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4.5
After losing a prized newspaper job at the Wall Street Journal due to the great downturn of ’09, Cheryl Tan took a year off to return to her native Singapore, and the comfort food of her youth. After meeting with her briefly, I am not surprised that she chose a difficult time to write a book, using her misfortune brilliantly. Reasons for her dexterity become evident once I got to know her family in “A Tiger in the Kitchen.”Although Tan, a capable, goal oriented type ‘A” seamlessly negotiated the transition to America, could she do the same in reverse? Especially when she had largely rejected cooking for family, viewing a life in the kitchen as cut off from the larger world, lacking power. And now, after sixteen years in America, Tan must finally contend with the ladies. She must earn her place in the kitchen.Slowly she learns to abandon the American obsession for precise measurements, formulas and procedures and begins to navigate complex recipes that often exist only in the sharp and exacting memory of one of her aunties. When she asks how much sugar to add or how long the duck should cook, she is often met with the words “agak, agak” loosely translated as “just enough” or “until it is done.’But over time spent with her aunties and mother, in the many hours it takes to properly prepare the cookery that fuses Malay, Indonesian and Chinese roots, Tan begins to see these women more clearly. She claims that although she has encountered tough and capable women in America, including driven CEOs and editors, nobody scared her more than these women in their Singaporan kitchens.Over the course of chopping, peeling, dicing and boiling, stories begin to unfold, as appetizing as the dishes themselves. Memories are offered up that would never have surfaced otherwise. Divorce, opium addiction, love and abandonment, the stuff that families are made of are handed to Tan as a gift for genuinely participating in the family legacy.Although I am not ordinarily fond of memoir cookery books, this one masterfully segues from kitchen to chronicle with natural cadence. I feel that I know these characters, the aunts and uncles, father and mother and grandmother on their own terms, gradually coming to understand them so well that when I actually attempted her recipe for Mandoo (a Chinese dumpling), I felt many eyes upon me, looking over my shoulder, silently letting me know that I could be quicker, the pleats in the dumplings neater, it could have used less filling to be tidy. But at the same time, I am convinced that they want me only to do my best. And somehow I really want to please them!“Tiger,” as the book is affectionately known, is both a frothy cocktail and a delicate family tale, that shifts from continent to continent, past to present and culture to culture with an intuitive grasp of the precise moment to move on. Tan’s journalism background comes to the fore with clear detailed writing to bring us to a tempting table laden with exotic treats. Unlike many family tales, it neither veers into an overly sentimental journey or a hard-nosed dissection of the shortcomings of either culture.And by the way, the Mandoo was delicious.
