A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Back in New York, I was starting to get cocky.

  Barely off the plane, I once again threw myself into baking bread. The first big project—challah, which looked impossibly complicated, with its twisted braids and perfect honey coloring—terrified me. I was convinced that I’d never pull off braiding gooey logs of dough, and yet I did. Easily, too. When Brian, one of my best friends, who happens to be Jewish, proclaimed it “just beautiful” and rapidly devoured the half a loaf I’d given him, I almost teared up.

  Heartened, I took a moment to reflect and admit to myself: I am the bread-baking bomb.

  And then I almost burned down my kitchen.

  In the back of my mind, even as I had sailed through bagels, brioche, and challah, I’d known that one day it would come to this: me sitting on the floor of my smoke-filled apartment, staring at three rock-hard, blackened loaves and thinking, I am a failure.

  Having never baked bread before, I’d known it was a little insane to sign up for the weekly Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge with bakers who had years of practice. But the successes had gone to my head. My breads were turning out well; the lessons my Singaporean aunties were sharing were giving me a confidence that I’d never had.

  So when Simpson mentioned that there would be some Italian friends at his Fourth of July party, I thought it was a sign. The next bread on the challenge list was ciabatta—and who would be better at judging the quality of an Italian bread than Italians themselves?

  Mike looked skeptical, but only briefly. And he most certainly didn’t say anything. After all, he generally likes to leave it up to me to get in the way of myself. Brief as it was, however, I’d seen his look of doubt. Never mind, I figured. I would show him as well.

  It all began promisingly enough. On the first day, I prepared the poolish, a sponge that’s meant to give a bread more complexity of flavor. I took some bread flour and a bit of instant yeast, and mixed in some room-temperature water to create a watery dough. After that sat for a few hours at room temperature, I stuck it in the refrigerator to rest overnight so the flavors could deepen. I was feeling good about myself—I even envisioned Simpson’s Italian friends grabbing me, madly kissing me on both cheeks as they murmured “Brava! Brava!” A Singaporean gal acing ciabatta, who would have thought?

  The next day, however, things got a little insane. In addition to ciabatta, I’d volunteered to bring desserts. I’d made my lemon thumbprint cookies the night before and was planning to whip together a strawberry rhubarb pie using a recipe that Haley, a fellow Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge cook, had suggested. When Simpson’s guest list grew a little, I decided to add a coconut-lime cake to the lineup. Two desserts and ciabatta? I’d churned out far more on Thanksgivings and Christmases past. This would be nothing—I thought.

  I mixed together more bread flour, salt, and instant yeast, and removed the poolish from the fridge. It had gotten nice and stretchy. All was good. After letting the poolish warm up for an hour, I added it, together with a bit of water and extra-virgin olive oil, to the bread-flour mix to create a dense dough. I then took the dough out for some stretching and folding to form a rectangle.

  Now, ciabatta, whose name means “carpet slipper” in Italian, is supposed to look like a slipper. I wasn’t seeing the resemblance yet. (I confess, despite my years covering fashion, I wasn’t entirely sure what an Italian carpet slipper really looked like.) But, ever positive, I took this rectangle to be a promising beginning. After letting it rest for a while, I stretched and folded it and let it rest again. Then I divided the dough into three portions, letting it rest for a bit longer on a handy kitchen towel that had to stand in for the canvas couche cloths that hard-core bread bakers use to create crusty breads.

  Then, things started to go awry.

  Between the chopping of rhubarb, the grating of limes, and the baking of shredded coconut for the desserts I’d promised, I’d skimmed over the last bit of the ciabatta recipe. I’d believed the hard parts of ciabatta making were over. I’d stretched, I’d folded, I’d stretched, folded, and then cut. The rest, really, should be a piece of cake. (Or bread, I suppose.) All I had to do was lay the loaves on a bed of cornmeal, stick them into the oven, and wait for the amazing smell of baked bread to wash over me.

  It turned out, first, I had to transform my oven into a makeshift hearth, setting it to a whopping 500 degrees and creating a steam bath for my bread. There was also some business in the recipe about opening the oven door periodically to squirt water in to generate more steam.

  I began to be afraid.

  I’d come this far, however; I wasn’t turning back. I still could hear the faint words “Brava! Brava!” in my head—that could happen only if I soldiered on.

  The moment my loaves entered the oven, I sprang into action. A pan of hot water was set at the bottom of the oven, and steam began billowing forth. I couldn’t see a thing. Precious seconds were ticking away. I panicked. Filling a turkey baster with hot water, I blindly stabbed at the oven’s dark, misty air, shooting water all over my bread and cornmeal. The smell and awful, awful sound of cornmeal starting to sizzle filled the air. Smoke began filling my apartment, gradually getting denser. Mike was coughing and looking grumpy. At one point, a plastic tub of turmeric I had perched on the top of my stove backguard actually popped and began to melt. It was that hot. Mike grabbed the gooey mess of marigold plastic and waved it at me, sighing. This ciabatta making was getting dangerous, I knew. And yet I wasn’t sure what to do—keep it baking as the recipe specified or just give up and take it out?

  At thirty minutes, my bread looked well baked. But I’d thought the recipe said to let it go longer. I was torn and confused. I’d been instructed by my Singaporean aunties to live by agak-agak and have faith in my own eyeballing. But baking was a completely different thing—precision and following the rules were crucial.

  And so I went on Twitter and sent out an SOS signal to my bread-baking friends. Somewhere in Ontario, a baker sent these sage words: “Don’t go by clock, go by the loaf!” I ran to the smoking oven to grab my loaves and take them out.

  The word coal immediately came to mind. The loaves were hard, completely blackened—and still emitting wispy tendrils of white smoke. Mike coughed a little more. Then he picked up the recipe and said, “Hey, did you lower the temperature to 450 degrees after the last thirty-second stretch?”

  Lower? Seconds? What was he talking about?

  First, I’d completely skimmed over the lowering part. Second, in my rhubarb-chopping fog, I’d registered one of the baking times as thirty minutes instead of thirty seconds.

  There was a long silence. Well, unless you count the words COLOSSAL FAILURE that kept ringing through my head. I had to sit down. On the floor. Next to my blackened, smoky loaves.

  After many more silent minutes, I decided to cut one loaf open. Actually, from the sound of my bread knife on the stony ciabatta, it was more like madly chisel it open.

  On the inside, there wasn’t any of the holey perfection that ciabatta usually has. But it wasn’t horrible, all things considered. In fact, except for the crust, it was edible—well, if you like bad bread—which was amazing considering I’d baked it for more than four times longer than I should have. (I know, I do like making excuses for myself.)

  “You take on too much,” Mike said. And he was right. One dessert and ciabatta would have been fine. Beyond that, I was just being delusional.

  When I thought of what my Tanglin ah-ma would have done, however, I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Here was a woman who had never complained about cooking or having a fear of cooking. From everything Auntie Khar Imm had told me, I gathered that if something didn’t work out so well the first time around, she would have just gotten back on that horse and tried again. If you wanted to put food on the table for your family, you had to stop whining and worrying and get in the kitchen and do it.

  I decided to set aside my self-pity—and back into the kitchen I went.

/>   Love, too, can be a powerful motivator. In this case, that would be Mike’s profound love for cinnamon buns, which happened to be the next bread on the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge list.

  In fact, since I’d joined the bread bakers’ challenge, Mike had been waiting impatiently for cinnamon bun week. And by the time cinnamon buns came up, I had begun to see a greater purpose to baking them. I thought they might help assuage my lingering guilt over a not-so-little visit I’d made to Stella McCartney during a recent Paris trip. (Hey, 50 percent off is pretty good, even in euros.)

  The buns began easily enough. First, I took some sugar, salt, and shortening, and mixed it all together, adding lemon extract and an egg. Once that had been beaten to a smooth consistency, I added bread flour, yeast, and milk, and mixed it all up. Then came the kneading—for about ten minutes. How to tell when it’s done? The recipe specifies that’s when the dough is “silky and supple, tacky but not sticky.”

  This created momentary anxiety. Tacky but not sticky? My powers of comprehension still went only so far when it came to bread. But that’s the thing about baking along with two hundred people—someone out in the ether always has an answer. In this case, that would be Phyl, a fellow Bread Baker’s Apprentice baker who writes the blog Of Cabbages & King Cakes. According to the very informative Phyl, an amateur baker in Ohio, you press your hand into the dough and pull it away; if dough sticks to your hand but then detaches itself, so your hand is clean, the dough is tacky. If it sticks to your hand and won’t come off, it’s sticky.

  I was doubtful of dough’s ability to feel silky, but once I touched mine, I knew what the recipe was talking about. It reminded me of a particular washed-silk Lanvin dress I once fondled that instantly inspired a great hunger in me. This feels like warm butter, I remember thinking. I want to eat it. I might not have been able to eat the Lanvin number, but lucky for me, that could actually happen with this silken blob before me. First, though, it had to rest for more than an hour so it could rise.

  Then came the tricky part—you’re supposed to roll it out into a rectangle of a certain size. Having lost my tape measure, I grabbed the only ruler I possess—a naughty one I’d gotten from the Betsey Johnson Spring 2004 fashion show with the words GUYS B.J. emblazoned across it. I’m certain my Tanglin ah-ma would have approved. Once the dough was rolled out, I sprinkled a fairly thick layer of cinnamon sugar all over the top, then took the ends of one side and started rolling it inward to create a cinnamon log of sorts.

  When I sat back and looked at it, a slight alarm washed over me—this log was looking mighty lewd. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t just because I was using a rule with the giant letters B.J. to measure it. Delicious did not immediately come to mind. (Uncircumcised, maybe.) When I shared a picture of the log, wondering if it looked right, my online friends had plenty to say. Dave, a former editor from Baltimore, helpfully noted, “I guess if the recipe fell flat, you could use the adjective ‘flaccid’—which is not often found in cooking tales.”

  These buns were getting made, regardless. I decided to soldier on. Next came the fun part: the log had to be sliced up to form little buns. (Mike noted that I seemed to enjoy this slicing of the lewd log bit a little more than was becoming.) But the end product looked promising. As the dough rested on a pan, they rose again, so the buns filled out and began pressing into one another. This was looking a lot more like a Cinnabon creation. I started to get hopeful.

  Once they went into the oven, the scent of cinnamon and caramelized sugar began filling my apartment—which was a vast improvement over the smoke and burned-cornmeal aromas that my ciabatta had produced. After I drizzled some lemon fondant across the buns when they came out of the oven, we were good to go. And within minutes of them hitting the cooling rack, four had disappeared.

  “Better than Cinnabon,” Mike mumbled midbite.

  Relief, instantly, came over me. I had tried, failed. Tried again—then succeeded. I had overcome my insecurities, and made my sweet-toothed husband happy. In the process, I’d gained some confidence while committing some wickedly good wifery.

  Somewhere out there, I imagine my grandmother must have been proud.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Every August in Singapore, we would wait for the white moth.

  Some years, it would take a few days to show up; sometimes it would be right on time. But always, at some point, it would flutter into our house, park itself on a chair, watching us as we had dinner, keeping an eye on me as I did my homework, so it seemed. Always, my mother would say, “That’s your grandmother.” Or “your grandfather,” followed by “You’d better behave.” The thought would always petrify me. Was I practicing the piano hard enough? Were these moths watching when I was in bed reading way past my bedtime? I never could tell.

  The gates of Hell open in August, you see, and your loved ones are supposed to return to you in the forms of white moths. As a child, I’d never thought of anything so terrifying as my dead grandfather whom I’d never met giving me the fish eye while I plotted a new way to make my sister’s life hell.

  Of all the holidays I’ve celebrated, the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts remained the trickiest. The Chinese in Singapore believe that August—the seventh month in the Chinese calendar—is when ghosts are released from Hell and allowed to roam the earth. (Who knew the Other World was so generous with vacation time?) Think of it as Halloween—on steroids—celebrated over an entire month. And completely unironically. This is a month when many Singaporeans avoid swimming in pools—where ghosts can pull you down and drown you—or walking in dark spots—where ghosts can attack and kill you. This isn’t just teenage horror-movie speak; people in Singapore talk of ghosts as they would their parents, friends, colleagues, the celebrities they see on TV. That ghosts exist is not something anyone debates; the only question is, who has the better story to tell? In the French convent primary school I attended, even the teachers knew the stories of the girl, many years ago, who fainted and came down with a fever after seeing the ghost of a nun perched on the wall of the school garden, cackling away.

  In my own family, ghosts are taken seriously. When I was a baby, my dad was posted to Taiwan and moved us into a posh apartment in a high-rise building in Taipei. The first time Mum walked into the apartment, she immediately declared that she could not live there. “It’s dirty,” she said. “There’s a ghost here. A very unhappy one.” Dad pooh-poohed the notion. A few days later, he returned from work, calling out to Mum the moment he took his shoes off. No answer. He walked through the living room and spotted her standing on the balcony. “Tin? Are you okay?” he asked, unease setting in as he walked toward her. Mum was standing on the balcony in a daze, holding me over the railing. If her fingers had relaxed just a little, a death drop would have been certain. Dad grabbed me and shook Mum, whose eyes were rolled back in her head, so the story—which they now often tell with great laughter—goes. The next day, they moved out.

  Perhaps because of this, my mother now sees ghosts everywhere. And I mean everywhere. “I saw a ghost right by that tree,” she once tossed out while pulling into a parking spot near our old apartment. “She had long hair and was just standing there. I asked her what she wanted, but she didn’t say anything. Sad . . .” Daphne and I weren’t quite sure what to do with the information. But before we could fully process it, Mum was bundling up our school things from the backseat and chastising us for moving slowly. And the moment passed.

  Fortunately, there’s a very simple way to appease Singaporean ghosts. Unlike their Western counterparts, Singaporean ghosts aren’t obsessed with eating humans or general carnage. (Unless their corpses have been turned into zombies by jumping cats, that is.) It’s food that they crave. They’re hungry the moment they leave Hell, and it’s only if they remain hungry that they’ll turn on people. So as a very practical matter, you’ll see massive feasts of fruit and home-cooked dishes set out along streets at this time. Even families who don’t have much food to put on their own tables will s
hell out for tea and overflowing platters of food in order to get these hungry spirits off their backs.

  Getting between a ghost and its food has its consequences—as any kid who’s been warned will tell you. My aunties still regularly tell the story about my kuku (uncle), who was walking home from school one day and kicked over a roadside offering of food and incense. “That night, he had a very high fever, and he kept saying that he was this man, a man we did not know,” my mum will say, as my aunties quietly nod, remembering. “And he kept saying, ‘My mouth is full of dirt, my mouth is full of dirt!’ This ghost had been buried, you see . . .” The fever subsided only when my ah-ma called in a monk to pray over Kuku.

  I hadn’t thought about this festival in years. August certainly is far enough from Halloween that no one is thinking of spirits in America. Landing in Singapore in August, however, I had one hungry grandmother to be thinking about.

  “You can come to the temple on Saturday” said the text from my cousin Jessie. My grandmother would definitely be hungry that first weekend of the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. And if her family wouldn’t feed her, who would?

  I wasn’t sure what to bring for my Tanglin ah-ma. Auntie Khar Imm and Auntie Leng Eng would probably come laden with sweets, tea, noodles, and spring rolls for her. My parents had not gone with the family to visit my grandmother during the Hungry Ghosts month for years, preferring simply to give Auntie Khar Imm money for offerings. This was a big moment. I would be representing my own family at this feast for my grandmother. What could I possibly bring that would be a worthy addition? The answer became obvious after very little thought.