A sewing class in progress at one of the convent schools, c.1950s.

Someone once asked me, “What did you learn to cook at home economics classes?”

In reply I proudly rattled off: fried rice with hotdog cubes, minced chicken on egg tofu, and spaghetti with sauce made with tomato ketchup. Imagine my embarrassment when a fellow (and older) food writer said that she had learned to make meat pies, mee siam and all sorts of kueh-kueh.

How did a 13-year-old get to make all these complex adult dishes at school while I was entrusted to cook with only processed and ready-to-eat ingredients? One crucial factor set us apart: time, or rather different periods of time.

I studied home economics in 1999, while she took the course back in the 1970s when it was known as domestic science, a name that was eventually replaced because it suggested a narrow focus on nutrition and sanitation.

Between the 1930s and 1997, home economics was taught in Singapore schools to train girls to be good homemakers. Depending on the era and the nation’s immediate needs, a “good homemaker” could mean different things – as defined by the prevailing syllabus set by the education authorities.

In the 1970s, for instance, being a good homemaker meant having the skills to just cook and clean. In the 1980s, it expanded to include being a good mother and raising a child. Then, in the 1990s, as more women joined the workforce, good homemakers became prudent consumers of outsourced and commercialised housework.

In “studying” home economics a second time around as research for this essay – reviewing textbooks, minister speeches, newspaper reports and oral histories – what became apparent was not just changes in cookery styles and ingredients over the years, but also official definitions of the “ideal” Singaporean woman.

Read the full article in Biblioasia (Vol 12 Issue 4)
Read PDF here

Chiam Hui is born in 1949 in Fujian, China, while Malcolm is born a Singaporean Peranakan almost 40 years later. These men belong to two different generations but they have the same patience for a good recipe.

In the late 1960s, Chiam Hui ate duck rice for a week so that he could spy on the adjacent stall, the famous Lao Zhong Zhong outside the old Thong Chai Medical Institution. In a triumphant voice like a prankish kid, the 67-year-old exclaims in Mandarin, “I know every single thing he put in the sauce! No big deal lah! He was mixing there, and I was eating my duck rice and watching him!”

Malcolm stalked a prawn mee hawker whose sambal he loved. By then street food sellers across the island had been moved into sheltered, open-air centres. The 31-year-old chef and owner of Peranakan restaurant Candlenut hung out at one of these centres in Whampoa until the stall closed to prepare their ingredients for the next day.

“People think we are crazy, but that’s what we are interested in. Some people just want to sit down and watch the world go by. That’s our world lor,” Malcom chirps, although he was not as lucky as Chiam Hui as the stall was too enclosed.

* * *

Their lives overlap in more ways. Both men cook at home, even though preparing food is traditionally a women’s role in patriarchal Chinese and Peranakan cultures. New circumstances permitted their offbeat behaviour.

Chiam Hui started cooking at nine years old when his mother was hospitalised, but he wasn’t the first man in his family to become a domestic cook. His father came to Singapore as a “zhu zhai”, a coolie, and had prepared meals for his co-workers and his boss’s family since he was 11. Chiam Hui had seen his father cooking at home, so dicing and stir-frying was not an awkward chore for him at all.

Malcolm was messing up his Peranakan mother’s kitchen when he was about the same age. As it was the 21st century, it was “cool” for a baba or any man to show greater interest in pounding chilli padi than in crashing toy aeroplanes. By 15 he was learning proper cooking techniques from his mother, who made no compromise to the Nonya kitchen ethics even if it was just dinner for her children. “If the shallot is not good, [we] have to buy new ones. The chickens have to be of a certain size, chopped a certain way,” says Malcolm. “Everyone is stress because we see her rushing in the kitchen as if it’s a restaurant.”

But only one between the two men became a professional cook. As for many immigrants at that time, Chiam Hui was entrusted with too many responsibilities too soon. He concluded early in life that cooking for a living was too tough.

* * *

His first job was at a departmental store in Tanglin. “An uneducated kid” like him could only move or sort out goods, a job needing no interaction with the British managers and customers. Soon after he tried to pedal a trishaw, but was terrible at balancing, so he peddled bananas instead.

At 21 he settled on wholesaling bitter gourds and chillies, a backbreaking but lucrative business that supported his then jobless parents and two baby brothers—14 and 16 years his junior. He stayed in the same job for 40 years and sent all three of his children to college.

I was one of them.

My father likes to begin his stories with a dreadful “Aiyah…” His hard work may have privileged his family to live in their own terms but every time he revisits the past, he pities his youthful self. My old man’s excessive use of profanity and hard-hearted words are not to be misunderstood as strength. Like tears, they are a release for his anger over the lack of choices he had in life.

And yet he is against dreaming in general and chefing in particular. He thinks it is an impractical pursuit. Not only is it hard work, it doesn’t pay the bills—it belongs in the bygone generations.

“I saw how your godma prepared economic rice at Peace Centre… In that tiny kitchen, there were three to four stoves ‘hong hong hong’. There is nothing enjoyable about cooping yourself in that kitchen,” he yells. “Aiyah… Didn’t you also see that? Your godma’s clothes looked as if they had been soaked in the rain. A human could shrivel in there!”

My dad’s memories that I wrote on his behalf. (Click on the image to read)

* * *

Malcolm knows how it feels to be shrivelled like a prune. He was able to choose a future for himself, and he chose to be a chef. When I bring my father’s sambal and anecdotes to him for an exchange, he concedes that his is a job that no mother, including his own, would agree to without putting up a fight.

But he is happy, and the glee in his voice is apparent when he describes the kitchen. “It’s like a cave what. We are like caveman inside who will get excited over the smallest thing. ‘Wah the dish comes out so crispy ah!’ You should see. It’s very funny. You have the whole world revolving and then here we are exclaiming something so small.”

Rather than saying Malcolm became a chef because he wanted to, he was happy becoming one. He recalls his first experience as a prep cook in Washington D.C.: “It was messy and I was new. It was stressful and all that, but it was fun. It was the first time I had so much fun doing something. You can almost say that I feel alive doing it.”

Malcolm’s memories. (Click on the image to read)

* * *

Unfortunately for him, my not so happy father was so not wrong about livelihood.

Despite the financial and personal freedom that afforded Malcolm to pursue what he likes, the demands of a family man in capitalist Singapore have caught up with him. Already, he is talking responsibilities like my old man: “In the ideal world, you are on your own, then you don’t care what. I make a thousand dollars? Fine. I can survive. But when you have a family, you have kids, then that will change how you approach things.”

Stressing him even more is the dilemma between making the best sambal, as any self-respecting chef would, and churning out maximum profit, like a businessman should. The restaurant is still surviving on the success of his catering arm. Malcolm gave himself 10 years to turn his business around. He has five more to go.

My father’s relationship with food remains simple. Since cooking is a hobby, his purpose can be about the people he cooks for and nothing else. The expensive belacan from Penang and the lavish amount of aromatics in his sambal attest to that.

Malcom’s taste buds agreed too. He did however tweak my father’s sambal before cooking with it.

* * *

Whether it is domestic or professional cooking, both men wish to be seen excelling in what they like. Modifying someone else’s food gives them legitimacy over the dishes with which they create. It is a matter of taste and also of pride.

When Malcolm first saw my father’s sambal, he said in a tone just slightly more forgiving than a critical bibik, “It’s very smooth ah. So use blender and blend one.” After tasting it, he determined it was “nice for stir-fry” and asked one of his kitchen cooks to “brighten the flavour” with lime leaves, tamarind and limejuice.

My father established superiority over Malcolm’s cooking more explicitly. He added sugar to his sambal even before tasting it. “His sambal has a very strong kaffir lime leaf aroma. We are not Thai. Some people don’t like it,” he explained. What about you? I asked. Ironically, he said, “I’m okay with that.”

He spread the sweetened sambal on a grouper he had fried for lunch, and was surprised at how salty it tasted. “Is it his sambal or my fish?” he asked. After verifying that it was the former the detective in him began investigating. At first he blamed the salt. Half an hour later he proposed a new theory. “It’s the type of belacan he uses!” Confident that he solved the puzzle, he exclaimed, “Very easy one lah! Dried chillies that he processed himself, shallots, lime leaves, lots of belacan…” He flashed a winning smile and retreated into his room for an afternoon nap.

In the end, it was Malcolm who seemed mature and practical. He was happy with his interpretation of my dad’s sambal, so while we were savouring it with grilled prawns, he said, “If your father give me his recipe I will use, I will do this dish.”

**SGX (Sambal Goreng Exchange) facilitates an exchange of sambal and related memories between two strangers. Our participants live in different times, different social, political and personal circumstances; their experiences with sambal are diverse. Together, their stories form a patchwork of memories across communities — a Singapore story of another kind. A food exchange creates spaces for personal memories to unfold beyond one’s own mind and private life. Because cooking or eating another’s sambal builds new memories upon the old, the food can become enduring testimonies to their lives.

Sambal tumis telor.

Aida texts me a few hours before I’m due to meet her at her sister’s flat. She has already cooked the sambal for the exchange with Rose, because it is also for her lunch with her sisters and their mother.

I arrive at 4 p.m. to find a household full of young and older women. There is Aida, two of her older sisters, their mother, her niece and her niece’s toddler, and her young nephew — the only opposite gender who can be home on a weekday afternoon.

The sambal tumis for Rose is already packed in a plastic container. I ask to take pictures of it, so Aida scoops another portion into a pretty glass dish found in many Malay kitchens. There are pots of leftovers on the stove, including a fermented durian (tempoyak) curry. There is also a box full of cempedak that they plan to fry for dinner.

After taking pictures of the sambal over their rose-patterned placemat, I ask if I can taste it. Aida and her sister end up bringing me also the tempoyak curry, several slices of tempeh, and even a homemade ice-blended minty lime juice.

Aida plates her sambal while her mother and sisters watch television in the living room.

What they had for lunch and what they offered me later, including tempoyak curry, tempeh, and the sambal tumis.

Aida decides to read Rose’s memories while I tuck in, but she checks on me every now and then. “Is the sambal too sweet for you?” She asks. The homemaker learned to cook sambal tumis from her mother and sisters, but instead of using just dried chillies like they did, she mixed in the fresh ones to brighten the colour. She also added quail eggs into the sambal, so that she didn’t have to cook another dish for lunch. She asks her mother, who’s watching television, if she likes her take on the sambal tumis. The older lady maintains a poker face, and says something to the point of “ok lah”, much to her daughters’ amusement.

Aida’s mother has been a homemaker and she makes different sambal for different dishes: one for sotong, another for brinjal, and yet another for chicken. Back when she was still a child, Aida picnicked with her mother’s nasi lemak and sambal tumis at the beach. Her mother also cooked laksa to supplement their income, but only when her father was back from sailing to help peddle it in the kampongs.

Her mother still cooks, and Aida likes having her in the kitchen because she finds it “assuring”. She says, “If I hardly cook that dish, and I want it to taste exactly like my mum’s, I will ask her for her opinion on the taste.” As with today’s tempoyak curry, a dish from her mother’s birthplace in Terengganu, Malaysia, Aida prefers to play the assisting role.

Before I leave with their sambal tumis,  I ask to what style it belongs. The Muda sisters burst into hysterical laughters, the kind that suggests they have had earlier jokes about it. “Malay and Indian,” one says. “My father is Indian,” Aida informs. “Indian use a lot of onion. Malay use sugar, to make it sweet,” her sister adds.

She reminds me to bring her sambal to Rose as soon as possible because the eggs can’t keep too long.

A scanned copy of Aida’s memories.

Name: Aida Muda

A bit about yourself: I am 47 years old Malay homemaker with 3 kids

Type of sambal: Sambal Tumis with Quail Eggs

Level of spiciness: Hot!

Special ingredient(s): Fresh Red Chilli

Your sambal memories:

I love my mom’s sambal tumis. Be it with prawns, quail eggs, ikan bilis. Usually I’ll eat sambal tumis with steaming hot white rice and especially when my mom cooks nasi lemak. I learnt to cook sambal tumis from my mom but I improvised it adding fresh red chilli to brighten up the colour. Sambal tumis reminds me when I was younger when my family frequently arrange a family get-together picnic at East Coast and Changi Beach. Its one of my favourite dishes.

To your sambal recipient:

To Kak Rose, thank you for your delicious sambal Mak Kasek, its very nice. We plan to eat it with white rice or stuff in our roti “bun” freshly baked bun. We will definitely try your recipe.

When the Sambal Tumis Telor is delivered…

While reading Aida’s memories, Rose realises she has forgotten to put on her tudong for phototaking. She drops the letter and gets changed.

“Very nice isn’t it?” says Rose, after reading Aida’s memories. Rose also used to picnic, along Katong and Marine Parade, and Aida’s letter reminds her of her own beach outings. People in the past, she says, could not afford Tupperware, and plastic containers were not common either. To bring food to the beach, her family, and most others, had to lug their pots and pans. “I still remember the bus that goes there. Bus number two. I think it still goes,” she chirps.

Rose heats up Aida’s sambal over the stove and tastes half a spoon of it. “There’s a lot of sugar in there,” she says. “My husband has diabetes so I try not to add sugar to my sambal.” Like Aida, Rose is concern about the side effects of sambal, although they identify different culprits. She quickly assures me that it not an issue, as everyone has their own food preferences. Neither does it dampen her enthusiasm to experiment with Aida’s sambal.

Without realising it herself, Rose turns the sambal into food suitable for picnics. First she cooks it with scramble eggs. Then she stirs another spoonful to an equal amount of mayonnaise. She spreads the mixture on a sliced bread and then stacks tuna, cherry tomatoes and the sambal scramble eggs on top.

Sambal tuna sandwich, and more sambal menu in the making.

Just as how she was when she cooked her own sambal to exchange with Aida, Rose goes into details like she’s hosting a cooking show. She tells me later she’s teaching me like she’s teaching her own daughters.

Rose doesn’t eat any of what she has made. She’s not hungry, she says, because she has eaten her lunch. That said, she carries on making more food.

This time she spreads the sambal on a piece of bread, adds the quail eggs that she has sliced beforehand, the cherry tomatoes, and then gives me “the honour” to add as much grated cheddar as I like. After a few minutes in the toaster, a sambal pizza is ready.

Aida’s sambal tumis telor (top right) and Rose’s interpretations of it.

Apart from the original sambal tumis, Rose makes me pack everything home. Maybe because the sambal has more room for tweaking, so that her family, especially her diabetic husband, can enjoy it too.

Read about Rose’s Sambal Mak Kasek and Aida’s response here…

**SGX facilitates an exchange of sambal and related memories between two strangers. Our participants live in different times, different social, political and personal circumstances; their experiences with sambal are diverse. Together, their stories form a patchwork of memories across communities — a Singapore story of another kind. A food exchange creates spaces for personal memories to unfold beyond one’s own mind and private life. Because cooking or eating another’s sambal builds new memories upon the old, the food can become enduring testimonies to their lives.

Sambal Mak Kasek

Rose takes a while to open the metal gate. When she appears from behind a wooden screen, which blocks the view of her flat from the corridor, she’s in tudong and home clothes. The mismatched outfit suggests she has gone to cover herself after I knocked on the door. The moment we’re in the dining area, she takes off her tudong. I remind her that I’ll be taking pictures, so she puts it back on, along with a nice set of baju kurung.

While she’s changing in her room I notice the ingredients on the dining table. A shallot is frozen in a half cut state, while a tablet continues blasting euphoric American-accented commentaries.

Rose prepares the sambal on her dining table. She practised cooking it three days before this shoot, and she gives me bread to try it with while she tells her story.

Rose exudes qualities of a cooking host. She talks about different types of sambal and the beautiful flavours they can achieve, while finely slicing several chillies. When she explains how caramelised sugar rounds off the spices, she reminds me of lamblike baby care instructors. Food, in her view, is to be treated with tender too.

My host tells me her mother died when she was only seven, so she learns cooking from anyone who has a recipe to offer. When I ask her for permission to give away this recipe if anyone asks, she says yes immediately: “This shouldn’t stop with me. Furthermore, it should be according to your taste. Any recipe, any cooking should be according to your taste. You might not like the way I cook this. You want more sugar, add more sugar, then it will be the best sambal for you.”

She makes sure to explain every step: reusing the oil that has cooked the ikan bilis will give the sambal more flavour, while adding enough oil to drown the sambal will extend its shelf life — a critical quality since I’m only exchanging it with another sambal cook a few days later.

Rose hasn’t cooked this sambal in 20 years, as she has been trying new recipes and have forgotten about it, until she’s approached for this sambal exchange.

To ease her into writing her sambal memories, I recount the stories she shared moments ago. She decides to draft a response before writing on the questionnaire I will deliver along with the sambal. She writes carefully, like a schoolgirl taking her first written test, but suffers no writer’s block. Her memories are vivid, including one of her grandmother throwing out a fishing line from their stilt house.

She stops writing all of a sudden and she looks at me. “It brings tears to my eyes you know?” She says. It turns out she has not even told her children of these stories before.

She has two pages-full of memories to share — even after leaving out some details in her first draft.

A scanned copy of Rose’s written memories.

Name: Rose B. Rusdi

A bit about yourself: A 57 year old Baweanese homemaker with 5 children.

Type of sambal: Sambal Mak Kasek

Level of spiciness: Hot!

Special ingredient(s): Gula Melaka

Your sambal memories: Earliest sambal memory was when I was about 3 years old having lunch on the steps of the small jetty near my house clad in a homemade underwear and singlet (my mum sews).

I was eating rice with mussel sambal on a chipped metal plate. Most delicious sambal meal ever. I can still hear my mum laughing with my grandma, saying that whenever they finished cooking, I will appear (by the way my mum cannot cook, she only assists her mum).

I remembered my grandma cooking with my mum helping prepare in an old kitchen area grinding chilli with the old ‘batu giling’ and cooking over the wood fire. We lived in a house on stilts and I can see the sea from the gaps in the wooden floor. When we wanted to cook fish we just threw out a line out of the window and cook whatever we caught.

My mum died when I was 7; so I was not able to learn cooking from her, not that she could cook anyway. Therefore I had to learn by asking and observing people around me. Especially from my aunts when they helped to look after us.

That was how I came across this recipe, “Sambal Mak Kasek.’ Mak Kasek was a distant relative. My aunt was taught to cook this particular sambal by Mak Kasek’s daughter Cik Ram. Apparently her sambal was unique at that time and my aunt felt privileged knowing this recipe.

People then are secretive about their special family recipes and would not share. But this lady was generous, and thus, I benefitted from her generosity. Moreover, at that time, in the 1970s I recalled, those that had tasted this sambal were very interested in the recipe.

To your sambal recipient:

The original sambal has cane sugar instead of gula melaka, I tweaked it a little because I find that gula melaka works better for my sambal. I realise that this sambal evokes memories of sharing, generosity of knowledge and love. Sharing of this recipe, hopefully, will encourage continuity of memories and maybe this recipe can evolve further as more people can learn to cook this particular sambal.

When Sambal Mak Kasek is Delivered…

Aida reads Rose’s memories. They didn’t know each other until this sambal exchange.

Aida Muda, and her maiden family, receives the sambal with curiosity. They take turns to peer into the plastic container and poke their noses into the half-opened lid. One nods her head, so does the next person, until everyone in the living room agrees the sambal smells right.

Aida opens the envelop and reads Rose’s memories out loud.  She giggles at the part about the fishing line. Her sisters and mother have their eyes glued to the television, paying no attention to her.

She feeds her mother a spoonful of Rose’s sambal.

“Sedap!” One sister says after she takes a spoonful of Rose’s sambal. She turns to her sisters, anticipating similar responses. Not long after, one exclaims, “pedas!” So Aida asks, “Did she add chilli padi?”

At first, they ask only about the sambal. “Pound ah? Blend? Ketok?” One sister quizzes. “How about the cili kering?” Aida follows up. “Bawang? Garlic?” They make sure no ingredient is left unmentioned.

When nothing is left to ask about the methods of cooking, they begin to wonder about cook. One of Aida’s sisters asks for Rose’s name and neighbourhood, as if the answer to the latter would give her an idea of the person.

After trying the sambal, her nephew picks up Rose’s letter to read.

Aida goes on to ask who Rose lives with, as she wonders what people, of what age, can take such spicy sambal. Even Aida’s young nephew, who has told his mum he likes Rose’s sambal, quietly picks up her letter to read, while the adults are still debating on her style of cooking.

“But, but, but. There’s a but,” says Aida’s sister.  “The oil,” referring to the additional oil Rose added to help the sambal last longer, “we are very particular about that.”

Sambal may have been a common language in many households, but it is also very personal.

Since the family have already eaten their lunch, they plan to eat the rest of Rose’s sambal on another day. Most likely with plain rice, they say. Or with the bread their sister has baked, to make roti sambal. “Take out the oil first,” they emphasise.

Read about Aida Muda’s Sambal Tumis and Rose’s response here…

**SGX facilitates an exchange of sambal and related memories between two strangers. Our participants live in different times, different social, political and personal circumstances; their experiences with sambal are diverse. Together, their stories form a patchwork of memories across communities — a Singapore story of another kind. A food exchange creates spaces for personal memories to unfold beyond one’s own mind and private life. Because cooking or eating another’s sambal builds new memories upon the old, the food can become enduring testimonies to their lives.

Yes, love drives me to cook twice a day—lunch and dinner, but love is just a motive. It was my knowledge, values, diligence, prudence, and power that shaped and constructed those meals. To attribute love, and only love, for the transformation of beef to steak is to turn a blind eye to the other capabilities demanded of a home-cook to put food on the table, day after day.

Duck breast, beet salad and potatoes cooked duck fat. #idontlikeitsimple

A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on Aug 14, 2014 at 6:19pm PDT

“Nasi Siam.” No more bee hoon so mee siam rempah goes into coconut rice along with beans, ikan bilis, and chopped kaffir lime leaves. I forgot to add tamarind water but still, Shiok-Ah-Lao-Sai. #friedrice #idontlikeitsimple   A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on Feb 1, 2015 at 6:08pm PST

A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on Dec 8, 2014 at 9:59am PST

Trust me, this looked worse before I cleaned and cooked it. #pigstomach in preparation for white pepper #pigstomachsoup #idontlikeitsimple A photo posted by Sheere Ng (@sheerefrankng) on Jan 8, 2015 at 2:59pm PST

Before any cooking can be done, home-cooks have to shop for ingredients. I go grocery shopping twice a week. I don’t do it once because it’s easier to plan six meals rather than 12, and if we end up eating out more often than we expected, I don’t have a backlog I can’t handle. I don’t shop more frequently because it takes at least an hour to get it done and I prefer to be efficient. When I was still a noob-cook I planned the menu ahead and wrote down the ingredients needed. I learned to plan dishes requiring similar ingredients so that I use everything I bought—especially those perishable aromatics sold in big bundles but recipes ask only a few sprigs of. That planning took me an hour.

Today I buy what looks fresh on the shelves. Because I have the memory of a goldfish, I also write down a list of possible dishes to cook with the ingredients I bought and strike off the list as we go through the meals. The planning gets complicated when we have to go to work on the subsequent days. My boyfriend leaves the house early on Mondays. So do I, plus Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. This means that I have to get the cooking done before either of us leave. If I know I can’t be back early to prepare dinner, I portion for dinner as well. Preparation sometimes begins the night before; defrosting the meats starts even earlier. Because we’re packing lunch (to save money of course), I try to cook dishes that still taste good after reheating. Stir-fried vegetables with meat and mashed potato with sausage fit this criterion. If I cook pasta, I make sure to toss it with olive oil, and pack the sauce separately in a ziplock.

Scribbles of the ingredients I got.

Home-cooks also think about nutrition and respond to the needs of those they feed. I believe it is best for our health to eat enough meat, more vegetables, and a good amount of fish. I adopted this formula because I read widely on this topic and the arguments for a varied diet convinced me the most (as opposed to the raw, gluten-free, meat-only, carbohydrates-only, everything-but-carbohydrates regimens). We are young, we run twice a week, and we sometimes walk 20 blocks instead of riding the subway, so we can afford animals fats in our diet although not all the time. If we’re not eating meat I turn to beans and nuts for protein. Seafood, especially fish, will give us the vitamins and omega-3 we need. I also apply the yin and yang theory in my cooking: I add ginger and sesame oil to my chicken during winter for their warming qualities, and I make radish soup or chrysanthemum drink to ward off looming sore throats.

Because I cook, we saved money. We spend, on average, US$100 a week on groceries. If we had done take-outs, it would be at least US$12 a meal for the two of us, excluding tips. Our food would look like what you see in the pictures below, and fish would be out of the question. Money saved is money earned, so I contributed to the household at least US$68 a week, and US$272 a month. On top of that, because I cook, my boyfriend, who is now the main breadwinner, doesn’t have to. Rather than wasting an hour being clueless in the kitchen, he’s spending more time writing, if not to make money, to hone his craft. I have relatively lesser time to write, but lucky for him, I believe cooking is also an important skill to have as a food writer.

Halal Guys’ gyro platters are fantastic! But it’s not something I should eat every day. Image taken from Midtownlunch.com

$6 will only get you the mopo tofu (in the box). Just tofu, gravy and rice. Image taken from Instagram.

Home-cooks not only have the power to dictate the food to eat, but also the values to keep. I have become concern about the welfare of farmed animals after learning about the intricacies of food systems and politics in class. I am against rearing chickens with so huge breasts that their legs can no longer support their bodies. I am against packing too many of them into one cage to the point that some could die and decompose inside yet nobody cares. I make a stand as a consumer by buying only whole chickens instead of cherry-picking cuts of meat. I  also try to buy from butcher shops that source humanely-raised meats from family farms. Since I put my values into practice in the kitchen, my boyfriend, who eats my food, becomes a participant. He was a reluctant one at first. Well taken care of farmed animals are costly to raise and a luxury to eat. But I convinced him by keeping our food spendings manageable, achieved by, amongst many others, reducing our meat intake, making stocks out of carcasses, and keeping prawn shells for bisque. He can’t say no if I can do the right thing within his means.

By deciding what food to eat—traditional over foreign, steamed over baked—home-cooks control the class, race, and values with which the entire family defines and expresses themselves. By cooking instead of eating out, they contribute disposable income to their family. Skills, not thoughtfulness, carve meats and dice onions. My boyfriend and I have not had a flu in the past year because I applied knowledge to my cooking. It takes work, not just love, to produce food, and we should recognise the capabilities of home-cooks that make it possible.

I asked my mother what else besides black fungus, water chestnut, and ground meat she put in her wanton.

I then asked if I should add coriander. A monologue ensued.

I had planned to make a big batch and freeze them for back up, so she said…

I have always wondered why in my family, it is my father and my grandfather who cook. Now, we are not Americans, we are Singaporean Chinese, but like the story of many Chinese in the United States, my grandfather and his kinsmen from South China sought jobs in a foreign land. Women didn’t tag along, so the men cooked for themselves.

I wondered if this was the case for the American Chinese. Indeed, this was what sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed in her 1956 study on the marital relations of Chinese families in San Francisco. She noted that the husbands brought home groceries and taught their wives cooking. This was unthinkable in a patriarchal Chinese society.

Well, the men in America were no typical Chinese. They came to the United States in their youth and reached adulthood without too much womanly concern for their welfare, until the US government loosened its grip on Chinese immigration in 1947. Prior to that, the Chinese were the most hated community in the United States, because of reasons illustrated in the following picture. They were perceived as economic enemies who monopolized the industries, leaving the white men jobless. The results were institutionalized discriminations that I argue attributed to the egalitarian division of labor in Chinese’s marital homes as observed by Lee.

A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)

In 1882, United States enacted the Exclusion Act to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. Prior to that, the Chinese community was already a predominantly male society because Chinese female immigrants were thought to be prostitutes, and therefore denied entry. Married Chinese men had little chance to reunite with their wives, while the bachelors could not start a family. Because these men could not demonstrate heterosexual norms, there were doubts on their sexuality. The early Chinese immigrants in the United States sustained the image of lesser men.

This feminine stereotype was reinforced by the economic restrictions imposed on these immigrants. White laborers who felt threatened by the competition from Chinese workers protested against enterprises that employed the Chinese in preference to whites. Violent anti-Chinese riots forced the Chinese into low-end wage labor in restaurants, laundries, and garment factories. Since cooking, washing and sewing had prevalently been women’s work, the Chinese men in these professions were thought to be “belonging to a feminized race.”

Racist stereotypes of Chinese men found their way into trade cards. The following image is one of the many that feminized these men. Notice the laundrymen had rosy cheeks and lips, as if they had put on make up. They also have long and delicate fingers like women’s.

Chinese laundrymen with rosy cheeks and delicate fingers like women’s. (Courtesy of Anderson Gallery, Drake University)

In the 1900, union leaders called for the preservation of “racial purity” and “western civilization” to spark anti-Asian legislation. They succeeded. American citizenship was granted exclusively to white males up until 1870, after which men of African descent could become naturalized, but Asian men were denied US citizenship up to 1952. Because the masculinity of a citizen was first inseparable from his whiteness, as the state denied the Chinese citizenship, it formally excluded them from the institutional and social definitions of maleness.

I argue that the Chinese men’s immigration to the United States produced what Raewyn Connell called a “contradiction within masculinity.” Hegemonic masculinity guaranteed Chinese men a dominant social position within their community, but subordinated their manhood to the white American males. To hang on to their masculinity and legitimize their professions, the Chinese reconfigured a manhood that was non-sexist and non-patriarchal. Lee’s observation that the “husbands enjoyed their protective roles and not a few declared they gained satisfaction in being accorded status,” proves that the men had not been strip of their manhood, but conceived a modernized gender relation.

Additionally, these men developed masculinity in an all-male institution that presented domestic cooking as a task appropriate for men. The 19th and early 20th century Chinese immigrants, like the men we see in the picture below, prepared their own meals. Men raised in such environment would consequently think it is normal to hold the cleaver at home.

Chinese men in 1900 San Francisco preparing their meals during the Bubonic Plague (Harper’s Weekly 1900 illustration from The Coming Man)

The wives in Lee’s study on other hand, grew up in families that received financial support from their fathers and brothers who were working in the United States. Academics coined married women who were left behind in China the “separated wives”. Past literature show that the separated wives assumed total family governance during the prolong absence of their husbands. Having been raised by separated wives, I argue that the women in Lee’s study expected the same independence and power in their own marital homes.

When these women were finally permitted entry to the United States, they too were implicated by the restrictions imposed on their husbands. Because the standard of living in the urbanized society was high, and Chinese men were banished from employment in government and private sectors, the wives had to supplement their husbands’ income. Newly arrived Chinese women typically worked in restaurants and sweatshops for long hours, leaving them little time to fulfill their domestic responsibilities. The need to re-divide the household chores between men and their wives, coupled with their reconstructed gender expectations, would ultimately contribute to the unusual kitchen dynamics Lee observed.

In Cantonese opera, men and women spar over love, money, and politics. A similar drama unfolded in my grandparents’ home, but the topic that triggered it was cooking. My grandfather liked to brag about his mastery in cooking. While sitting cross-legged on a single-seat sofa, with a cigarette between his fingers, he cried, “Your grandmother doesn’t know a thing!” Then he let out a chuckle.

My grandmother uttered a feeble “humph,” but she was no docile sheep of a woman as many in her generation were expected to be. One day, when I asked her to teach me how to make ngoh hiong, a Hokkien meat roll that was the mainstay of our dwindling family dinners, she took the opportunity to show her husband of 60 years who called the shots in the family. To demonstrate how she would marinate the ground pork, she got my 86-year-old grandfather walking up and down the kitchen to fetch her ingredients. When he looked uncertainty, she belittled him mercilessly. “Of course you have to wash the bean curd! Where is the oil? What are you looking for? The bean curd skin is right here!”

My grandfather spewed a couple of Hokkien vulgarities—he could cook himself and was the master of vegetable stew and pig’s stomach pepper soup. But he was accommodating, so my grandmother marinated the meat, texturized it with chopped water chestnuts and shallots, and rolled it in bean curd skin. Seven minutes later, the meat roll emerged from the steamer in one piece. Was this a metaphor for their marriage?

For as long as I could remember, my traditional Chinese grandparents held hands as often as they snapped at each other. He grabbed her hand when I needed a photograph for my school project, they held hands as they fumbled home from their cataract procedures, and she squeezed his hand when he took his last breath.

The meat roll that my grandmother made needed as much handholding as her marriage. She steamed the meat roll before she fried it, so that the filling wouldn’t fall apart in the hot oil. Before that, she added mashed bean curd to the meat to keep it from becoming dry, as ground meats can do when fried.

My grandparents couldn’t agree on much, including how to finish the roll. She preferred to dip it in raw egg before frying, to give the bean curd skin a caramelized and fragrant finish. He thought the fried bean curd would be perfectly toasty and savory on its own. He won, because she accommodated him, but she always complained that something was missing in the flavor.

After my grandfather passed away two years ago, my grandmother reversed to her own cooking methods. But the feeling of something was missing lingered.

Ngoh hiong (Hokkien meat rolls)
(makes 10 meat rolls)

3/4 pound minced pork meat
1/3 pound prawns, shelled, deveined and chopped
1/3 pound firm bean curd, mashed
4 cloves garlic, chopped
4 shallots, chopped
4 water chestnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon five spice powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon sesame oil
3 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2 egg yolks (set aside egg white for later use)
10 pieces bean curd skin, 12 inches by 8 inches
5 tablespoons vegetable oil

Methods

1. In a mixing bowl, combine pork, prawns, bean curd, garlic, shallots, water chestnuts, five spice powder, salt, pepper, sesame oil, soy sauce, cornstarch and egg yolks.

2. Place the bean curd skin on the counter and use a damp cloth to wipe away excess salt on the skin. Smear a thin layer of egg white on the skin.

3. Lay 3 tablespoons of meat filling 1 inch above the bottom length of the bean curd skin. Roll it over once, fold in both ends of the skin and then continue to roll until you come to the end. Seal the edge with egg white.

4. Steam the meat rolls over high heat for 7 minutes. Leave a space between the rolls so that they do not stick. Remove the meat rolls from the steamer and set aside to cool. Cut the meat rolls into 1-inch length.

5. In a skillet over medium heat, add the oil. Fry the meat rolls for 3 minutes or until golden browned.

*Written for Sheryl Julian’s  food writing class at Boston University, where I am pursuing a MLA in Gastronomy.

Delish, even when it’s cold

When I told my godma that I wanted to learn how to make poached chicken, she bought the ingredients right away and showed me that very night. Cooking is that easy to her. No need for planning or practising. My godma, also my mother’s sister, is one of the most casual cook I’ve seen. She stirs and scoops with one hand on her waist and often leaves the stove to mingle with her guests. But somehow the food always turns out perfect.

To make poached chicken, she first filled a pot ¾ full with tap water and heat it up over the stove. She then put some garlic and ginger into a plastic bag and placed it on the table. “Just smash them with a cup. Don’t need special equipment,” she said casually, but I could sense her mockery of the people who purchase fancy equipments for every step of their cooking. She took a mug from the shelf and hammered the plastic bag until the garlic and ginger ripped opened. “That’s all!” she exclaimed.

She added the garlic, ginger and some salt into the boiling water. Holding the chicken’s neck, she gently lowered the fowl into the pot and then lifted it again. “Because the chicken’s stomach is cold. You have to do this a few times so that the water goes into the chicken to warm the inside,” she said. This was the most complicated step of this recipe.

My godma left the chicken to boil for one minute and turned off the fire. “Keep the chicken inside for 45 minutes. Let the hot water cook it slowly,” she said and then scooted off to play with my nephews.

Ingredients

1 Chicken
10 cloves of garlic
2 ginger
1 tbsp salt

To make the sauce

1 tbsp oyster sauce
3 tbsp light sauce
½ tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp fried shallots and its oil
1 tbsp chicken stock

Mix everything and drizzle on the chicken

Ingredients (for one duck)

4 tbsp of white sugar
3 tbsp dark soy sauce
10 cloves of garlic
4 slices of galangal (南姜)
4 Ligusticum Wallichi (川芎)
5 cloves
2 pieces of Angelica Sinensis (当归)
1 cinnamon stick (桂皮)
2 star anise (八角）
1 tbsp five spices powder（五香粉）
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp light soy sauce
200 ml water

Methods

1. Stir fry sugar until it melts.

2. Add all other ingredients except duck. Mix well.

3. Put the duck into the wok. Add more water until the duck is half submerged.

4. Bring the sauce to boil over high heat.

5. Cover the wok and let it simmer for 45 minutes.

6. Turn the duck over and cook for another 45 minutes.

7. Taste the sauce and add light soy sauce or sugar as you like.

8. Poke the duck with a fork to check doneness.

9. Chop it into pieces and serve with sauce.