A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  As a six-year-old, I remember being so overbooked I sometimes felt too busy to think. My after-school hours were spent endlessly shuttling from watercolor classes to ballet to Chinese brush painting lessons and swimming. Once I entered first grade, there were the tuition teachers my parents hired to give me additional lessons in Mandarin, math, and science so I could ace all my classes.

  Auntie Khar Moi recounted how my cousin Royston had had a fierce tuition teacher who reduced him to tears with her sharp words, diminishing any desire to learn. “We’re better off being oxen!” she said, anger spiking her voice. Better to work the fields than be bullied into studying hard for an intellectual life, that is. I marveled at the pride I could hear in her words, wishing that my parents had had the same understanding when I’d come home in tears after yet another piano lesson in which my teacher had whacked me on the knuckles with a ruler because I was such an ungifted—and lazy—student. Instead, I’d plodded along, trying to keep up, until many years later my parents finally accepted the fact that I probably wasn’t a prodigy and allowed me to stop. My piano remains in my parents’ living room to this day, gathering dust—an enduring symbol of my childhood shortcomings. Talent is immaterial in my family; it’s the trying that matters. Considering that I often sat down to practice only after my father or mother had spent some time chasing me around the dining table with a cane in hand, I would say it was widely thought that I simply did not try hard enough when it came to the piano.

  Mired in my memories of not trying hard enough, I was soon to be reminded of those feelings all over again. Our little Teochew mooncake balls were done and the fryer was revved up. We popped them in, several at a time, watching as they slowly turned a golden brown color. Most of them looked lovely: the crust turned out perfectly, with a slender spiral of dough that flared out as it circled each ball. Some, however, were just flat and smooth, resembling Ping-Pong balls as opposed to beautiful spheres with decorative crusts.

  What went wrong?

  I retraced my steps, mentally walking through the various things I’d done. At some point, I suddenly realized, I’d been so busy listening and chatting that I must have stopped mixing the two doughs together, using just one kind instead. “Um, what is the purpose of using two doughs?” I asked Auntie Khar Moi, more than a little ashamed that I’d not asked her this question, say, as we were making the mooncakes. “One has oil in it, and one doesn’t, so when you fry it up, the dough with the oil explodes,” she said, noting that this was how you got the spiral effect.

  Somehow, I had done it again.

  Quickly, I assessed the situation. There weren’t actually that many Ping-Pong mooncakes coming out of the fryer. I must have been paying some attention—or perhaps I just had not made that many mooncakes. Either way, I was relieved that the damage was limited. And once I bit into one, the exterior didn’t really matter. Crunchy outside and just lightly sweet on the inside, they were a pleasure simple and true, especially with a hot cup of Chinese tea.

  As I ate one, and then another, I wondered how it was possible that I’d never had one of these Teochew mooncakes before. But all these years later, it certainly wasn’t too late to start.

  After some months in Singapore, I began to wonder: Is my mum ever going to teach me how to cook something?

  Oh, how she’d protested when I first mentioned wanting to learn to cook from her. “Aiyah, don’t ask me lah. I’m not a good cook!” she squawked. “Your e-ma or ah-ma can teach you better!” Having had a maid handle the cooking in her home for more than three decades, my mother knew she was rusty at the stove. In fact, she seemed genuinely embarrassed by the idea of imparting recipes, seeming to feel that she didn’t know how to make anything special. “It’s so easy,” she’d say whenever I asked her how to make a tofu and pork lunch dish or the carrot and corn soup we had at least once a week with lunch or dinner. “Just throw everything in and boil, boil, boil!” This was a refrain that I’d heard for years, never questioning it. I wasn’t about to let it go this time, however.

  “Mommo,” I said one day, using the name that my sister and I had, for reasons we can’t remember anymore, been calling her for years. “You make really good soups. I really want to learn how to make them.” She paused, looking doubtful. “It’s so easy—” she started to say again. “But, Mommo,” I said, cutting her off, “don’t you want me to learn how to make them so I can be healthier?” This, apparently, did the trick.

  My mother would do anything to protect Daphne and me. This was especially evident when I was sixteen and was stricken with dengue hemorrhagic fever, a potentially life-threatening disease in tropical countries that is spread by a certain breed of mosquito. My mother and I both were felled by dengue fever and found ourselves hospitalized for a week, watching an alarming rash spread across our bodies that turned out to be tiny blotches of blood just under our skin. Once we were back at home, my mother was livid. She became convinced that our next-door neighbor, who had numerous potted plants, had turned her yard into a breeding ground for the dengue-carrying mosquito.

  For days, my mother fumed, peering across the fence that separated our home from the neighbor’s, squinting at her plants, staring venomously at the neighbor whenever she surfaced. Finally, my mother decided something needed to be done. She made an anonymous phone call to the health department, tipping them off to my neighbor’s deadly garden. This being hyperefficient Singapore, inspectors were next door in a flash. After a thorough inspection, they found nothing. Since they were in the neighborhood, they decided to go door to door to see if they could find the source of the mosquito. My mother welcomed the inspectors with a litany of complaints about our neighbor. She was aghast that her nemesis had been innocent and would not have to pay a hefty fine. Just then, however, the inspectors found something. The larvae of dengue mosquitoes did exist—in my mother’s own potted plants.

  This would be what Singaporeans call kenah bang—or, you’ve been slammed.

  When it came to soups, however, my mother was on surer footing. Ever since I was a child, my mother had religiously made soups for my sister and me not because they tasted good—which, frankly, is not the case with some of them—or because they went well with dinner or lunch. Rather, her sole purpose for making them was to bu shenti—restore your body. My mother has always been a firm believer in the restorative powers of herbs and vegetables. Home-brewed chrysanthemum tea, after all, had been dangled in front of me as a way to help improve my vision and give me sparkly, pretty eyes. And the various mélanges of red dates and gnarly-looking, mossy-smelling Chinese herbs that she tossed into massive pots of water along with chicken or pork and daikon, carrots, or watercress were all meant to help keep her family’s yin and yang energies in balance.

  The Singaporean satirist Colin Goh once noted in a column that “if Harry Potter went to school in Singapore he’d learn in potions class that there are two kinds of potions: heaty and cooling.” Colin’s take may be funny, but my mother, along with many Chinese, has a deep—and very serious—belief in foods having properties that can heat your body up or cool it down. The key is to figure out whether you have too much yin or yang and adjust those fires accordingly. When she heard my sister or me so much as clear our throats, much less cough, we instantly knew what was coming. There would be cups of barley water, milky and sweet, strewn about our house, perched right by our beds. The concoction was meant as a cooling agent, to help bring the fires within us, the yang energy, down a few notches.

  In fact, my mother believes in the healing properties of herbs and various foods so much that she decided a few years ago to turn this conviction into a career. Several nights a week, she began schlepping massive, heavy books imprinted with endless mazes of characters and instructions on anatomy, acupuncture, and of course, the Eastern belief in the healing properties of herbal concoctions, all in a bid to wrap her head around the ancient remedies of our people. In the last few years, the Chinese medicine class had become her lifeline—a welcome distrac
tion from the family turmoil. And the more she learned, the prouder I was of her.

  I had been doubtful of this process at first, gently and then more firmly refusing whenever she offered to cup me. (This ancient Chinese process of healing involves fire, smoke, and little glass cups being suctioned onto one’s back to release energy in key parts of one’s body. Gwyneth Paltrow did it several years ago, bravely showing off the round bruise marks the cups left in a backless dress she wore to an awards show. Somehow, I lacked Gwyneth’s courage.) When my mother started learning acupuncture and began fishing about for practice subjects, I made myself even more scarce in the house.

  Herbal remedies, however—this was something that I could get behind. My mum, too, was immediately for this idea. For years she’d been trying to convince me of the powers of heaty or cooling soups, and now, finally, I was embracing them. Her lessons, however, fell a little short at first. With her class schedule and her six mornings a week in a traditional Chinese healer’s clinic for practical experience, my mother was busier than any of my retired or generally not-working aunties. So when I mentioned I’d like to learn how to make her green carrot–red carrot soup (which is what we called the soup she regularly made by boiling carrots and daikon with chicken or pork), the ingredients magically appeared on the kitchen table with instructions from my mother to watch as Erlinda taught me how to make it. (It was true that the basic strategy in many of the soups I learned from Erlinda did involve tossing everything in a pot to “boil, boil, boil,” as my mother had insisted.)

  One day, however, I implored my mother to spend some time in the kitchen with me. “The point is to spend time learning from you!” I said. She looked a little guilty. Despite my forays into the kitchen in recent years, we’d not really cooked together. When she’d visit me in the United States, she would take over the kitchen sometimes, making her soups and some basic stir-fries or steamed fish to be served with rice for a simple dinner. The few times she’d been in New York for Christmas, I’d pretty much kept her out of the kitchen as I undertook my traditional two- to three-day whirlwind of cooking just to set appetizers, entrées, side dishes, and a hefty lineup of cookies and festive cakes out for Christmas dinner. We had hardly ever cooked together, but I was eager to change that.

  And my mother finally relented when I explained to her that I wanted to learn how to make the sweet green bean soup she’d made for me when I was a child, because I wanted to share it with a group of food bloggers spread from Paris to San Diego who had started a monthly virtual lunch date. We had decided to swap recipes for chilled soups in September, and I’d immediately thought of my mother’s green bean soup.

  The soup—which is just lightly sweet and basically made with green mung beans and water—was a dish that I had looked forward to as a child. In Singapore, this soup is generally eaten either chilled or piping hot, as a dessert or a snack. However, I often had bowls of it for breakfast and sometimes lunch. Whenever I had schoolmates over, my mother would whip out green bean soup and fried chicken wings—a snack combination that was both delicious (fried chicken wings) and healthy (green bean soup). (This is also supposed to be a “cooling” soup that helps prevent and get rid of acne. Perhaps Mum was just trying to save us all from pockmarked skin.) In any case, on those sweltering tropical days when we’d spent hours running around in the sun or, later, having a marathon mah-jongg session, what I truly looked forward to at the end of it all was a bowl of my mother’s green bean soup and some garlicky chicken wings.

  Despite my love for this sweet soup, I’ve never known how to make it. So when my Let’s Lunch bunch suggested that we make a chilled soup for our next virtual lunch, I jumped at the excuse to learn my mother’s recipe. I knew I could count on my mother’s deep-seated desire for me to have friends, which goes back to the time she tried bribing my fellow preschoolers with chocolate to get them to talk to me. I don’t think it worked.

  One afternoon, she carved out some time, and our tutorial began. We started with green beans (mung beans), pearl sago, tropical pandan leaves, and a sweet potato, which is optional. Now, this is a pretty basic soup. But my mum usually adds sweet potato to the mix if she wants it to be a little heartier. (I think she thinks it also makes the soup look a little fancier.) So, to impress my Let’s Lunch friends, we peeled and cut the sweet potato into small, bite-size cubes.

  Then we put some water into a pot, knotted a few pandan leaves, threw them in, and brought the liquid to a boil.

  After a while, my mother tossed in the green beans, then the sweet potato, and finally the sago and sugar. After just a little more boiling—when the beans had split and softened—the soup was done. So, yes, Mum wasn’t just being humble when she said the recipe consists of tossing everything into a pot and boiling.

  But the fact that something is easy to make doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

  After a bowl of our soup, I wasn’t sure if I felt “cooler” or if my skin felt less oily. But another word for how I felt did come to mind: content.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first time my Tanglin ah-ma was hospitalized for the mysterious pains that would lead to her death, she had one thing on her mind.

  Summoning my uncle Soo Kiat to her bedside, she said, “I’ve made the chili paste for otah,” referring to a creamy and spicy fish paste wrapped in banana leaves that was one of her many signature dishes. “The fish has been bought; the otah must be made.”

  She whispered the recipe to my uncle. Her mind, then, was at rest.

  Now, otah, a Malay dish, would not be an expected notch in a traditional Chinese home cook’s kitchen post. The paste—also known as otak or otak-otak—is a spicy mousse, usually made with mackerel, that is wrapped in banana leaves and then steamed or grilled. It can be eaten on its own, mashed into rice, or slathered on bread for a savory lunch or breakfast.

  Simply thinking about it is often all it takes to get my mouth watering. I’d never known where my grandmother got her recipe, but after some digging, it became obvious—the ailing Indonesian cook she had taken in later in life. In addition to sharing her mee siam recipe, this cook had given Tanglin Ah-Ma her otah recipe. Now, decades later, this would be passed to me—a product of my grandmother’s selfless generosity.

  The otah process takes two days. On the first, Auntie Khar Imm and I began by chopping up lemongrass, shallots, galangal, turmeric, and lightly toasted, crumbled belacan (fermented, ground dried shrimp), and blending them in a food processor with candlenuts and a little water to make a paste. By now, Auntie Khar Imm was letting me chop along with her or take over some basic slicing tasks as she moved on to other steps. When it came to fresh turmeric, however, she protested. “No need lah!” she said, gesturing to my pale pink nails, which I’d had manicured just the day before. “You’ll stain your nails!” I had come this far, however; I was determined not to be pampered. So, fifteen-dollar manicure or not, I waved off her protests and jumped in. She was right, of course. Before long, the juices spurting out of the bright orange turmeric were turning my fingers, my nails, bits of my wrist an alarming, electric yellow. Hoping it would wash off—but not really caring—I kept chopping.

  Next, we started frying this paste over medium heat in a large wok. While it was frying, we tossed sun-dried chilis that had been softened in boiling water and tiny, flaming-hot bird’s-eye chilis into the processor and blended them together. We then added this paste to the wok, mixing it all up well.

  We wanted the chili paste to get really dry. The best way to tell whether there’s still water in the paste is to add oil (which we did periodically during the frying) and then inspect the oil to see if white, wispy strands appear. If we saw the wisps, there was still water in the mixture.

  About an hour and a half later, the paste was dry enough. We scooped it out into a bowl to cool overnight on the kitchen table.

  When I showed up at Auntie Khar Imm’s the next day, I was presented with a massive gray fish. Beh gah he, she called it, as I tried to jot down what
those Teochew words sounded like. With my grasp of Teochew being tenuous at best, I quickly took a picture of the fish, desperately hoping that its face or sheen had enough identifying characteristics that I might be able to find it back in New York.

  As we chopped, squeezed shredded coconut for its thick milk, and added that together with eggs, sugar, coriander, tapioca flour, salt, and a dash of monosodium glutamate to the fish-and-cooled-chili-paste mixture, Auntie Khar Imm began to share the story of my Tanglin ah-ma and the cook who had taught her this dish. “She had one eye!” she said of the cook. “And she cooked for this really rich family.” I began to think: Every family history really is enhanced by the appearance of a one-eyed Indonesian cook. This was pretty cool.

  And now, decades later, there I sat in Auntie Khar Imm’s kitchen, carefully scooping fish paste into banana leaves, sealing them up, and steaming them while marveling at the generosity of my Tanglin ah-ma, and the otah recipe that it had earned.

  On the way home, I noticed massive neon-yellow splotches still covering my very newly manicured nails. The marks of my grandmother’s recipe, however, felt oddly satisfying.

  A few days later, I bundled up a few sticks of otah and brought them to Gunther, the head chef of one of Singapore’s most expensive French restaurants, who had heard about my otah lesson and asked for a taste. With no small amount of anxiety, I wondered what this Belgian import who adored spicy Singaporean food and had spent years mastering local techniques would think.

  “You don’t have to try it right now,” I said in the coolness of his restaurant, just before dinner service started, hoping that I wouldn’t have to watch him eat it, possibly loathe it, and then say something polite. Instead, he opened the Tupperware container right away, picking up an otah with his fingers and popping it into his mouth. Carefully, I watched his face. His eyes widened. He smiled. “It’s spicy—very good!” he said, reaching back in to grab another otah. His face had brightened visibly. He didn’t seem to be lying.