A Tiger in the Kitchen (10 page)

Auntie Khar Imm heated the oil and tossed in the minced garlic, gently frying up the sputtering mixture. “You want it to be slightly brown but not too brown or it will be bitter,” she said, slowly stirring. When the garlic turned gold, she carefully removed it from the wok, placing it in a bowl. Next, she fried up the shallots in the same oil, adding some more oil—as I watched closely, trying to
agak-agak
along with Auntie Khar Imm—then removed them. Next, the mushrooms went into the oil for about ten minutes of frying. I may not have been measuring out the amounts, but I was studiously watching the clock and scribbling down starting and ending times. Auntie Khar Imm clucked, however, and firmly instructed me to make sure to look into the wok. “You want to fry until the mushrooms are soft and all the water that comes out of them has disappeared,” she said. Next, my wonderfully diced pork went in, then the garlic, shallots, some sugar, white pepper, ground coriander, and dark soy sauce, a sweet and thick mixture that looks like molasses and is common in Singaporean Chinese dishes. With the wok almost full now, Auntie Khar Imm summoned up more strength as she fried, swirling the ingredients about the pan as I watched. Finally, she paused to taste a spoonful of the mixture before dumping in more white pepper and sugar. And with just a few more firm stirs, we were done.

The filling looked lovely—it was the shade of bittersweet chocolate and smelled peppery, garlicky, and porky all at once.

The meat would cool overnight; the next day, dumpling wrapping would begin.

The wrapping phase of
bak-zhang
making is time-consuming. For starters, you need to soak the uncooked glutinous rice in cool water for at least five hours. You also need to soak the dried bamboo leaves in water so they’re malleable enough for wrapping.

I would be lying if I said I actually did any of this—Auntie Khar Imm woke up at 4:30
A.M.
to get all this done before I showed up, mired in a fog of sleepiness, at the (to me) early hour of 10:00
A.M.
In fact, by the time I arrived that next morning, Auntie Khar Imm had not only done all of this but had also already set up our
bak-zhang
wrapping station. A long pole was propped horizontally; she had tied two clusters of strings to the pole and arranged a carpet of newspapers beneath it.

I suddenly got the sense that the Ghirardelli chocolates I had brought her the day before were a woefully inadequate gift.

Pulling up two squat wooden stools, Auntie Khar Imm gestured for me to sit. Grabbing a handful of long leaves, she showed me the drill. First, she took two long bamboo leaves and lined them up horizontally. Then she bent them in the middle and twisted one side upward so both ends were pointing north and a triangular hollow had formed at the base. Next, she scooped a tablespoon or two of rice into the hollow and topped that with a layer of the pork filling. Then she filled the rest of the hollow with more rice, patted it down as firmly as she could, grabbed the bottom of the pyramid with one hand, and used her other hand to fold over the leaves so they covered the rice. Finally, she wrapped some string very tightly around the perfect green pyramid and tied a knot to keep everything in place. This entire process took Auntie Khar Imm seconds to do. And then it was my turn.

Now, when I was growing up, origami had its minor moment among elementary school girls in Singapore. Oh, how we would save up our allowances, buy neat little packages of brightly colored square paper imported from Japan, and after consulting a compendium of picture-filled origami books, we’d while away time at home, in school, fashioning frogs, cranes, and intricate little balls that you could actually blow up—and throw at other girls. Well, when I say
we,
actually, I don’t mean
me.
I was absolutely ungifted at this paper-folding business. I tried, yes, but cranes, frogs, and (as desperately as I wished to be making them) those tiny paper-ball weapons were completely beyond me. I should have known that I would not be what they call a natural at this
bak-zhang
wrapping deal.

The lining up and folding to create the hollow were mystifying to me. After a few tries, some with Auntie Khar Imm guiding my hands, however, I began to get the hang of it. Holding on to the leaves tight enough and piling on the rice proved a little tricky, though. Clumps of meat and bits of rice rained on my toes and skittered across the newspapers. And no matter how hard I tried, my dumplings looked more like puffy green breast implants than the perfect pyramids Auntie Khar Imm kept making. Probably sensing how mortified I was over my clumsiness, my auntie never said an unkind word. “This is your first time making them,” she kept saying. “Don’t worry.” She did, however, have an issue with my method of packing.
“Mai ah-neh giam siap lah!”
she said, over and over, when she saw how little pork I was putting into each dumpling.
Don’t be so stingy
. She was piling four to five heaping tablespoons of filling into each dumpling. I, on the other hand, was putting in two to three. I realized that after all the effort we—well, Auntie Khar Imm—had put into chopping and frying, I was subconsciously rationing our precious, precious pork. “You want to have a bit of the meat with every bite,” she explained. “That’s what will make it tasty.” Try as I might, however, I couldn’t bring myself to stop being
giam siap.
We’d slaved over this pork—if only people knew! They would be lucky to eat this. They should be allowed to appreciate it only in small doses! Like caviar. Or truffles!

And this was how we ended up, two hours and forty-two
bak-zhangs
later, faced with a large bowl of pork filling long after the rice had run out. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Oops” didn’t quite seem to cut it. Auntie Khar Imm looked disappointed. “Well, we can eat this with rice,” she said, packing up the pork.

As I’d wrapped the last of my verdant breast implants, Auntie Khar Imm had set a massive pot of water on the stove to boil, tossing in ten knotted pandan leaves. Carefully, she unhooked the clusters of
bak-zhang
from the pole and immersed them in the water. The dumplings would have to boil for ninety minutes. I looked around the kitchen, the apartment, and wondered, What would we do for ninety minutes? Things were going swimmingly when we had tasks at hand; the concentration I needed to focus on chopping, wrapping, and not pelting myself with pork had greatly limited the idle time we had for conversation. With ninety minutes to kill, however, I wondered what we’d have to say to each other. I needn’t have worried.

“When Ah-Ma died, it was very tragic,” Auntie Khar Imm began, speaking of Tanglin Ah-Ma, my paternal grandmother. “I didn’t really know how to cook. Everything I made, your uncle Soo Kiat said, ‘You don’t know how to cook. My mother’s food is so much better.’ ” I was surprised—having remembered great dishes that my auntie Khar Imm had made and set out at Chinese New Years past—but I understood perfectly. Decades after her death, my father continued to feel the same fervor about his mother’s cooking.
“Wo liu yenlei ah,”
Auntie Khar Imm said. I wasn’t sure how to respond—the thought of my auntie crying because the food she made for her family didn’t match up to my grandmother’s was hard to bear.

My grandmother had shouldered the brunt of the daily cooking, Auntie Khar Imm said, because my auntie had been busy with work and then her two children. She’d helped and watched, sure, but when it came to actually being the mistress of the kitchen, the job was intimidating. “So how did you learn?” I asked. Remembering my Tanglin ah-ma’s methods and practice, she said. “And I used to go downstairs and listen to the
san gu liu po
[gossipy aunties],” she added in Mandarin. “Whatever they said about cooking, I would listen, and then I would come home and try it out.” And bit by bit, the complaints began disappearing.

Auntie Khar Imm may have silenced her critics, but I knew my toughest one was still waiting to be convinced. I didn’t want to watch my father eat one of my
bak-zhang,
and I was grateful that he ate one while I wasn’t at breakfast one morning. Not that he said anything all day about it, of course. My
mother
had to tell me that he’d finally tried it.

“Well?” I asked my father, hoping against hope. There was a brief silence, and then “You must tell Auntie Khar Imm that her
bak-zhang
standard has dropped.” I was confused. It had tasted perfectly good to me. I couldn’t fathom what could possibly have been wrong with those dumplings—apart from the fact that the ones I’d made were entirely the wrong shape. And tiny. And had too little pork. And may have come apart because I didn’t tie them up well enough. But apart from
all that,
I thought our
bak-zhang
was fantastic! I started to feel indignant. These Tan men. Would there ever be any way to please them?

“The meat,” he finally said. “The chunks are just too big.”

And there it was. The one thing I’d volunteered to do was the very thing that had brought down the mighty
bak-zhang
that Auntie Khar Imm and I had slaved over for two days. I immediately confessed that it was my fault; he looked unsurprised.

This “learning to be a Tan woman” quest was starting to look a little bleak.

During my weeks in Singapore, I began to feel a gaping hole in my heart that only something back in New York could fill.

Just the thought of him would get me itchy—and oh, how I pined. My hands would tremble, my heart would quicken. I spent days thinking about the things I would do with him the moment I got back. I half envisioned our reunion involving a slow-motion running scene, arms outstretched, hair flying in the breeze, my cheeks flushed in anticipation of hand to steel.

Mike understands fully that this object of my pining is not him. It’s my oven that I crave—my sturdy little hunk of stainless steel, which has seen me through countless cookies, cakes, and pies in our little Brooklyn home. My mother’s Singapore kitchen had no oven to speak of, and in my weeks away from New York, I realized just how much I missed feeling dough between my fingers, the smell of a summer crisp bubbling as it baked. This time, when I arrived back in New York, after a hot and steamy reunion with my oven, I was sated, but still, I wanted more. It was in this fog of longing that it struck me: I am going to conquer bread.

A few summers before, I’d vowed to conquer pies. Over three months, I spent days and nights in my sweltering kitchen mixing, wrestling with dough, peeling and slicing apples, pears, and nectarines, and carefully crimping my way through pie after pie. After finally discovering the wonder of rolling out dough between two sheets of wax paper to achieve a perfect (and easily transferable) crust, I considered pies conquered. Ditto with rhubarb the following summer, when I spent weekend after weekend churning out rhubarb pies, cakes, and crisps. And then there was the summer that I devoted myself to fried chicken. You do not want to know about the extra swath of flesh that appeared around my waist right about then.

Bread, however, had been a force of nature I’d never even contemplated taking on. Yeast? Rising? Kneading? I had absolutely no idea how it all worked. The notion of trying to bake bread was all the more absurd considering that I’d taken cues from the fashion conscious in New York and had all but sworn off eating bread—unless I was in Paris and unless it was amazing bread, that is. And then one day, Nicole, an amateur baker in San Diego, sent out a message on Twitter: “I need a challenge. Am thinking of baking my way through every single recipe in
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.
Anyone want to join me?” A challenge. I was instantly intrigued.

I was beginning to feel the tiniest sprouts of confidence in the kitchen, after having learned pineapple tarts among other lessons from my aunties. And so I signed on, sending away for the bread guru Peter Reinhart’s book
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,
a bread-baking bible of sorts. Before long, I was joining more than two hundred bakers across the United States and in locales as far-flung as Berlin and Sri Lanka in this quest to master the art of baking bread. The bakers, male and female, included Internet administrators, stay-at-home moms, an architect, an epidemiologist. The woman from Sri Lanka was a science fiction writer who had moved there from the United States in pursuit of love. (It appeared to be going well.) At the heart of it all was Nicole, an avid baker who flung herself into kitchen projects and blogged about them at www.pinchmysalt.com to get her mind off her husband, who was deployed in Iraq. “This was something for me to jump into to keep me busy,” she said. And her deal was simple: Every week, we would all bake a bread in the book. Because the bakers were scattered across the continents, there was no way for us to meet and break our homemade breads. So each of us would simply post an account of baking that week’s bread on our own blog. It sounded easy enough. I decided to throw my spatula into the ring (at least during the weeks that I didn’t spend in my aunties’ kitchens in Singapore).

My first bread was a little redundant for a New Yorker: bagels. Since I live in bagel central, however, I assumed this would be an easy first—something that I, with my newfound confidence in the kitchen, could ace. What could be difficult? A lot, it turned out.

For starters, it was impossible to find high-gluten flour, the ingredient that’s essential to making bagels chewy. I called a phalanx of stores that sell hard-to-find ingredients. Nothing. After a day of searching, it became rather ludicrous, given that you can buy bagels on virtually every city block in New York.

I started tearing my hair out; people began questioning the sanity of my quest. “Aiyoh, why did you sign up for something like that?” Simpson, a New York chef friend, said. “Some more, bagels are so cheap!” With my bread-baking deadline looming, my local bagel shop, Montague Street Bagels, galloped to the rescue. After I explained my troubles to the owner with a great deal of whining and gigantic, sad-looking eyes, he disappeared into his kitchen and emerged with a bag of high-gluten flour.