A Tiger in the Kitchen (6 page)

“Chi le, chi le,”
I replied, telling her I’d eaten, as I watched her disappear in a rush to get her guest a glass of water.

There was some clucking over the fact that I’d brought a gift.
“Aiyah, buyong lah!”
Auntie Khar Imm exclaimed, looking pleased nonetheless as she handed the oranges to her mother. She was wrong; a gift was needed, as I was a guest in her mother’s home. (I was suddenly thankful that my own mother had reminded her Americanized daughter of the necessity the very day before.)

After introductions were made—I’d never met her mother or sisters—and pleasantries were exchanged, I realized I was already behind. The process had begun without me. At dawn, Auntie Khar Imm’s family had gone to the market to pick up the pineapples they’d ordered. The plan that weekend was to make three thousand tarts—more than twenty years after my Tanglin ah-ma’s death, dozens of friends and family members still request jars of them every Chinese New Year.

As I entered the kitchen, I marveled at its expanse. The room itself was large—about the dimensions of a sizable dining room—and it opened out into a white-tiled backyard lined with kitchen cabinets stuffed with cooking utensils, shelves, and a row of burners. In the heat of this big backyard, my aunt’s family had spread out in a tart-making production line—each one was hard at work prepping the pineapples for the jam we would make that day. In one corner, Auntie Khar Imm’s mother was in a half-sit, half-squat position above a foot-high wooden stool as she hunched over a stack of pineapples, holding a large chopper. With muscular whacks, she worked methodically, chopping off the tops of the pineapples and their tough, thick skins before tossing them into a large red pail. From there, Auntie Khar Imm’s two sisters took over. Perched on similarly short stools, they were using small knives to slowly gouge out the eyes from each fruit.

Surveying this hubbub, I wasn’t sure what to do. After the obligatory hellos, they immediately bent back over the pineapples, working deftly, silently. They seemed to have it pretty much covered. And it was true, they’d been doing this for decades, since they began helping my Tanglin ah-ma make the tarts, learning the recipe along the way. They certainly didn’t need this dilettante around.

But I had come all this way—and I certainly didn’t travel 9,500 miles just to
watch
my aunties make pineapple tarts. No, guest or not, I was
making
these tarts.

I asked Auntie Khar Imm for a knife and jumped in—well, sort of. For starters, I was having problems feeling my fingers or getting them to move in the general direction they were supposed to go in the filmy plastic gloves they’d instructed me to put on to keep out the tart pineapple juice. And then there was the issue of maneuvering the knife in said gloves in a way that actually resulted in the eyes getting gouged. Over and over I jabbed, trying not to stab myself as the gloves skidded across my palms like roller skates on ice. The few holes I managed to create were massive and slushy from multiple stab wounds. I could feel the aunties surreptitiously surveying my work—all of them too polite to scold me for wasting chunks of pineapple with my mammoth gouges. The more I stabbed, the more mortified I was. But no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t get my fingers to obey.

Finally, one auntie walked over and handed me a Chinese soupspoon. “Try this,” she said, gesturing for me to use the handle to scoop out the eyes. With that, my fingers complied. And I started to fit in.

In silence, we worked—my inability to speak much Teochew being a major social hindrance. But as we carefully dug out the hundred or so eyes that were in each pineapple, the stories emerged. Auntie Khar Imm, of course, began by asking the question I’d been getting since I became engaged seven years ago: “When are you having a child?” My clucking answer—that I was just too busy with work, with life, in New York to even fathom producing anything that would depend on me for just about everything—was unacceptable, of course. After a short silence, her sisters nudged me to take a break and eat something, gesturing to a large pot of jet-black liquid on the counter.
“Ter kah dieo,”
Auntie Khar Imm said in Teochew, stopping to explain further in Mandarin when it was clear that I had no comprehension of what she had just said. It turned out the dish was a stew of pigs’ trotters braised in black vinegar and ginger. “Good for after giving birth,” Auntie Khar Imm said. “Very easy to make.”

Point taken.

When the seventy pineapples had been cleaned, prepped, and cut into large chunks, Auntie Khar Imm began running the slices through a juicer, dumping the pulp into a massive wok and preserving the juice in a pot. Into the wok went cinnamon sticks, knotted pandan leaves—from a tropical plant that’s similar in scent to vanilla and is used in many Southeast Asian desserts—and a few cups of the juice. And then the truly laborious work began. For the next several hours, we sweated over the stove, stirring the pineapple concoction in several woks, pausing now and then to taste the gradually congealing jam to see if the mixture needed more sugar or juice. Actually, to be more accurate,
Auntie Khar Imm
sweated over the stove. As she did the bulk of the stirring—with me pitching in now and then when she had to take a break—I hovered with my notebook and camera, trying to document every moment, believing that this would be the best way to ensure that I would remember every sliver of this process.

Watching Auntie Khar Imm stir with ease and calm in her mother’s sweltering backyard kitchen, I felt increasingly puzzled. She looked nothing like the frazzled bundle of nerves that I was in my own kitchen, where I often found myself glued to a printed-out recipe or instructions on my BlackBerry, not daring to make a move without first rereading the recipe for the twentieth time. Sometimes I would attempt to be bold, but my definition of culinary bravado meant that I would first read the 150 comments on an Epicurious.com recipe for additions that other cooks had made, and after much thought and more Web research about the pros and cons of an unorthodox move that hadn’t been sanctioned by the mighty editors at
Gourmet
or
Bon Appétit,
I would make the addition, my heart filling with fear laced with the tiniest dash of excitement. Auntie Khar Imm, however, displayed none of this trepidation. Instead, I watched in shock as she would sample the tiniest spoonful of the boiling jam, then cavalierly slit open giant bags of sugar, hoist them over the woks, and give them a hefty jiggle, inspiring landslide amounts to tumble forth. “Wait, wait,” I sputtered, “how much are you putting in? How do you know how much to put in?” These questions, at first, confused Auntie Khar Imm, who immediately started laughing once she figured out what I was asking. “Aiyah—
buyong
measure
lah!
” she said. “Just taste, taste, taste and then
agak-agak lor
!”

I didn’t know it then but
agak-agak,
a Malay phrase meaning “guess-guess” that’s pronounced “ah-gahk ah-gahk,” would be a refrain I would hear over and over during the two days of tart making—usually uttered following some laughter on my aunties’ part over my attachment to the preposterous notion that cooking should be precise. I wasn’t seeing much humor in the kitchen that day, however. I had been hoping to learn a recipe, one that I would be able to replicate back in New York. I had never done the
“agak-agak”
thing in my kitchen. How would I know if I was completely screwing up?

And so I attempted to grill Auntie Khar Imm. “But, really—
how
much sugar do I put in?” Patiently, she explained, “You see how sweet your pineapple is lor! Very sweet then add less, not so sweet then add more.”

This was patently unhelpful, I thought.

“Um, but how can you tell how sweet your pineapple is? Are pineapples of a certain shade sweeter? Can you tell by their smell? If it’s sweet, how much sugar do you add? If it’s not so sweet, how much do you add? What
is
your definition of sweet?”

Now it was her turn to look confused for a moment—before erupting once again in laughter. “Aiyah,” she finally said when she caught her breath. “Just taste, taste, taste, and then
agak-agak
!”

I was starting to get truly panicked. I had traveled from half a world away in order to learn my Tanglin ah-ma’s pineapple tart recipe—but it was starting to look like I’d return to New York with vague instructions built on the nebulous foundation of
agak-agak
. After about the fifth time that we had this exchange, however, Auntie Khar Imm decided to humor me by measuring the sugar she was adding—while giggling at the ludicrousness of the practice.

She had learned to make the tarts—and to cook—from my Tanglin ah-ma not by measuring, taking pictures, or writing things down, of course. She’d learned from watching, from helping, from cooking along with her. There had never been any need for words or lessons. They simply had a job to do—to put food on the table—and they just rolled up their sleeves and did it. If something tasted too sweet or too salty one day, they’d just add less sugar or salt the next. Cooking wasn’t a science; it wasn’t meant to be perfect. It was simply a way to feed the people you loved.

No one knew where my Tanglin ah-ma had learned to make pineapple tarts—or any of the other dishes she mastered. But what everyone did know was that she was a formidable woman. From the stories I’d heard, she’d been handed a trying life. Born in rural Singapore to a farming family, she entered into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man who turned out to be as in love with betting on horses as he was with drink. (And, everyone suspected, women.) After watching her husband squander his wealth, she turned to hand washing the neighbors’ laundry in order to buy schoolbooks for her three children, my father, my auntie Leng Eng, and their younger brother, my uncle Soo Kiat. But above all, she was devoted to feeding her family. “She would wake up very early to make breakfast,” Auntie Khar Imm said, noting that Tanglin Ah-Ma occasionally rose at three or four in the morning to make
bak-zhang
, the pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings that Singaporeans sometimes have for breakfast. I tried to think hard of my childhood and the
bak-zhang
I’d had. Did I remember what my grandmother’s dumplings tasted like? But no matter how hard I dug into my recollections of life pre-eleven, I just wasn’t sure. I had been so young—and more obsessed with Chicken McNuggets than with these sticky dumplings—that I didn’t recall having eaten them very much. Thinking about my grandmother rising in the darkness just to make them for all of us, I felt ashamed.

As we talked and stirred, the jam got denser, darker, turning a woody shade of ocher. It would have to cool overnight before we could bake. As I left that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking of my grandmother’s
bak-zhang
. I had taken them for granted; now, I desperately wanted to learn how to make them.

The next morning, I arrived bearing chocolates.

Once again, there was the clucking, the cries of
“buyong lah!”
and the offering of water to the guest. Auntie Khar Imm and her sisters had already begun by the time I arrived. And once again, they didn’t seem quite sure what to do with me. My boisterous cousin Jessie was in the kitchen, too. I’d hardly seen her since we were children, but within minutes of catching up, our banter felt natural. After flitting about, trying to figure out where to fit in, I decided to latch on to my cousin, trailing after her as I’d done as an eleven-year-old at my grandmother’s funeral. Jessie, who works in the accounting department of an interior design firm, had missed the jam-making process because she had to work the day before. But now that she was in the fray, Jessie, who as a twelve-year-old had been able to boss adults around, held court once again, brimming with confidence as she dumped butter, flour, and egg yolks in a mixer to prepare the dough for the cookie base.

Having grown up living with my Tanglin ah-ma, Jessie had been roped in to help in the kitchen, learning how to cook along the way. Watching her stride around, mixing and rolling dough with confident authority, I couldn’t help but be in awe. Once again, I was the bookish, sheltered eleven-year-old, wanting to be like my fearless older cousin. From Jessie and her auntie Khar Moi, who I was told was the baker of her family, I learned some things—how to mix the buttery dough, create sunflower-shaped rounds with a cookie press, and fill the holes of the rounds with dough. We would then lightly brush the cookie bases with beaten egg yolk, roll up balls of the jam, which by now had hardened a little, place them atop the cookies, and send the cookies off to Auntie Khar Imm, who was squatting on a low stool, manning the oven.

As we kneaded, brushed, and rolled, I gently prodded my aunties to tell me about my ancestors. I’d heard the story of my great-grandfather’s immigration from Shantou, in southeastern China, to Singapore in search of a better life. I’d wanted to visit the village for years—here was my chance to find out more. Auntie Khar Moi, who’d actually visited the area, told me about the tiny village called Teo Ann Kim Sar, colloquially referred to as Sar Leng Tan (akin to Village Tan), where my great-grandfather was born. She didn’t know much except that it was somewhere between Chaozhou and Shantou, two fairly major industrial cities in Southern China. The more questions I asked—and the more cookies I made—the more they seemed to embrace me, this almost-alien
ang moh,
as one of their own. When a friend of mine stopped by to watch us cook and teased me, saying that I was “very fierce,” my auntie Khar Imm immediately leapt in to defend me. “Aiyah,” she said, “Sar Leng Tan girls are all very fierce one!”

My Tanglin ah-ma, too, had had this quality, I found out. Among the Chinese New Year cookies she would make was a tiny white cookie called
kueh bangkit
. Now, this sweet, tapioca flour cookie is not easy to execute; when done right, it’s supposed to have such an airy consistency that it virtually melts on your tongue. But most versions you buy in stores are so dense that they’re not going to disintegrate unless you start chewing.