapping phase of bak-zhang making is time-consuming. For starters, you need to soak the uncooked glutinous rice in cool water for at least five hours. You also need to soak the dried bamboo le
aves in water so they’re malleable enough for wrapping.

  I would be lying if I said I actually did any of this—Auntie Khar Imm woke up at 4:30 A.M. to get all this done before I showed up, mired in a fog of sleepiness, at the (to me) early hour of 10:00 A.M. In fact, by the time I arrived that next morning, Auntie Khar Imm had not only done all of this but had also already set up our bak-zhang wrapping station. A long pole was propped horizontally; she had tied two clusters of strings to the pole and arranged a carpet of newspapers beneath it.

  I suddenly got the sense that the Ghirardelli chocolates I had brought her the day before were a woefully inadequate gift.

  Pulling up two squat wooden stools, Auntie Khar Imm gestured for me to sit. Grabbing a handful of long leaves, she showed me the drill. First, she took two long bamboo leaves and lined them up horizontally. Then she bent them in the middle and twisted one side upward so both ends were pointing north and a triangular hollow had formed at the base. Next, she scooped a tablespoon or two of rice into the hollow and topped that with a layer of the pork filling. Then she filled the rest of the hollow with more rice, patted it down as firmly as she could, grabbed the bottom of the pyramid with one hand, and used her other hand to fold over the leaves so they covered the rice. Finally, she wrapped some string very tightly around the perfect green pyramid and tied a knot to keep everything in place. This entire process took Auntie Khar Imm seconds to do. And then it was my turn.

  Now, when I was growing up, origami had its minor moment among elementary school girls in Singapore. Oh, how we would save up our allowances, buy neat little packages of brightly colored square paper imported from Japan, and after consulting a compendium of picture-filled origami books, we’d while away time at home, in school, fashioning frogs, cranes, and intricate little balls that you could actually blow up—and throw at other girls. Well, when I say we, actually, I don’t mean me. I was absolutely ungifted at this paper-folding business. I tried, yes, but cranes, frogs, and (as desperately as I wished to be making them) those tiny paper-ball weapons were completely beyond me. I should have known that I would not be what they call a natural at this bak-zhang wrapping deal.

  The lining up and folding to create the hollow were mystifying to me. After a few tries, some with Auntie Khar Imm guiding my hands, however, I began to get the hang of it. Holding on to the leaves tight enough and piling on the rice proved a little tricky, though. Clumps of meat and bits of rice rained on my toes and skittered across the newspapers. And no matter how hard I tried, my dumplings looked more like puffy green breast implants than the perfect pyramids Auntie Khar Imm kept making. Probably sensing how mortified I was over my clumsiness, my auntie never said an unkind word. “This is your first time making them,” she kept saying. “Don’t worry.” She did, however, have an issue with my method of packing. “Mai ah-neh giam siap lah!” she said, over and over, when she saw how little pork I was putting into each dumpling. Don’t be so stingy. She was piling four to five heaping tablespoons of filling into each dumpling. I, on the other hand, was putting in two to three. I realized that after all the effort we—well, Auntie Khar Imm—had put into chopping and frying, I was subconsciously rationing our precious, precious pork. “You want to have a bit of the meat with every bite,” she explained. “That’s what will make it tasty.” Try as I might, however, I couldn’t bring myself to stop being giam siap. We’d slaved over this pork—if only people knew! They would be lucky to eat this. They should be allowed to appreciate it only in small doses! Like caviar. Or truffles!

  And this was how we ended up, two hours and forty-two bak-zhangs later, faced with a large bowl of pork filling long after the rice had run out. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Oops” didn’t quite seem to cut it. Auntie Khar Imm looked disappointed. “Well, we can eat this with rice,” she said, packing up the pork.

  As I’d wrapped the last of my verdant breast implants, Auntie Khar Imm had set a massive pot of water on the stove to boil, tossing in ten knotted pandan leaves. Carefully, she unhooked the clusters of bak-zhang from the pole and immersed them in the water. The dumplings would have to boil for ninety minutes. I looked around the kitchen, the apartment, and wondered, What would we do for ninety minutes? Things were going swimmingly when we had tasks at hand; the concentration I needed to focus on chopping, wrapping, and not pelting myself with pork had greatly limited the idle time we had for conversation. With ninety minutes to kill, however, I wondered what we’d have to say to each other. I needn’t have worried.

  “When Ah-Ma died, it was very tragic,” Auntie Khar Imm began, speaking of Tanglin Ah-Ma, my paternal grandmother. “I didn’t really know how to cook. Everything I made, your uncle Soo Kiat said, ‘You don’t know how to cook. My mother’s food is so much better.’ ” I was surprised—having remembered great dishes that my auntie Khar Imm had made and set out at Chinese New Years past—but I understood perfectly. Decades after her death, my father continued to feel the same fervor about his mother’s cooking. “Wo liu yenlei ah,” Auntie Khar Imm said. I wasn’t sure how to respond—the thought of my auntie crying because the food she made for her family didn’t match up to my grandmother’s was hard to bear.

  My grandmother had shouldered the brunt of the daily cooking, Auntie Khar Imm said, because my auntie had been busy with work and then her two children. She’d helped and watched, sure, but when it came to actually being the mistress of the kitchen, the job was intimidating. “So how did you learn?” I asked. Remembering my Tanglin ah-ma’s methods and practice, she said. “And I used to go downstairs and listen to the san gu liu po [gossipy aunties],” she added in Mandarin. “Whatever they said about cooking, I would listen, and then I would come home and try it out.” And bit by bit, the complaints began disappearing.

  Auntie Khar Imm may have silenced her critics, but I knew my toughest one was still waiting to be convinced. I didn’t want to watch my father eat one of my bak-zhang, and I was grateful that he ate one while I wasn’t at breakfast one morning. Not that he said anything all day about it, of course. My mother had to tell me that he’d finally tried it.

  “Well?” I asked my father, hoping against hope. There was a brief silence, and then “You must tell Auntie Khar Imm that her bak-zhang standard has dropped.” I was confused. It had tasted perfectly good to me. I couldn’t fathom what could possibly have been wrong with those dumplings—apart from the fact that the ones I’d made were entirely the wrong shape. And tiny. And had too little pork. And may have come apart because I didn’t tie them up well enough. But apart from all that, I thought our bak-zhang was fantastic! I started to feel indignant. These Tan men. Would there ever be any way to please them?

  “The meat,” he finally said. “The chunks are just too big.”

  And there it was. The one thing I’d volunteered to do was the very thing that had brought down the mighty bak-zhang that Auntie Khar Imm and I had slaved over for two days. I immediately confessed that it was my fault; he looked unsurprised.

  This “learning to be a Tan woman” quest was starting to look a little bleak.

  During my weeks in Singapore, I began to feel a gaping hole in my heart that only something back in New York could fill.

  Just the thought of him would get me itchy—and oh, how I pined. My hands would tremble, my heart would quicken. I spent days thinking about the things I would do with him the moment I got back. I half envisioned our reunion involving a slow-motion running scene, arms outstretched, hair flying in the breeze, my cheeks flushed in anticipation of hand to steel.

  Mike understands fully that this object of my pining is not him. It’s my oven that I crave—my sturdy little hunk of stainless steel, which has seen me through countless cookies, cakes, and pies in our little Brooklyn home. My mother’s Singapore kitchen had no oven to speak of, and in my weeks away from New York, I realized just how much I missed feeling dough between my fingers, the smell of a summer crisp bubbling as it baked. This time, when I arrived back in New York, after a hot and steamy reunion
with my oven, I was sated, but still, I wanted more. It was in this fog of longing that it struck me: I am going to conquer bread.

  A few summers before, I’d vowed to conquer pies. Over three months, I spent days and nights in my sweltering kitchen mixing, wrestling with dough, peeling and slicing apples, pears, and nectarines, and carefully crimping my way through pie after pie. After finally discovering the wonder of rolling out dough between two sheets of wax paper to achieve a perfect (and easily transferable) crust, I considered pies conquered. Ditto with rhubarb the following summer, when I spent weekend after weekend churning out rhubarb pies, cakes, and crisps. And then there was the summer that I devoted myself to fried chicken. You do not want to know about the extra swath of flesh that appeared around my waist right about then.

  Bread, however, had been a force of nature I’d never even contemplated taking on. Yeast? Rising? Kneading? I had absolutely no idea how it all worked. The notion of trying to bake bread was all the more absurd considering that I’d taken cues from the fashion conscious in New York and had all but sworn off eating bread—unless I was in Paris and unless it was amazing bread, that is. And then one day, Nicole, an amateur baker in San Diego, sent out a message on Twitter: “I need a challenge. Am thinking of baking my way through every single recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Anyone want to join me?” A challenge. I was instantly intrigued.