A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  “That’s the thing about being measured” against others, he immediately replied. “Since everyone knows they are great cooks, you have nothing to lose if you don’t cook as well. Everyone knows you don’t cook like that daily unlike them but if you do, everyone will be amazed. Either way, you win, so no sweat!”

  Willin’s words would ring through my head for the rest of the day, as I chopped, steamed, stirred, and boiled. I was so frazzled that at one point I peeked out to the dining room and noticed that not only was my sister sitting at the table wrapping mandoo but my father and Mike had joined in the process as well. I had never seen my father cook in my life. Just as I started to tear up, my dad showed me one of his dumplings; it was a mandoo wrapper filled with spicy orange otah filling instead of pork and cabbage. “I’m calling it jiao-tah,” he said, referring to the Mandarin word for dumplings—jiaozi—and combining that with otah. “I think it’s going to be a hit!”

  As the afternoon raced by, I felt like I had everything under control. Then, at 5:00 P.M., with guests arriving just two hours later, I suddenly noticed that my massive pot of salted vegetable and duck soup wasn’t boiling. This would be because I had completely forgotten to start the process—the duck wasn’t even in the pot. The salted plum and tamarind leaves were still on the counter. I could not believe it. This was a process that should take at least two hours, more if you wanted your soup to be flavorful. I started to feel shooting pains in my head. I couldn’t believe I had screwed up one of the compulsories. Ignoring my second braised duck, I turned my attention to the soup. How could I get it to be more flavorful in this shorter period of boiling? In a panic, I tossed in extra chunks of smashed ginger, extra tamarind leaves, an extra sour plum. It would just have to do. By the time this was done, I checked back in on my duck to find that its skin had burned through and was firmly stuck to the wok. This was turning out to be nothing short of a disaster.

  Right about then, I noticed the piles of softened clear vermicelli and sliced cabbage, carrots, bean curd, and shiitake mushrooms that I had scattered about the kitchen counter in little bowls. The chap chye! Just a few weeks earlier, I had begged my Auntie Alice for some time in her busy schedule before she flew to Dongguan to spend Chinese New Year with her second son. I’d wanted to learn to make my mother’s family’s chap chye, a dish of mixed vegetables and tofu with clear noodles that’s eaten for luck during the New Year festivities, but my mother, crazed with school homework, had been too busy to teach me. The dish is easy enough to make—the prep is what takes the most time. But with my soup catastrophe, a slightly burned duck, and the trauma of hard-boiled eggs that weren’t peeling right since I hadn’t boiled them long enough, I was in no frame of mind to set all that aside and whip together chap chye. I considered skipping it altogether—we did have an awful lot of food on the table. What was one dish less?

  “Chap chye must eat one!” my mother clucked. She was right—it was a good luck dish. In fact, during Chinese New Year, my mother often adds fu chook, a black fungus that looks exactly like clumps of human hair, to her chap chye for added luck. (The name of the fungus sounds like the Chinese word for prosperity.)

  Even so, I simply could not muster the energy to pull together a dish of chap chye. Standing in the kitchen, I began to understand how it must feel to be on the precipice of a meltdown. My head was pounding. A film of sweat coated my entire body. My T-shirt had glued itself to my skin. My hair was a tangled mess bundled up into a raggedy ponytail. From the way my mum was looking at me, I could tell I had a manic look in my eyes. “Go up and change,” she said, waving me out of the kitchen. So I took a break, putting on a cheery pink floral Tracy Reese blouse and a comfortable black skirt. I washed my face, combed my hair, and spritzed on a few pumps of Paris by Yves Saint Laurent, the perfume I’ve worn for years to job interviews and major meetings—situations in which I aim to walk in feeling as if I own the world. With a dash of lip gloss, I was looking halfway normal, so back down to the kitchen I went.

  My mother was at the stove this time, whizzing about quickly and surely, grabbing bits of cabbage, carrots, and vermicelli, and flinging them into the wok with the confidence of Rachael Ray. Despite her many protestations over not really knowing how to cook, of course, she did all along. And it was lovely to watch. I was stunned—and very grateful. With her stepping in, the chap chye would be made, after all. She even tossed in bits of the good luck fungus, which I’ve loathed and avoided for years but certainly didn’t mind in the least this Chinese New Year.

  Biting my lip and feeling completely terrified, I began setting dishes out on the table. There were my two braised ducks—one looking okay, the other looking charred and a little too caramelized. The gravy for the duck was peppered with tofu and chunks of mushy yellow bits from several disintegrated hard-boiled eggs. I’d not boiled them long enough, making them impossible to peel cleanly. My grandmother’s chicken curry had turned out to be a bit of a disaster. I had used canned coconut milk instead of fresh to save the step of squeezing the milk out in cheesecloth. This meant that the much more concentrated canned milk made the gravy incredibly thick; instead of it being like a thick soup, it was a little like ectoplasm. And the salted vegetable and duck soup—I had no idea how it tasted. I was just hoping for the best.

  I did, however, stand by my otah, my mandoo, my gambling rice, and the pork adobo, a dish that I love to make in my Brooklyn home, which I’d added to the mix.

  The moment my family arrived, I hid in the kitchen, peeking out periodically.

  First Uncle Soo Kiat circled the dining table, then Uncle Ah Tuang, who enthusiastically pointed at the salted vegetable and duck soup, saying, “Good, good—you made this. This one is a must.” Auntie Khar Imm’s eyes widened when she saw the spread. “Ma ah, these are all your dishes!” my cousin Jessie exclaimed.

  Among all the guests, however, there was a face I wasn’t familiar with. It was a woman my family called Niajeh, a cousin of my Tanglin ah-ma’s who had grown up with her and cooked with her. The moment I saw her, I grew even more terrified. Niajeh was a legendary cook, and she had known my grandmother. How could I possibly measure up?

  Willin’s words, however, piped through my mind. There was nothing more I could do. The dishes had been made. I went out to watch everyone eat.

  “This one, only okay,” Uncle Soo Kiat said, pointing at the gambling rice. “But this one,” he added, gesturing to the otah, “very good!” I started to feel relieved. I was so afraid that I could barely eat, but as I sat at the long table in my family’s garden, watching my aunties and uncles—even Niajeh—wolfing down my otah, my duck, going back for seconds, I started to feel like perhaps I hadn’t screwed up. More important, I realized that the point hadn’t truly ever been the food.

  There was my family, several branches that had been fractured over time, rarely spending time with one another, sitting around a dinner table, everyone thoughtfully chewing and picking apart each dish. I watched as my father held court, my sister flitted about, seeing if anyone needed refills of wine or water, and Mike could not stop eating. Even my mother, who had been adamant about not seeing my father’s family ever again in the wake of the divorce, was smiling.

  I realized that I was glad—no, I was thankful that I had come home.

  As the meal wound down, Uncle Soo Kiat started telling me about Niajeh and her amazing mee siam, the Malay noodle dish that’s spicy and sour all at once. “It’s the Indian kind of mee siam,” he said. “You really cannot find it anywhere else now.”

  “I’d love to learn,” I said.

  “Well, she lives in Australia. Maybe you should go there next!”

  I wasn’t sure what the future held, if a mee siam adventure in Australia was in the cards. All I knew was that, for one night, we were there, together, eating a meal culled from the women who had made me—my mother-in-law, my auntie Alice, my auntie Khar Imm, my mother, my ah-ma, my Tanglin ah-ma.

  As my aunties left that night, I gave them long hu
gs good-bye. And when Niajeh asked for Tupperware to bring leftovers home, I almost teared up once again.

  “When will you come back?” my aunties asked.

  I said I wasn’t sure.

  “Thank you,” I finally told Auntie Khar Imm. “Thank you for everything.”

  “No need lah,” she said. “You passed already.”

  EPILOGUE

  I was leaving Singapore with a heavy heart this time. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. But at the same time I knew I’d learned so much that I’d be carrying bits of my family back with me to Brooklyn. And this included bird’s nest soup, something that I’d never thought I’d be eager to learn.

  For decades, this clear, sweet soup with floating bits of gelatinous “bird’s nest,” which look alarmingly like clumps of cloudy phlegm, had been the bane of my days in Singapore. Bird’s nest is not cheap—the Chinese fervently believe in the healing properties of the soup, which is eaten hot or cold, usually as a dessert. My mother always says it’s what keeps skin looking youthful, and it restores the body’s energy. As a result, I usually see a bowl of it on my bedroom table the very morning after I arrive from the long journey between New York and Singapore. (For a while, during my teenage years, my mother took to believing that the body best absorbed the bird’s nest if you drank the soup while half asleep; she took to rousing Daphne and me at ungodly hours of the early morning and attempting to shove spoonfuls of it into our mouths even before we had time to fully open our eyes.)

  Beautiful skin and great health, however, is still never enough to get me to finish the bowls of it she makes without complaining bitterly. The idea of eating what essentially is birds’ saliva is simply not worth the Shangri-la youthfulness it supposedly offers.

  As my year at home drew to a close, however, I realized that my time ahead in New York was devoid of bird’s nest soup. The euphoria I thought I’d feel wasn’t there. Instead, there was a pang. “Mommo ah,” I said one afternoon. “Can you teach me how to make birds’ nest?” If she had been sitting on a chair, I’m certain my mother would have fallen off it. “You sure?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I should learn.”

  The process of making bird’s nest soup was simple—you need, in essence, just four main ingredients: water, bird’s nest, rock sugar, and pandan leaves. My mother adds a little ginseng to hers for added health benefits, but it’s really not necessary. “You soak the bird’s nest in cool water for half an hour to one hour,” she said, speaking slowly so I could write everything down. “Until the hairs all come out—once they’re loosened then you take tweezers and you pluck all the hairs out.” This seemed like a very essential step—I suddenly thought of all the mornings when I had wailed and complained whenever she’d tried to foist this soup on me. I now realized how difficult it had been. I remember watching her bent over a bowl, squinting hard into a semi-clear glob for long stretches, tweezers in hand, meticulously pulling out hair after hair. My mother always was driven in this task; she would only pause now and then to quickly rub her tired eyes. I had always chosen to ignore this whenever I saw it—if I didn’t think about her painstakingly preparing the bird’s nest, I wouldn’t have to think about eating it in my very near future.

  “After all the hairs have been plucked out, you drain it and ‘wash it clean,’ ” she said. “Then you put the bird’s nest, three to five pieces of pandan leaf, and eight or nine small pieces of ginseng into a pot and put enough water to cover it—just boil over a small fire for half an hour. Toward the end, add rock sugar to taste.”

  “How much sugar should I add?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

  “Aiyoh, you don’t ask me how much lah—very difficult to tell you one!” she said. “Just until you think it’s sweet enough lah.”

  It seemed simple enough, once the hair part had been dealt with, that is. “Oh, when you make it ah, make at least five pieces,” my mother said, noting how the nests were generally sold in bits that were about three inches long and about two inches wide. “You make just one or two—it’s just wasting time to make. Make more.”

  My mother looked at me keenly, seeming to wonder whether I would actually bother to do all this back in Brooklyn. “It will cool you down, help you bu shenti—strengthen your body,” she said. “Mummy always sees you running around, so busy. You’d better take care of your health, okay? Listen to Mummy.”

  I promised that I would try.

  “Cheryl ah,” Auntie Alice said in a phone call the day before I left. “So how did your dinner go?”

  “Good, good,” I said, telling her about the text that I’d gotten from my cousin Jessie the next day: “Thanks Cheryl for your dinner. the food was great. . . . especially the braised duck . . . my mum said yrs is so much better than hers. . . . You Won her heee . . . heee . . . real good. . . .”

  “Wow!” Auntie Alice said. “Not bad ah! Clever already ah!”

  I started to say “No lah, no lah” before she cut me off.

  “You know, there’s this Chinese saying: Jingde liao chu fang ye jingdeliao dating,” she said. “It means you are skilled enough to be in the kitchen but also skilled enough to be in the great hall.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can do both—you’re a superwoman!” she said, laughing. “You have really grown up, Cheryl.”

  Recipes

  TANGLIN AH-MA’S PINEAPPLE TARTS

  Makes about 100 tarts

  Quantities aren’t exact. My aunts don’t use a recipe, and they laughed at me the first ten times I asked them for this one. The initial set of instructions they gave me for pineapple jam was “Aiyah, you just juice the pineapple, add sugar, and then boil, boil, boil!”

  For the jam

  4 pineapples

  2 to 3 pandan leaves* knotted together

  1 long cinnamon stick, broken in two

  At least 2 ½ cups sugar, depending on desired sweetness

  *Leaves from the pandan tree, also called screw pine, can be found frozen in some Asian grocery stores.

  Peel the pineapples, dig out the eyes, and chop the fruit into chunks. Run the chunks through a juicer. Place the pulp in a wok or pot with a large surface area and heat it on the stove. Add the juice until the mixture has the consistency of porridge or grits; add the knotted pandan leaves and cinnamon stick. Bring the mixture to a boil and keep it there for 3 hours, stirring often. Halfway through, taste the jam, and add sugar by the ½ cup until the jam is as sweet as you desire. (Note: The amount of sugar needed will vary greatly depending on how ripe the pineapples are.)

  The jam is done when the pineapple mixture has changed from bright yellow to brownish ocher and most of the liquid has evaporated, leaving a dense but moist jam.

  For the pastry

  3 sticks plus 2 ½ tablespoons butter at room temperature

  About 4 ¾ cups flour

  4 egg yolks, plus 1 yolk for brushing onto pastry

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  With a mixer on low speed, combine the butter, flour, and egg yolks, mixing for 3 to 5 minutes.

  Place the dough in a cookie press fitted with a disk featuring a circle of diamonds. Press the cookies out onto greased baking sheets. Form small balls of dough and press each one into the hollow of a cookie, forming the base of the tart.

  Beat the remaining egg yolk with ½ teaspoon of water. Brush the rim of each tart generously with this mixture. Take a scant teaspoon of jam (more or less, as desired) and form a ball, then press it into the hollow of each tart. Pat the sides of the jam to create a small dome.

  Bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees, until golden brown. Remove the cookies from the baking sheets and cool on a rack.

  AH-MA’S KAYA

  Yield: About 4 cups

  10 eggs

  ½ to 1 cup sugar, depending on how sweet you like it

  Milk from shredded pulp of 1 coconut (squeeze milk out in 2 batches)

  3 pandan leaves, tied in knots

  Crack the eggs in a
bowl; whisk them together. Add ½ to 1 cup of sugar and coconut milk and mix it up well. Transfer mixture to a glass bowl, add knotted pandan leaves, then perch that bowl atop a steaming rack in a wok.

  Steam the mixture for 45 to 60 minutes, untouched (if using Ah-Ma’s method), until the desired consistency is reached. If you are using the method E-Ma and I experimented with, stir occasionally.

  When you remove the kaya from the steamer, stir it, let it cool, and spread it over toasted bread. The consistency should be smooth and creamy.

  TANGLIN AH-MA’S BAK-ZHANG

  Yield: About 40

  2 pounds glutinous rice

  1 pound pork belly

  2 pounds pork leg

  2 pounds shallots, peeled

  ¾ to 1 cup vegetable or corn oil

  10 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

  4 ounces dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in water for 2 hours, drained, and cut into ¼-inch cubes

  1 tablespoon salt (or more, to taste)

  4 tablespoons sugar

  1 tablespoon white pepper

  2 ½ tablespoons ground coriander

  2 to 3 tablespoons dark soy sauce

  80 to 90 bamboo leaves and string

  10 pandan leaves

  Wash the rice and soak it in a tub of water for at least 5 hours.

  Bring a pot of water to boil, place the pork belly and pork leg in the water, and cover. Cook it until it’s 50 to 75 percent done. (Poke a chopstick in. If it goes through easily, the meat is ready. You want it to be solid enough to be easy to cube.) Then chop the pork into ¼-inch cubes.

  Place the shallots in a food processor to chop them, not too fine. Heat about ¼ cup of oil in a wok. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and fry until it’s slightly brown. Remove the garlic, then add the shallots to the same oil and fry until soft. Add more oil (½ cup perhaps), and fry some more to mix. Remove the shallots. Then add the mushrooms to the same oil and fry for about 10 minutes or until the mushrooms are soft and the water they release has evaporated. Add the pork and fry it all up together. Add 1 tablespoon of salt, fry it a little, then add the garlic and shallots. Add the sugar, white pepper, and coriander, and fry it all together for about 20 minutes, then taste. If you’d like any more of any of the spices, add them now. Finally, add the dark soy sauce and fry until everything is well mixed. Remove from the wok and set aside. Let the filling cool for a few hours or overnight.