A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  Then the frying began. She began to pour cooking oil into the wok before pausing to reach into a cupboard to pull out a measuring cup. I was surprised—I had thought I was supposed to agak-agak. “Ni xihuan measure mah!” she said, smiling. Yes, she was right—I did like measuring. I felt a pang as I realized that this would be our final cooking lesson.

  After pouring a half cup of oil into the wok and heating that up, she mixed in the shallots, frying them until they turned brown—this took about ten minutes by my estimation—and then removing them and setting them aside on a plate. Then she fried the mushrooms in the same oil, removing them and setting them aside after five minutes. Next, she added the pork belly cubes to the mixture, frying that together until the meat browned. Then she added the dried shrimp, shallots, and mushrooms back into the wok, mixing it all together and taking out a measuring spoon to scoop a half tablespoon of salt into the wok, and an eighth of a teaspoon of monosodium glutamate. After mixing that all up, she added the cabbage and stirred it all together for a minute. Turning off the heat, she carefully dished the mixture into the rice cooker, making sure to stir the entire mixture together before pressing the “cook” button.

  As we waited for the rice to cook, we sat around the dining table, sipping from mugs of warm water.

  “I met my father’s wife, you know,” I said, watching as her eyes widened and her hand flew up to cover her mouth.

  “Wah, really?” she said, thinking about what I’d said for a moment. “So what did you think?”

  “She’s not bad,” I said. “My Mandarin is not very good, so I didn’t have much to say.”

  Auntie Khar Imm took another sip of water, thinking again. “I met her also,” she finally said. “I thought she was very pretty. Beautiful skin; nice girl. Just like you. Just like your mother.”

  Her words weighed on me as we packed up the rice and I prepared to leave. She was right—Ketty was a nice girl. She would never be my houma, my second mother. But perhaps it was time to start seeing her as family.

  Singapore may be a country filled with a diversity of religions—Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism. However, when it comes to Christmas, everyone, regardless of race or religion, jumps right in and celebrates.

  Orchard Road, the main shopping street in Singapore’s downtown area, is strung up with Christmas lights from beginning to end. An endless stream of cars and pedestrians clogs the street during the entire month of December as Singaporeans turn out to madly shop and check out the massive—and usually gaudy—holiday decorations that malls put up, each shopping center hoping to outdo the rest in the annual contest for the best-decorated mall.

  Amid this festive hive of activity, my family was going through a little meltdown. Except for a handful of Christmases when either I or my father hadn’t been able to get enough time off at work to fly to Singapore or New York for the holidays, my family had always spent Christmas together. This year, however, Daddo had decided to stay in Beijing with Ketty, a decision we had all thought we were fine with—until Christmas morning, when we woke up to unwrap a mountain of gifts. Faced with a pile of crumpled wrapping paper, we did the annual photo shoot where each person piled on all the gifts they’d gotten that day—artfully perching them on the body, on the head, on the arms—and had a picture taken to document that year’s bounty. Giggling over our pictures, we realized there were none of my father that year. Under the tree, his presents remained wrapped.

  Over the phone, my father told us he missed us. And knowing that it was hard to say good-bye and hang up, he said to me, “Remember when I brought you to college for the first time? Remember what I said?” Of course I remembered—it was a phrase that had come to mind the many times a day that I thought of my parents, my sister, my friends in Singapore so far away, with sharp stabs of longing.

  “I’m as far as the telephone,” he had said. “Whenever you miss me, just look at the telephone. I’m always there.”

  To quell the tears, we set about preparing our Christmas Day lunch. For years, Auntie Jane, my mother’s younger sister, had been in charge of Christmas. At her trendy apartment near Orchard Road, we would gather, filling our plates with turkey, glazed ham, noodles, and her famous potato gratin. After she retired and moved to New Zealand, however, the Christmas dinners my mother’s family used to have had become a sometime occurrence. This year, Daph and I had decided to take over, inviting Auntie Alice, Ah-Ma, our cousin Benny, his wife, and their daughter, Bernice, over for lunch.

  Like Auntie Jane, we took the easy route for the basics: the ham, gravy, stuffing, and log cake had been ordered from the Tanglin Club, the British social club to which my parents belonged. And Auntie Alice had offered to make Auntie Jane’s potato gratin for old times’ sake—this invention involved cubed potatoes tossed with diced onions and button mushrooms that were topped with bits of pork and chicken sausage and then drizzled with decorative squirts of mayonnaise before going into the oven.

  Around plastic garden tables on my mother’s sunny front porch, we perched on stools, filling our plates over and over. Sure, Auntie Jane wasn’t there. Neither was my father. Or my kuku and his family, who had decamped to Denver to visit family.

  But there were enough of us. And the stories flew out fast and furious.

  “I still remember when you were living in Taiwan,” Auntie Alice said. “You were just a baby—one or two years old. We went to visit your parents and we were all in a restaurant and you asked your parents for something and they said no. You just threw yourself on the floor, just screaming and crying. You wouldn’t get up, you know! I thought, ‘This Tiger baby ah!’ ”

  “Yah lah, this one, always so stubborn,” my mother said, as the laughter around the table subsided.

  I noted to Auntie Alice that her new daughter-in-law might be having a baby soon. “Another Tiger in the family!” I said. She instantly stopped laughing, looking a little horrified.

  “Aiyoh,” she quietly said, shaking her head, “our family has been mostly filled with such peaceful animals so far.”

  As the afternoon waned, we packed up the leftovers and said our good-byes. Ah-Ma hugged me and clung to my hand, pulling me toward her as she stroked it firmly. I braced myself for the conversation I had been expecting to have.

  “You should find a boyfriend,” she said in Mandarin, looking intently at me. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  “Hah?” I said, unsure of what she meant. Hadn’t she meant to say “baby”?

  “You need a boyfriend,” she said again.

  I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Aiyoh,” Auntie Alice said. “I think she thinks you’re Daffy.”

  And she was right—even after Daffy and I told her who we were, she did not believe us, squinting at both of us carefully, repeatedly pointing at me and saying, “This one is the second one, right?”

  After a few minutes of this, the laughter turned into an uncomfortable silence. My grandmother was not just forgetting old recipes—she was, perhaps, starting to forget who we were. As we stood in the driveway waving our good-byes, I hugged her once again, grateful that I had come home.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  With Chinese New Year approaching, my year of cooking was rapidly coming to an end.

  As I entered my auntie Khar Imm’s family’s kitchen once again, I could feel it. The wheel had come full circle. A year ago, I had entered this kitchen fearful and uncertain, with little sense of my family and whether I still fit in it. Now, just a year later, I knew the pineapple tart–making drill the moment I stepped into the room. No one had to explain anything to me. I simply jumped in wherever I could, rolling out dough, filling holes in the cookies, rolling out balls of pineapple jam, and hoisting trays of pineapple tarts over to Auntie Khar Imm, who once again was manning the stove.

  Still, of course, there were new things to be learned.

  “Lu-Lien ah,” Auntie Khar Imm called to me when I arrived. “Try this,” she said, pushing a jar of deep-fried green and bei
ge strips in my face. I took one and chewed on it. It was crispy, salty, delicious. It would have been fantastic with beer or a cold soda. “Mmm, what is it?” I asked. It turned out it was sheets of seaweed attached with a mix of flour and water to summer roll skins, cut into bite-size strips, and deep-fried. My aunties had sampled them somewhere and decided to experiment with making them at home as a Chinese New Year snack this year.

  And instead of pig’s trotter stew as a lunch snack, my aunties were sweating over a different set of ingredients on the stove this time, methodically deep-frying ikan bilis (anchovies) in hot oil and setting that out on the dining table with a platter of fried eggs, a large bowl of chili, and coconut rice. “Nasi lemak,” Jessie explained. I was surprised. This dish of rice and fried anchovies that I sometimes trekked to a hawker center to buy for breakfast was Malay—not a recipe that would have been passed down from my grandmother. “Wah, so good ah! Know how to make nasi lemak all!” I said.

  “Aiyah, just try lor—see how it tastes,” Jessie said. A few seconds later, after Jessie tasted the rice, she bundled it all up and put it back in the rice cooker, adding more coconut milk. “Not enough,” she said. “Must cook longer.” I realized I was witnessing the process of agak-agak at its best.

  As involved as I was in the Chinese New Year tart-making process, I was most nervous about the dinner I had been planning for the third day of the new year. “What are you going to cook?” Auntie Khar Imm had asked. “Well, some of this and some of that,” I’d said, as mysteriously as I could. “You’ll just have to come and eat!”

  I’d been planning this meal for months—a dinner for my father’s side of the family in my parents’ home. I knew how much my aunties had put into teaching me to cook over the past year. I wanted to thank them properly. I also wanted to bring them all together.

  While I was planning to make a medley of “greatest hits” from both sides of my family, I wanted to surprise my aunties with a few additions that they hadn’t taught me. As a child, I’d grown up having bak kut teh, a peppery pork rib soup, as an occasional Sunday treat. “This is Teochew, you know,” was a refrain I’d always hear just before my father slurped up his soup. In the past year, I had asked all my relatives if they knew how to make this soup my father so loved. None of them did. This was when Uncle Willin came to the rescue. “Hmm,” he said a few days before Chinese New Year began. “I’ve made it in my restaurant. I don’t know how ‘traditional’ it is, but I like it.” Although we had eaten our way through much of Singapore, I hadn’t cooked with Willin in all my months there. With my year of cooking coming to a close, I begged him to teach me.

  “Aiyoh, I’m not even Teochew, and this is a Teochew dish! You should learn from a real Teochew!” he protested.

  “Aiyah, can lah. You’re a chef!” I said. “I want to learn something from you!” And that settled it.

  On a clear, hot day, just after his lunch shift, I met Willin in a swanky Cold Storage supermarket on downtown Orchard Road to pick up pork ribs, garlic, peppercorns, and a bag to hold the peppercorns in the pot of soup. I wondered what my Tanglin ah-ma would have thought of us buying these ingredients at this gleaming, pristine store, where prices were surely far higher than in the wet markets where most Singaporeans bought their meat and produce. A short drive later, we were at the stove in the kitchen of Relish, one of Willin’s restaurants. He didn’t have much time, so we worked quickly. Bringing a large pot of water to boil on his industrial stove was a cinch. Then he quickly blanched the ribs under hot water before tossing them into the pot along with the little bag of peppercorns and a whole head of garlic. Then we let the soup boil for forty-five minutes, until the broth turned pale brown.

  As Willin worked, he told me how he had come upon the recipe. “Just from tasting and thinking and experimenting in the kitchen,” he said. “It’s very easy.” And it was true—the soup was simple yet delicious.

  “I’m going to make this for my family,” I said, after having several large sips.

  “Don’t!” he said. “I’m not Teochew! Your family is going to hate me for trying to teach you something Teochew if they don’t like it!”

  I thought about my auntie Leng Eng, my uncle Soo Kiat, the formidable Auntie Khar Imm trying Willin’s bak kut teh and thought perhaps he had a point. To be safe, I decided to try it out on my mother’s Hockchew family and see how it went.

  The plan was to make the traditional reunion dinner—which gathers the family together on the eve of Chinese New Year—for my mother’s family, then cap the New Year festivities with a dinner for my father’s relatives on the third day of the year. I began several days before the meal, making a giant shopping list for my mother and starting with the otak. With my notebook in hand, I went through Auntie Khar Imm’s steps, blending together the lemongrass, the shallots, and the chilies to create the sauce mix, adding in the chopped-up mackerel I now was unafraid to touch. On the list were braised duck, gambling rice, my grandmother’s ngoh hiang, my auntie Khar Imm’s salted vegetable and duck soup, and my mother-in-law’s mandoo.

  For the first meal, I thought I had everything under control. The ngoh hiang looked lovely; the braised duck was just the right color. The otak, though a little spicy, was a beautiful shade of orange and tasted just like versions you’d buy in a store. I was proud of how well everything was going—until I hit Willin’s bak kut teh.

  When we were in Willin’s kitchen, I had watched him pour salt by the tablespoon into his own broth, dutifully writing down “about two tablespoons of salt” in my notebook. In my own home, however, as the dinner hour approached, I began to get more panicked, especially when my mother started bounding in every ten minutes or so, asking, “How’s everything going?” As the minutes ticked by, the soup wasn’t taking on enough flavor, I thought. I didn’t have extra ribs or extra peppercorns. So instead, I grabbed my mother’s box of salt and shook it like a madwoman into the broth, tasting as I went along.

  When my ah-ma and my kuku and his family arrived, we were ready. Before dinner began, there was the traditional “lo hei,” in which the family gathers in a circle around a large platter of raw fish salad, each person holding a pair of chopsticks in hand, picking up bits of the salad and tossing it high up in the air. The salad, called yu sheng, is made up of ingredients that have lucky-sounding names or symbolic meanings—the word for fish, for example, sounds like abundance or prosperity; sesame seeds indicate a year of flourishing business. Kuku had ordered our yu sheng from the Four Seasons Hotel—not being traditionalists, we had always gathered to toss the salad without knowing what we were doing exactly, besides tossing the ingredients as high as we could to ensure that our abundance, flourishing business, and good health would reach soaring pinnacles in the coming year.

  This year, however, Daphne had printed out instructions off the Internet, guiding us along as each dish was added. As the slivers of salmon sashimi went onto the platter, she announced “Nian nian you yu!” prompting us to follow along in chanting the Mandarin words implying “This year, you’ll have abundance.” As chopped peanuts were scattered about the platter, she called out “Jin yin man wu,” wishing all of us precious gold and eternal youth in abundance. After julienned daikon, carrots, oil, pomelo, and several other ingredients were added, the plum sauce went in. Most of us knew what accompanied this. “Tian tian mi mi!” we called out, wishing a sweet year ahead to everyone at the table. With loud cries, we dug our chopsticks in, tossing bits of fish and vegetables as high as we could into the air, hoping fervently for a good year ahead. Once the reunion dinner dishes started coming out, my family ate ravenously, pausing to marvel that I’d actually made these dishes.

  “Wah, quite good ah!” Auntie Donna said, smiling. I was starting to feel good about everything—until they dipped into the soup. All around the table, eyes were squinting. If they hadn’t been so intent on not hurting my feelings, I’m sure they would have spit out the soup. It was far, far too salty. Daphne helpfully tried to move my grandmoth
er’s bowl of soup away from her so she wouldn’t sample it. But it was too late. “Jin giam ah!” she shouted, wincing and sticking out her tongue as she frantically looked around for some water to wash away the intense taste of salt.

  I decided to take it off the menu for my father’s family dinner. (I also decided not to tell Willin, chirpily texting him “Dinner went great! Thanks for the BKT recipe!” the moment it ended.)

  Before the big dinner for my father’s family, however, there was one more family event: the traditional lunch on the second day of the new year at my auntie Khar Imm’s home. I was growing increasingly stressed over how my dinner would fare, my father’s family being rather fussy about food in general, not to mention the food that I was trying to make using my sainted grandmother’s recipes. Sitting at Auntie Khar Imm’s dining table, I started to feel a gnawing pain in my abdomen. She had made Teochew braised duck, together with lovely chocolate brown eggs and tofu steeped in the salty gravy—it was perfectly done and amazing over rice. We could not stop eating it.

  Surveying the lunch table, my dad made a pronouncement. “Tomorrow, you all better eat before you come. Stop at McDonald’s or something,” he said. “Your dinner is not going to be as good as this, for sure!”

  I felt my face start to redden, but he was right. How could I possibly outdo the teacher? Perhaps this had been madness all along. Amid the laughter, Auntie Khar Imm leapt to my defense. “Aiyah, don’t listen to your daddy!” she said, smiling. “I’m sure it’ll be very tasty!”

  The next morning Willin texted me. “How are you doing? Everything OK?”

  The outpouring of my insecurity began. How would I ever compare? My aunties were phenomenal cooks. My grandmother had been a goddess in the kitchen. Why did I think I could do this?