Check This Out Tonight: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Author of A Tiger in the Kitchen
Two of my great loves are encompassed in one memoir by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan—the preservation of family history and the consumption of food.
In her memoir, A Tiger in The Kitchen, Tan touches upon the important role that making and breaking bread plays in families—particularly in her complex, intriguing Singaporean clan.
After losing her job as a fashion writer in NYC Tan decides to counteract her unyielding nostalgia for the dishes of her youth by embarking on a yearlong cooking extravaganza. She travels to Singapore with the hope of learning about the recipes that her deceased grandmother, a celebrated cook, once made for the family.
Tan enters her auntie’s kitchens with fumble-y hands and little confidence—squeamish about some of the more…exotic ingredients in the dishes. But the woman who ventures out a year later is one with a new breadth of knowledge about family stories (from those repetitive hours spent in the kitchen together), and a passion for cooking that even extends to her little kitchen in Brooklyn.
In the interview below Tan expounds on her experiences far better than I can hope to—and hopefully her captivating book will inspire many to dig into their own pasts and discover something tasty in family history. Maybe I’ll even attempt it.
What has this experience taught you about the importance of conserving family history and stories? Will you continue to search out information about your family’s past now that you’ve opened the floodgates?
For years, I'd heard little scraps about my family history, which all sounded fascinating, but I'd never bothered to take the time to really prod, take down notes and remember. It's hard to have the time to ask questions and get meaty answers when you're only parachuting back into your childhood culture for short visits, however, so it wasn't until I spent a lunar calendar year traveling back to Singapore to learn how to cook with my grandmother, my aunties and my mother that I really started to get to the heart of these stories that I'd always only gotten whiffs of.
Cooking with the women in my family, however, ended up being a truly rich way in which to extract these family stories and learn about the characters I'd only heard about very superficially and it made me realize just how strong all these people were. I learned how hard my family had it at various times -- they suffered a great deal during World War II, my paternal grandfather was a gambling addict and womanizer who squandered away his family's money, my great-grandfather was an opium addict who used his young granddaughter as his opium courier, my maternal grandmother got married to my grandfather only because she thought she would be safer as a married woman during World War II, a time when some Japanese soldiers were kidnapping and raping women in occupied Singapore. All of these stories only truly came out over lengthy periods of time spent with various family members, often in the kitchen—when you're chopping a mound of shallots or making 3,000 cookies, after all, what are you going to do but share stories?
It was also surprising to me how food ended up being such a vehicle for the telling of these stories -- one of my favorite stories about my family revolves around a dish that my late grandmother used to make: Gambling rice. The family was so poor that at one point in time my grandmother ran a little gambling den in the house to make a little money. Now, in addition to being a phenomenal cook, my grandmother was also very smart—she didn't want her gamblers to get hungry and leave so she started to cook for them. She made a one-dish meal that consisted of shredded cabbage, pork, mushrooms, garlic and shallots stir-fried together and cooked with rice. She point was to make something easy to eat -- gamblers could hold the bowl in one hand and keep gambling with the other. Hence, gambling rice. I love how this one dish speaks volumes of my family history and how smart and resourceful my grandmother was. I feel so many of us have a gambling rice story in our family's histories and yet so few of us make the time to record them down. When the person who holds that recipe—and the story—passes on, that bit of your family history disappears altogether. It's such a shame. Now that I've started this process, even though this book is done, I hope to continue logging my family's history via recipes—there are many more, I am told.
Is there an especially funny story about family miscommunication that you can tell us about—anything that happened during your “cooking lessons” or otherwise?
The biggest miscommunication that recurred for much of the year was the different approaches to cooking—and, also, to life—that my relatives and I had. As a neurotic New Yorker, I expected cooking to be precise. I had always cooked from recipes; I was often glued to my Blackberry at the stove, reluctant to veer from any instruction without a great deal of research. However, watching the women in my family cook with grace and great ease—slitting open giant bags of sugar, hoisting them over woks and just giving a hefty jiggle, for example—I simply couldn't understand their method. And they, in turn couldn't understand how wedded I was to the preposterous notion that cooking should be specific.
When I would press them for details, however, my aunties would repeatedly say, "Just taste, taste, taste—then agak agak!" Agak agak is Malay for "guess guess"—it took a while but I began to embrace the spirit of this phrase, learning that you should be confident in yourself, go with the flow and be open to the possibilities. If something tastes like it needs more salt, just grab a handful and toss it in. If something was too sweet one day, it's no big deal—just add less sugar the next day.
I learned that this lesson also applied to life as well—I had lived a life in which I was wedded to precision in everything from my career to my personal life. Through watching the women in my family cook, however, I learned the importance of relaxing, going with the flow and being aware of and open to the possibilities that life presents you. Sometimes things don't turn out the way you've planned but if you trust yourself to agak agak, all will be fine. If not, you just have to taste, taste, taste—then agak agak again!
In your book, you began to understand that the definition of a woman is not such a finite thing—what is your point of view on that now?
The female identity is a constantly changing construct—when I was a child, I viewed being a woman and all the skills (cooking) associated with women as something weak. Although Singapore is a very modern country, it remains a little traditional and patriarchal. Men are often the ones going off and having great careers while women—even if they do work—are often still in charge of running the household. So as a child, I grew up emulating the men in my family, shrugging off the lessons that the women in my family had to teach.
Returning to learn how to cook with the women in my family, however, and discovering their stories of resilience and hardship made me realize just how strong they had always been. No matter how hard their lives were, no matter how horrid their husbands were, they still rolled up their sleeves and took care of their children, making good meals to feed the people they loved. I began to realize that I'd had it wrong all along—cooking wasn't weak at all. Their feeding us all had always been a symbol of their strength and fortitude, in fact. I decided that as a modern woman, it's OK for me to try to have it both—the career as well as the kick-ass kitchen skills. The latter doesn't diminish the former—or me—in any way.
Of the recipes that you list in the back of A Tiger in the Kitchen, can you tell me which one is your favorite and why?
It's hard for me to choose because each one is so tied to someone I love but I would have to say my late grandmother's pineapple tarts. These are wickedly delicious cookies that look like tiny sunflowers and comprise a buttery shortbread base topped with dense, sweet pineapple jam. They're usually served during Chinese New Year because pineapples are gold, which is a lucky color, and my grandmother made the best pineapple tarts. Even though we could barely communicate—she didn't speak English and I barely spoke Teochew, the Chinese dialect she spoke—I knew how much she cared for me because she always nudged her pineapple tarts toward me, knowing how much I loved them. I took these tarts for granted as a child, however—I never bothered to ask her to teach me how to make them. And then when I was 11, my grandmother passed away.
Decades later, as a thirty something living in New York, I started to think a lot about home and when I thought about my family back in Singapore, I thought of the feasts we used to have and how sad it was that I loved these pineapple tarts but had absolutely no idea how to make them. It was these tarts that propelled me to finally go home and ask my aunties to teach me how to cook—and spending two days with them, learning how to bake these tarts, represented the beginning of my journey back home to learn about myself, my family, our collective history. And for me to finally embrace learning how to be a women—but doing it on my own terms.
What is the record amount of Tanglin Ah-Ma’s Pineapple Tarts that you’ve made?
The most I've made with my aunties is 3,000 over the course of two days—it's backbreaking work! These tarts are so delicious that years after my grandmother's death family members, friends and friends of friends still regularly request tubs of them at Chinese New Year. I've faced many challenges in my many years as a journalist but few things terrified me more than walking into my auntie's kitchen that first time and seeing the tubs holding the 70 pineapples we had to wrestle with to make the pineapple jam for 3,000 tarts.
If there was one recipe that you could have shared with your grandmother, that she wouldn’t know how to make, what would it be?
My late grandmother, the legendary pineapple tart baker, had an enormous sweet tooth—pineapples, durians (a sweet and creamy fruit), super-sweet mangoes, she loved them all. I don't think pies were part of her repertoire, however, and living in America all these years has made me a big fan of this dessert. I love baking them—I find rolling out the dough and crimping it therapeutic—and I would have loved to share my favorite with her: Triple-berry pie with a brown-butter streusel topping. Berries are very expensive in Singapore so the idea of having a pie packed with blackberries, raspberries and blueberries is incredibly extravagant. I think she would have really enjoyed a slice of my pie, however.
Perhaps I should start a list: "The Five Things I'll Bake in Heaven."
Do you have any future projects in mind, any new places you’d like to visit where you can immerse yourself in more cooking exploration?
I have two projects I'm working on right now—one non-fiction and one fiction. As for new places, I'm fascinated with China, where my ancestors came from, as well as Italy, where I would dearly love to live someday. I'm obsessed with Italian food, baking and agriculture—and what that all says of Italy's heart and culture. Someday, perhaps.
I am about to marry into a Korean family that adores food and cooking—and who would love if I knew something about cooking—any advice for me as I venture into this world with my complete lack of culinary skills?
Go into the kitchen, watch, help and ask a lot of questions. I didn't truly get to know my Korean mother-in-law until I stepped into the kitchen as a helper to the cook and not just an eater. When she figured out that I genuinely wanted to learn how to make her kalbi, mandoo and seaweed soup—"good for after giving birth—make a lotta milk!" as she says—I felt that was when my mother-in-law actually started seeing me as family and not just a guest. And the fact that I wanted to cross that bridge at all meant so much to her. Good luck!
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan will be at Elliott Bay Book Co. tonight at 8 p.m.!
