A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  “What’s in it? How did you make it?” he asked. I was so taken aback, I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d always thought my Tanglin ah-ma’s cooking was amazing, of course. But to hear one of Singapore’s top chefs marvel over something she had passed down, something I had made with my bare, yellow-splotched hands, made me momentarily speechless. After a few seconds, I sputtered out the steps that we’d taken just the day before in my auntie Khar Imm’s little kitchen. Gunther nodded and thanked me, while calling over his waiters to “try this—it’s excellent.”

  Gunther broke out some gin, and we had a toast. As I sat there sipping expensive gin in a posh French restaurant that my Tanglin ah-ma never would have even thought to enter, where the chef had devoured her otah and been incredibly impressed, I couldn’t help but think, just perhaps, she would have been so, so proud.

  Long before I had my uncles Willin and Simpson, I had another set of intrepid-eating kaki (people).

  There was Kevin, who attacked his food with such vengeance that he once had a girlfriend who barely ate at meals with him because—she confessed when they broke up—watching him eat literally made her feel ill. There was Regina, the skinny captain of our high school girls’ tennis team, who had a bottomless pit of a stomach. And Jeanette, who was as constantly hungry as she was pretty, with not a spare ounce of fat on her body to reflect the seemingly endless snacking that we saw her do. We had met in Catholic Junior College, where we plowed through the Singapore equivalent of American eleventh and twelfth grades under the somewhat watchful eyes of nuns and Catholic teachers. Together, we were united in our love for food. The eating of it, that is. Being a man, Kevin never had to worry about cooking. And Regina and I only started dabbling in it when we came to the United States for college and suddenly had to fend for ourselves. As for Jeanette, she was lucky to have married Eudon, a man whose father was a chef and had instilled in him a love for the kitchen. With a husband who would go on fishing trips to net squid and then come back home to make squid-ink risotto from scratch, all Jeanette had to worry about in the kitchen was cleaning up. For years, the rest of us wanted to kill her.

  Kitchen pangs struck her as they did me, however. I had been sharing my stories of cooking with my aunties—as well as the spoils of those lessons—with Nette, as we call her. Her curiosity was piqued; soon we began plotting the adventures we could concoct together. One evening over cocktails, Nette spent several minutes spinning a long, mouthwatering tale of the ayam masak merah that our friend Aisah’s mother makes for the annual feast she prepares to mark the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. The dish, one that I often seek out at Malay restaurants and food stalls, consists of fried chicken that’s cooked in a dense, crimson chili gravy, which is both spicy and sweet. It’s often served as part of nasi padang, a meal of rice accompanied with a variety of dishes that first originated in Indonesia. (In Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian language, nasi padang literally means “rice from Padang,” a city in Sumatra.) The dishes you’ll typically find in a nasi padang restaurant include fried or grilled fish in curried sauces, achar (super-sour Indian-style pickles), and spicy beef rendang, a delicious dish of beef slow-cooked in a rich, coconut milk–based curry. The Dutch also have a version of this meal, transported back from their days as colonialists in Southeast Asia, known as rijsttafel, or “rice table.”

  I’d never considered trying to make ayam masak merah before, having relegated it to the category of foods you have to buy. It seemed like such a difficult dish that I could never have even fathomed knowing anyone who would know how to make it and could teach me. “Aisah’s mum’s ayam masak merah is so good,” Nette said over and over. After some thought, I began texting Nette to ask, “When are we learning?” A few weeks later, Nette and I found ourselves hauling a gift of chocolates up the steps to an airy apartment in Ang Mo Kio—a neighborhood in central Singapore whose name means “red hair bridge” in Hokkien and was either named after a British Royal Army engineer, who built a bridge in the area when Singapore was still a colony, or a British expatriate, Lady Jennifer Windsor, who owned an estate there in the 1920s, depending on which story you believe.

  “Hello, hello!” Aisah said brightly, welcoming us into her mother’s home and looking stylish as usual, even in basic shorts and a casual blouse. In the years after our Catholic Junior College days, Aisah had gone on to earn a coveted job as a Singapore Airlines flight attendant. She spent several years jetting to Europe and all over Asia before settling down to run a clothing boutique on Haji Lane, a recently fashionable shopping spot in Singapore. Even though she no longer flies with SIA, Aisah still carries herself with the grace and fluid elegance of the airline’s flight attendants—and is always as put together.

  At lunchtime, Aisah’s mother’s apartment, on a high floor in a tall building, was sunny and had a lovely breeze drifting through it. We peeked into the kitchen to greet Aisah’s mum, Auntie Jianab, who was already hard at work at the stove. Standing by a big wok filled with bubbling hot oil, she was methodically frying up pieces of chicken that she had lightly salted before carefully sliding them into the oil. As soon as they turned golden, she fished them out and set them aside on paper towels. “She doesn’t speak English,” Aisah whispered to me. While I spoke Malay excellently enough to order “mee siam, one” I could hardly be relied on to learn how to cook in Malay. Aisah had that taken care of, though. “I’ll translate as she cooks,” she said.

  As Auntie Jianab fried her chicken, she instructed Aisah to ready the rempah (spice paste). Using a blender, Aisah chopped up shallots, dried chilies, and garlic to form the paste. Next, Auntie Jianab stir-fried the spice paste together with tomato puree, liquid gula melaka (palm sugar), salt, a chicken bouillon cube, and kecap manis (an Indonesian sweet soy sauce), and then added the chicken to the mix and stirred. “You have to make sure to strain the gula melaka,” Aisah cautioned, wrinkling her slender nose. “Sometimes you’ll find bugs in them.” There apparently was no escaping insects in Southeast Asian cooking.

  Auntie Jianab made the whole process look terribly simple, gliding with lightning-quick ease through the motions while Aisah, Nette, and I watched nervously, trying to keep up and make sure every step was carefully committed to both notepad and memory, while also jumping in to measure a liquid or open a can wherever we could. Before long, the chicken was done and we were sitting down to eat. Auntie Jianab’s ayam masak merah was a little darker—and sweeter—than versions you’ll typically find in nasi padang stalls. And it was far superior, I thought—many versions I’ve tried are too heavy on the spiciness or so bland that the sweet notes are barely detectable.

  As we dug into the chicken, also padding up our rice plates with gobs of stir-fried garlicky green beans, Auntie Jianab emerged from the kitchen with a tiny bowl of crackling deep-fried ikan bilis (anchovies). I loved this inch-long, slender salty fish that is delicious mixed with some chili sauce and hot rice but also a lovely counterpoint to an ice-cold beer on a summery evening. But I’d never once fried it at home. “Is there anything special to frying it up?” I asked. Aisah, after conferring with her mother, said, “You just have to look for the lighter-colored ikan bilis. Those taste better. Then you just deep-fry it in oil until it becomes crispy.”

  Watching us eat, Auntie Jianab began to share her kitchen tales. She had learned to cook when she was a girl, she said, growing up in Singapore. For years, she made mostly basics like simple Malay curries and soups—it wasn’t until Aisah turned four that she had more time to learn more complex dishes. Her ayam masak merah recipe was gleaned from watching women cook at Malay wedding festivities over the years, she explained. “Wow,” Aisah said. “I never knew all this about my mum!”

  As our eating slowed and we finally, regretfully, put down our forks, Auntie Jianab shared one more story. One day, in the village where she grew up, Auntie Jianab spotted a handsome man who instantly caught her attention. Since he was new to the village, her family began inviting him over for dinner—and th
is turned out to be a chance for the shy, young Jianab to impress him with her cooking skills. Over the course of several dinners, she plied him with delicious curries and rice dishes.

  Her cooking worked its magic. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  Back in her own kitchen, Nette had become inspired. “Allo allo,” an e-mail from her one day read. “to baptize our pizza stone . . . we have decided to throw a pizza party next Sat. you guys will prob be the guinea pigs.” While I’d cooked for Nette before, making a simple breakfast and a steak dinner for her once when she’d visited me in New York, I’d never actually cooked with her. (I didn’t think we could count our watching of Auntie Jianab in the kitchen as “cooking.”) Instantly, I volunteered to come up with the toppings for one of the pizzas.

  In recent years, I had become obsessed with clam pizza. The first time I had it was unforgettable—my friend Greg, who worked in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote about food and fashion for the Courant, had been astounded that I had never tried the famous clam pizza at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. Finally, after years of raving about it, he made a date. Mike and I got in a car and headed to New Haven. After waiting in line for more than thirty minutes, we slid into a booth where Greg proceeded to order a large clam pie with bacon. The salty, cheesy, and crispy combination had me mesmerized right away. Bacon or no bacon, this clam pizza was phenomenal. I began swinging by Pepe’s whenever I was remotely close to New Haven.

  “Do you like clams?” I asked Nette. “If so, I may make a clam pizza topping.” Nette looked a little skeptical—pizza places in Singapore tend to err on the traditional side. When menus offer adventurous toppings they tend to be Asian-inspired, such as tandoori chicken, for example. I had never seen a clam pizza on a Singaporean menu and it sounded like Nette hadn’t either. But as always, she was game to try anything. I had shared Peter Reinhart’s pizza dough recipe—which my bread-baking friends had unanimously adored—with Nette, and Eudon was hard at work tossing pizza dough into the air by the time I arrived in the large kitchen of her fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Singapore’s centrally located Tiong Bahru neighborhood. While much of densely populated Singapore is crammed with tall buildings—both residential and commercial—a small section of Tiong Bahru remains a quaint little pocket of relatively squat apartment buildings, some of which date back to the 1930s, when this government-created housing estate was developed. (An estimated 80 percent of Singaporeans live in comfortable, affordable apartments built by the government.) Some of these white, boxy buildings, which go up to five stories high, have a modern art deco feel to them. Before World War II, the neighborhood apparently was a place where the rich kept their mistresses, which earned it the name Mei Ren Wuo or “den of beauties.” In modern-day Singapore, however, the neighborhood is more like a den of yuppies. The relatively young and professional have been attracted to Tiong Bahru’s streamlined structures, which are modern yet also conjure a bygone era in Singapore—a time when buildings didn’t all loom dozens of stories high.

  At Nette’s that night, Eudon twirled large disks of pizza dough in the air, readying them for the oven. The first few were delicious standards—basic pepperoni and a margherita pizza, dotted with mozzarella, basil, and fresh tomatoes. Then Nette cleared a spot for me in her kitchen for my clam pizza. Eudon had spread the dough out onto the stone; I sprinkled it with minced garlic, Italian parsley, canned, chopped clams, red pepper flakes, and grated Parmesan cheese, before drizzling olive oil on top of the mound of ingredients. (Since it was Nette’s first clam pizza, I figured I should make a pure version and left off the bacon.) After twelve minutes in the oven, the pie came out smelling delicious. It stood little chance of surviving more than five minutes outside of the oven, disappearing almost instantly.

  As we capped the night with whiskey and homemade chocolate cake and surveyed the crumbs of our dinner scattered about, Nette and I felt pleased with ourselves. Guests had arrived ravenous and they’d been well fed—not with food purchased from the many great hawker stands that fill Tiong Bahru, but with pizzas produced in Nette’s own kitchen. In all our teenage years of daydreaming about the lives that lay before us, we had never contemplated cooking together or throwing a dinner party. We had never considered the act of making food for people as anything less than a chore, a necessity—something we were intent on avoiding as much as possible.

  Looking at the satisfied smiles around the dinner table, I realized what silly schoolgirls we had been.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There are numerous things to love about my auntie Alice. The bottomless well of warmth and pure, well-intentioned kindness that she possesses. Her fervent love for her family—the thing that nudges her to try, regularly, repeatedly, to bring us all together for dinner or afternoon tea. The no-nonsense approach that enabled her to raise three handsome and close-to-perfect young men, each one more gentle and well behaved than the last. The infectiousness of her humor, her body starting to rock as she titters, one hand coyly reaching up to cover her mouth while the other reaches down to slap her knee when it’s a laugh that’s really worth enjoying.

  The one thing I truly admire in her, however, is how practical she is, a problem solver to a fault. In her longtime job as a public relations manager for a big hotel in Singapore, this quality was, of course, handy. In the kitchen, it has proved essential. If Auntie Alice doesn’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter—she’ll figure it out. Which is why she knows how to make a whole host of dishes that are so labor-intensive and easy to buy at hawker stands that most Singaporeans never even bother to attempt them at home.

  “Cheryl ah,” she said one day on the phone. “What else do you want to learn?”

  “Kueh lapis?” I said, hopefully. Auntie Alice had always been a wonderful baker—and my mouth still watered when I thought of her buttery slabs of kueh lapis, a pandan-scented, spiced, striped cake comprising multiple one-eighth-inch layers of dough baked atop one another.

  “Um, I don’t really bake anymore leh,” she said, sheepishly confessing that her oven had been turned into storage space for pots and utensils years ago. “I don’t know if I remember how to make kueh lapis!”

  Before I could start feeling sad, however, Auntie Alice volunteered: “What about chicken rice?”

  Ah, chicken rice—two words that tug at the hearts of many Singaporeans who live overseas. Widely considered Singapore’s national dish, chicken rice—also known as Hainanese chicken rice because Hainanese immigrants first started making the dish—basically consists of boiled chicken and rice. When done well, the chicken is so tender that its juices practically spurt out, coating your tongue as you bite into it. (Boon Tong Kee, a hallowed chicken rice joint in Singapore, is known for steaming it and then cooling it in such a way that a hefty layer of gelatinized juices and fat sits between the meat of the chicken and its chewy, fatty skin.) But for many, the best part of this dish is the rice itself—ever so slightly pandan scented and oily, and made so that each grain of rice is slick with chicken fat and juices.

  I’d eaten chicken rice and dreamt of it more times than I could count. But I had never once thought of making it. I’d had it made for me from scratch just once, fifteen years before, and the occasion had so impressed me that it’s been seared in my memory. During my sophomore year in college, a group of Singaporean friends and I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to attend a national conference of Singaporean students living in the United States. Sure, it was going to be an honor to meet S. R. Nathan, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States at the time. But the main reason any of us was going, really, was the remote chance that we might get to eat some semblance of Singaporean food.

  On our very first day there, things looked promising. I met Andre, an eager young Singaporean student who was hosting me and my group of friends: Francis, Leonard, and Kevin, three guys I’d known since I was eleven, back when we were a rambunctious lot who spent hours playing Ping-Pong, skateboarding, and kickboxing in
the swimming pool. As we sat around Andre’s living room lamenting the fact that it had been ages since we’d eaten chicken rice, he said the words: “I can make chicken rice, you know.”

  There were audible gasps; our hearts started racing. Francis and Leonard quietly wondered aloud if I should take one for the team and make out with Andre to grease the wheels. Fortunately, no making out was in order. Andre the affable was instantly enthusiastic about making his chicken rice for us. Immediately, we drove to the grocery store to purchase the ingredients, and Andre set about working his magic.

  I’d like to say that I helped—or that we helped—but really, none of us cooked or was even vaguely interested in the cooking. Instead, the four of us simply sat in the living room and waited for the smells to hit us. The result was okay—not as delicious as professionally cooked chicken rice. But it truly was amazing. Biting into the chicken and chasing it with garlicky, greasy rice, this group of loudmouths was reduced to a long stretch of silence. It was fall, and there we were in cold, cold Bloomington, Indiana—right smack in the middle of America’s heartland—and we were huddled around a table eating homemade chicken rice! I briefly considered making out with Andre after all, just because I was so grateful. The four of us began bickering bitterly over who would eat the last piece of chicken. “Jie,” Leonard said, calling me “older sister” as he had since we were eleven. “Eat it lah.” “No, you eat it,” I replied. And Kevin jumped in, too, urging someone—anyone—else to eat the last piece. It was only polite, after all; we’d all gone so long without chicken rice. One of your loved ones, not you, should really have the last piece. After several minutes of this, Francis, who had been watching mostly silently, jumped up from his corner of the table, holding his fork just so. “Aiyah, I’ll eat it,” he said, leaning over to spear the final piece and dump it on his plate. We watched, stunned, as he devoured the last of our precious chicken rice with great gusto, then laughed. It wasn’t until I was back in my dorm room at Northwestern that I started to feel the pangs of regret. I couldn’t believe that even in my fog of greed I hadn’t bothered to learn or even watch how to make Andre’s Singaporean chicken rice.