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A Tiger in the Kitchen

Food

Restaurants and recipes from Cheryl Tan, author of A Tiger in the Kitchen

September 14, 2011

Cheryl Tan’s book, “ A Tiger in the Kitchen,” a Brooklyn Bugle Book Club selection discussed here, describes many Singaporean dishes and includes a few recipes. But Tan doesn’t include recipes for all the dishes she describes, and I had some restaurant questions. Tan agreed to answer some questions by email.

AB: Do you have a favorite Singapore or Singapore-style restaurant in NYC?

CLT: There are very few good places — Nyonya in Chinatown has some good dishes. I would highly recommend the beef rendang, which is an amazing curried beef dish packed with lemongrass, coriander, cumin, ginger and a whole host of other spices, as well as the kangkong belacan, which is water spinach fried with belacan, a spicy shrimp paste.

The Singapore consulate in New York uses Taste Good in Queens to cater some of its events — I take that as pretty big endorsement. Many dishes here are great and very authentic — popiah, the Singaporean summer roll I mention in A Tiger in the Kitchen, as well as chili crab, Singapore’s national dish. I also like some Singaporean dishes at Cafe Asean, a pan-Asian restaurant in the West Village

AB: One of the dishes you mention but don’t provide a recipe for is laksa. Is there a good place to get it in New York?

CLT: I actually don’t have a recipe of my own for laksa — it’s not something my family makes. Taste Good does fantastic versions — regular laksa as well as assam laksa, which is a slightly sour version of laksa as it is flavored with “assam,” which is Malay for tamarind.

AB: The recipes mention msg and other canned and processed foods – how do you feel about using them in cooking in general?

CLT: I don’t personally use MSG when I cook — in the recipes in my book, I’ve mentioned that they’re optional. Generally, I try to use fresh ingredients as much as I can but with some items — tomato pastes and sauces, for example — it would simply be too time-consuming to do everything from scratch.

AB: You describe a process of molding bak-zhang in bamboo leaves – do you fold the bamboo leaves to mold the bak-zhang?

CLT: The dish is amazing! I love the flavor of the filling so much — and if you’re lazy to wrap bak-zhang, you can always just make a big pot of that filling and eat it with rice. It’s so tasty. Here is how you wrap bak-zhang.

Cheryl Tan will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18, as part of the panel “Food From All Sides” to be held at 12 noon on the North Stage. Here’s the description from the Festival’s website: Three panelists use the lens of food to write about family, poverty and war—Annia Ciezadlo (Day of Honey) looks at food and politics in the Middle East, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (A Tiger In the Kitchen) follows a Chinese-American woman back to Singapore in search of her family’s culinary history, and Tracie McMillan (forthcoming The American Way of Eating: Undercover on the Front Lines of Our Nation’s Meals) deals with poverty and food issues. Moderated by food writer Christy Harrison.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “A Tiger in the Kitchen” by Brooklyn Heights Resident Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

September 9, 2011

by Alexandra Bowie

According to birth order theorists, oldest children tend to be cautious; their younger siblings are the creative risk-takers in the family (surround that statement with a lot of caveats, of course). There are some exceptions, one of them being the oldest daughters of two-daughter families. Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, the author of the engrossing memoir “The Tiger in the Kitchen” is one of this special group.

Tan grew up in Singapore, a descendant of emigrant Chinese. She worked hard at school, consciously avoiding learning domestic skills as she studied. She went to the US for college and didn’t look back for 15 years. After graduation, Tan forged a career as a reporter, first at the Baltimore Sun, later at the Wall Street Journal, covering fashion and the related business. She married an American, and settled in Brooklyn. But at some point she realized she was missing something – the food. A couple of years ago a lay-off gave her an opportunity, and Tan took it: over the course of a year she made several long visits to her family in Singapore and, eventually, to the village her great-grandfather had left behind in China.

Tan spent most of her visits with her divorced mother and extended family on both her father’s and mother’s sides, learning her culture through its cooking. Tan describes one signal clash of cultures that was evident immediately: the only plausible explanation she could give her Singapore relatives for her extended visits away from her husband was that she was learning to cook so she could make him “good Singaporean dinners.” Tan brought the same skills she needed as a reporter to her cooking quest, and immediately found another place her several cultures refused to mesh in the approach to details. Having trained herself to be a successful free-lancer, Tan was interested in the minutiae: when? How much? Could her aunties and granny let her measure an ingredient before they added it to a pot? They laughed at her, saying “Agak-agak,” which Tan translates as “just guess.” As Tan let go of her need to know the details, she slowly learned to cook.

More important, as she ably demonstrates, over the course of the year Tan grew up. Tan writes her own brand of UK-inflected American English, and speaks her mind. She describes her mistakes, including a delightful story about second-guessing her forgetful grandmother. The comparison of the final products proved, that, contrary to Tan’s assumption, her granny had not omitted some important instructions. Tan also describes her cooking failures, most memorably a ciabatta that filled her apartment with smoke. Tan is braver than I am: she describes serving many of what she considers failures to her friends and family. As Tan learns through the course of the year, it’s not always a choice between career and cooking. Some lucky people combine them, as Tan now has – in addition to the book, her blog is a great source of recipes and food information. Her lengthy visits home taught her something fundamental. Over the course of that year, she more than came to terms with herself; in the words of one of her relatives, she learned to cook with her heart.

Cheryl Tan will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18, as part of the panel “Food From All Sides” to be held at 12 noon on the North Stage. Here’s the description from the Festival’s website: Three panelists use the lens of food to write about family, poverty and war—Annia Ciezadlo (Day of Honey) looks at food and politics in the Middle East, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (A Tiger In the Kitchen) follows a Chinese-American woman back to Singapore in search of her family’s culinary history, and Tracie McMillan (forthcoming The American Way of Eating: Undercover on the Front Lines of Our Nation’s Meals) deals with poverty and food issues. Moderated by food writer Christy Harrison.

Who taught you to cook? What’s your favorite family meal memory? Join the discussion in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.

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