A Tiger in the Kitchen

by Cheryl Tan

  All this changed the moment she found out that I was learning to cook.

  “Cheryl!” she cried when I walked in, grabbing me with her thin, strong hands, holding me to her in a firm, long hug. “You looking good! How are your parents?”

  “They’re good!”

  “Your sister? Not married yet?”

  “No, no. Still single.”

  There was a grimace. I could almost see her thinking, Kids these days, I tell you.

  “Mike says you learning how to cook? I bought some stuff to teach you,” she said, starting toward the kitchen. Clearly, I was to follow.

  There was nothing bubbling on the stove this time, no smells of spicy Korean stews or Mike’s favorite—steak—to signal that dinner was on the cusp of being served. Instead, carefully arranged on the counter were various ingredients: shredded chicken, garlic cloves, large, bunched-up sheets of dried, black-green seaweed.

  “Seaweed soup,” she said, holding up the crinkly sheets and waving them at me. “Korean recipe—good for women to clean the . . . you know,” she added, dropping her voice a few levels while pointing to her nether regions. “Good for making more milk after you have baby.”

  I could see where this was going.

  Before I could protest, Ai-Kyung was off and running. “You take three pounds of chicken—whole chicken—then you boil it in a big pot of water,” she said, holding up the bowl of chicken she’d prepped before we arrived. “Then you take the chicken out, drain the soup with a sieve, and you keep the water in the pot.” The chicken, by this point, had been shredded coarsely. The seaweed had been soaked in cold water to just the right softness and then cut into small pieces. “Don’t soak too long,” Ai-Kyung cautioned. “Just twenty to thirty minutes. You want it a bit crunchy, not mushy.” After soaking, “you massage the seaweed with your hand and rinse a couple times,” she said. Then she tossed four cloves of bashed garlic into the pot of reserved broth, brought it to a boil, and turned down the heat to let it simmer, adding a scant teaspoon of Hawaiian sea salt and one to two tablespoons of soy sauce. “You put one in first,” she said, pausing and raising her index finger to get my attention, “then you taste and see if you want more.” After that, she let the broth simmer for thirty to forty minutes, added the shredded chicken, seaweed, and a dash of sesame oil, and suddenly we had a simple, clear soup that tasted clean and comforting at the same time.

  “Good for ladies,” Ai-Kyung said, as she watched me slurp up her soup, which was truly delicious. “After I gave birth to Mike, I had to take it every day. Make a lotta milk.”

  While the very well-intentioned milk-making soup was perfectly lovely, there were other Korean recipes I had my eye on. Whenever Mike craved Korean food, he wanted two things: kalbi, grilled beef short ribs, and mandoo, pork and cabbage dumplings. Specifically, he wanted his mother’s kalbi and mandoo. The one time I’d tried to make kalbi at home in Brooklyn—with a recipe from the James Beard Award–winning Korean American chef David Chang of Momofuku fame, no less—Mike thought it was nice and all. But it just wasn’t his mother’s kalbi.

  Ai-Kyung, of course, was thrilled to hear this. “It’s so easy!” she said, laughing and turning away. I could tell she was touched to hear that Mike missed her food.

  Naturally, the next afternoon when we arrived, there was a mound of beef short ribs on the counter. Working quickly once again, Ai-Kyung started on the marinade, mixing half a cup plus one tablespoon of sugar with one cup of water, three-quarters of a cup of soy sauce, two tablespoons of sesame oil—pausing for a moment to sniff at the bottle and say, “I hope this is sesame oil!” before laughing and moving on—one tablespoon of minced garlic, and one teaspoon of coarse sea salt. “Some people use mashed papaya or kiwi—makes it tender,” she stopped to say. “But I don’t like the papaya flavor. If you’re using papaya, though, mash it up before adding it in.” Many kalbi recipes call for apple juice as a tenderizing agent. Ai-Kyung, however, had a secret alternative. “I like guava juice,” she said, pouring half a cup into the marinade. Once she’d mixed in three coarsely chopped scallion stalks—“Green parts, too!”—and a one-inch piece of ginger, peeled and thinly sliced, the marinade was ready to go. “Put it in the fridge for seven hours or overnight,” she said, squinting at the clock and realizing that this meant we wouldn’t be able to eat until 10:00 P.M. “Or at least three to four hours is fine.”

  Once that was done, she started on the mandoo, chopping up two cups of cabbage, sprinkling sea salt on it, and letting it sit for an hour or so. Then she mixed together minced chives, green onions, minced pork, ground beef, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt, ground ginger, and a beaten egg. Ai-Kyung drained the cabbage, squeezing it dry with her hands, and added it to the mixture. Then, as Mike, Charlie, and Al, Ai-Kyung’s husband, sat down to watch TV, she and I took the bowl of mandoo filling and sat on her veranda, which had a lovely fifteenth-floor view of Honolulu and the glimmer of sparkling blue just beyond the hotel skyline along Waikiki Beach.

  Ai-Kyung took a round dumpling wrapper, showing me the package so I’d remember what kind to buy. Mandoo wrappers are typically a little thicker than Chinese dumpling wrappers, but Ai-Kyung prefers thinner skins on her mandoo, so she buys the Chinese versions. Holding a wrapper in her left hand, she dipped the tip of her right pinkie finger into a small bowl of water and ran it along the edge of the wrapper, wetting it. Then she scooped one tablespoon or so of filling into the center, folded the dumpling over, and sealed it with four tiny pleats. That was all it took. She placed the dumpling in a tray.

  “I learned how to make these in Shanghai, you know,” she said. “I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I saw my grandmother making them with the Chinese housemaid, so I sat down and learned. She used to make the skins herself. The centers should be thicker than the edges because when you fold it over you’re going to have that heavy double layer on the edge if you have a very thick dough. We used to use a beer bottle to roll out the skins for making mandoo.” Because she learned to make mandoo in China, the versions Ai-Kyung makes are more Chinese than Korean. “I made it with tofu one time, Korean style,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I didn’t like it.”

  Having learned how to fold dumplings from Auntie Khar Imm, I wasn’t a complete dud at folding mandoo—which, I could tell from her slight smile, Ai-Kyung was pleased to note. With four hands and gradually growling stomachs, the filling disappeared quickly, and soon Ai-Kyung and I had more than a hundred mandoo carefully lined up in a series of tiny trays.

  Ai-Kyung brought a pot of water with some salt to boil, tossed in a handful of mandoo, put the lid on, and brought the water to a boil again. When it was boiling, she added one cup of cold water, brought it back to a boil, and repeated. “When you’ve done it twice, the mandoo is ready,” she said, mixing together soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, and black pepper for a dipping sauce while the mandoo was boiling. Removing the kalbi from the marinade, she sautéed it in a pan for three to four minutes per side and then set that on the dining table, too.

  And suddenly, we were all eating—the very first home-cooked Korean meal that I’d actually helped to make. As his mother closely watched, Mike ate more than a dozen mandoo and half the plate of kalbi, all by himself. The next day, we were to return home, a fact that always saddened Ai-Kyung, I knew. But this visit, it had been different. We had made dinner together; together, we had fed her son, the man we both loved.

  As we hugged our good-byes, I thanked Ai-Kyung for taking the time to teach me. “Oh, it’s no big deal!” she said, wincing and pooh-poohing the thanks. But just as we were about to leave, she ran into the kitchen and emerged with a parting gift. It was a little plastic bag; in it was a bunch of dried Korean seaweed.

  “So you know what it looks like,” she said, winking, “how to find it in New York.”

  Back in New York, it was November and the holiday season was getting under way.

  Spending so much time in Singapore was beginning to take its toll on my social
life in New York.

  “Tan,” Jesse, one of my dearest friends said, “we never see you anymore.”

  “Aiyah, you too busy for us now lah,” Simpson complained. “Flying all over the world, too important lah.”

  Immediately, I set about trying to make things right. First things first. There was Thanksgiving, my favorite Western holiday. What’s not to love about a festival that’s all about getting together to eat? Having spent months in Asia, I wanted to include Asian elements in the menu—adding miso-rubbed turkey and persimmon-cranberry sauce to the lineup. In addition to cooking like a madwoman in the four days leading up to Thanksgiving, I flung myself into baking panettone bread to share with my friends.

  This, however, turned out not to be the wisest of ideas.

  This bread, it will drive you insane, make you tear your hair out. You may find yourself staring intently at an unrising bowl of taupe glop, thinking, Just why, God, WHY? I mean this for the folks out there attempting to bake it, that is. (If you’re the sort who buys panettone in a store, then sure, go for it. I’m certain that’s pretty harmless.)

  I wasn’t envisioning this at the time, of course—just the warm, glowing feeling I would get as I presented my friends with my festive, homemade holiday panettone. And so, with Ella Fitzgerald’s “Christmas Song” burbling in my head, I merrily set about buying the ingredients—rye flour, pineapple juice, and bits of dried mangoes, cranberries, and pears. When I sat down to look at the recipe, I knew I was in trouble. This bread requires a starter that takes five days to make. And when that’s done? The dough takes two more days.

  A seven-day bread? But my holiday spirit was unflagging. And so, the baking began.

  First, I started by making a seed culture—a mix of rye flour and pineapple juice, left to ferment and rise slowly at room temperature. Every day, I dutifully fed it a little by adding flour and pineapple juice or water and then just let it sit and watched it grow. This was happening so painfully slowly that I began to understand how it might feel to watch grass grow. Except that grass would be nowhere near as noxious. This recipe actually states at one point: “Do not be put off by the strong aroma of the dough.” (Another favorite bit: “Try not to breathe as [the gas] escapes—the carbonic gas mixed with ethanol fumes will knock you across the room!”)

  After five days of this, however (with a very patient Mike politely ignoring the fumes and bowls of bizarre goo), the starter was ready to go. I mixed up a sponge using the starter, milk, and flour, and let that ferment overnight. Then I chopped up raisins, dried mango, papaya, cranberries, and pears; mixed those with orange and vanilla extracts and brandy; and let that sit out overnight. Now, traditional panettone calls for dried cherries, raisins, and apricots. Having never made panettone before, I, of course, decided to put my own tropical spin on it. What an unforgettable holiday gift that would be!

  The next day everything got mixed together with more flour, sugar, yeast, and almonds, forming an incredibly liquid dough that just would not rise. After hours upon hours of staring at it and hoping for some action, I finally scooped some into muffin tins to make mini-panettoni and the rest into a large, round tin to make a cake-size version. Into the oven that went, and the moment it came out, I realized that my dreams of a lovely holiday gift to make up for ignoring—or igvoiding, as my sister might say—my friends were not to be.

  How did it taste? Dry. Mealy. Sort of like “Big Waste of Time” encapsulated in a loaf.

  I can think of a thousand things I probably did wrong. I should have used more flavorful fruits, such as dried cherries, instead of attempting my tropical take on panettone with mangoes and papayas. Perhaps my water was the wrong temperature. Maybe my apartment’s aggressively tropical heating system ruined the dough. Whatever it was, I probably will never find out. (I’d decided then and there not to attempt panettone again.)

  My friends politely nibbled at the bread when I set it out at Thanksgiving. (Perhaps their opinions had been slightly colored by the lengthy complaints and display of self-flogging I’d indulged in over the panettone the moment they sat down at the dinner table.)

  Still, I felt like I wasn’t connecting enough with my dear friends. The months I’d spent making Southeast Asian dishes meant it had been months since I’d cooked with Simpson, my original teacher. I missed our time together in the kitchen—even if it was just me watching his moves at the stove, picking up tidbits.

  A few weeks later, I was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc at Jesse’s annual holiday party in Brooklyn, taking in the sight of his bright Christmas tree with the stuffed panda perched at its top and thinking about the time I’d spent away from my friends. They respected my quest; they’d been nothing but supportive. But they also missed me, and I missed them. I was reconnecting with my family, my friends in Singapore, but lives were trundling along without me in New York. New girlfriends were popping up, old jobs were being shed. Watching the party swirl about me, I couldn’t help but feel a disconnect.

  Just then, my cell phone rang; it was Simpson. “I have two pounds of foie gras in the car and some bread,” he said. “Should I bring it up?” The answer to a question like that, of course, is yes, oh, yes.

  Within minutes, Simpson was hauling up slabs of foie gras and clearing a spot near Jesse’s stove, inspecting his condiments and pans before grabbing a skillet that he deemed acceptable. As I watched, Simpson drizzled a little olive oil on the pan and swiftly sautéed the chunks of foie gras, turning them over and over until they were suitably browned. Then he lay the foie gras on a cutting board, slicing them into small strips, and placed those onto little bits of crusty bread with a slight drizzling of balsamic vinaigrette. A crowd started gathering. Jesse’s spread of cookies, pizza, cheese, and pulled-pork sliders had been delicious, to be sure. But here was a simple yet decadent dish that had definitively taken his party up several notches, a snack that Simpson had just slapped together in minutes.

  “This is amazing!” I said, scarfing down several foie gras toasts as I thought about just how much I’d missed Simpson’s little treats, how much I’d missed watching him cook.

  “Aiyah, it’s nothing lah,” he said. “So easy!”

  Just days later, I would head back to Asia. And I realized how much I would miss him again.

  “Soon,” I promised, “I’ll be done. Soon, we’ll cook again.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The first sign that I might not fit in, I should have known, was the jellied sea worms.

  We had just arrived in Xiamen to learn a bit more about ourselves and the part of China where our ancestors had lived. And after having traveled to this neon city in southeastern China filled with old Euro-Chinese hotels and sleazy expat bars in October 2008, my father, sister, Mike, and I felt somewhat invincible, ready to take on just about anything. We were in a restaurant that our host, a family friend who lived there, had proclaimed one of the best in the city. Xiamen was our oyster—or, as it turned out, our sea worm.

  A waitress emerged with a plate, filled in the center with a pile of dark, chopped-up jelly, and plopped it onto the bright pink tablecloth, an ominous dark spot in a sea of Barbie effervescence. We looked at one another, not quite daring to ask. “They’re sea worms—they live in the mud at the bottom of the ocean!” our host said cheerily, looking disappointed when we clearly did not recognize our cue to grab our chopsticks and dive in. “Come, come, you cannot say you’ve been to Xiamen until you’ve eaten this dish.” And so we did. Gingerly picking up a cube of jelly with chopsticks and trying not to think too hard about what I was about to put in my mouth, I closed my eyes and focused on the texture: slippery and slimy, yes. But it didn’t taste like much more than a salty Jell-O, so it could’ve been worse. Except . . . Oh, wait. There was an odd rubbery bit—something like squid or octopus except that the fleshy substance produced an audible crunchy squish of a sound when you bit down and chewed. I smiled and politely crunch-squished for a few seconds before grabbing at a beer to wash it all down quickly.
By the time we got back to the hotel, Daphne was covered in hives.

  My maternal grandfather may have come from Xiamen decades ago, but it clearly wasn’t home for us. Not anymore, anyway.

  On this trip, the four of us had journeyed to southeastern China after years of talking about it. Flying in from New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing, we’d converged first in Shantou to find the village my great-grandfather had come from. The trip had been surreal—Shantou was an industrial city with a population of several million. The air was gritty. Cars and motorbikes paid little attention to stoplights and general cues to drive in the correct direction; we were horrified to learn that cars driving horizontally into busy traffic across a several-lane road were regular and accepted occurrences. The general lawlessness was disconcerting. And the Shantou portion of the trip had been capped with a harrowing, hours-long car ride to the tiny village we had been told was the right one, only to spend an hour in the dusty clan headquarters just off the village square, poring over its book of names without finding my great-grandfather’s among them.

  Flying out of Xiamen a few days later, I vowed to return. I promised to find my great-grandfather’s village.

  When I started cooking with them, Auntie Khar Imm and her sisters had offered some help, pointing me in the direction of the Tan clan association in Singapore that had organized my Tanglin ah-ma’s funeral. “They’ll know which is the right place,” she had told me. And when I’d visited the association headquarters, barging into the tidy row house near Singapore’s Chinatown that it occupied, ablaze with questions about my ancestral village, the gaggle of men playing mah-jongg and smoking cigarettes had looked bemused. “Women can join also,” Michael, the president, noted in between puffs when he saw me looking around, wondering if I was actually allowed in the building. Even so, I thought it was a pretty clear signal.