Sweet Blog Archive: January, 2010

01/30: Getting a feel for it

There are alot I things I wished I had asked my grandma before she passed away.  How did she, for instance, transform herself from a somewhat privileged lady who mah-jonged and never really cooked or cleaned a majority of adult life to a pretty damn efficient housekeeper and kick-ass cook in her sixties?  I mean I’ve heard stories about her incredible journey told second hand by my aunt.  But nothing can live up to hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth and, more importantly, nothing beats learning how to do something from the master herself.

I was too young to really appreciate just how far my grandmother had traveled, how much she evolved both as a food lover and a cook in the span of just under a decade–from the time she and my grandfather decided to emigrate to the U.S. from Hong Kong to when they moved in with my family to basically oversee my daily care.  I don’t ever remember her not cooking, not experimenting with new dishes when I was a kid, but then I was probably only about three when my grandparents moved to San Francisco, leaving behind their old life of servants and lively social circles.  It never occurred to me until much later that grandma wasn’t exactly bred to do any of the things she eventually mastered–purely out of sheer determination to succeed.  I’m sure my older brother Sam, who along with my dad emigrated with my grandparents first, served as captive guinea pig to her early endeavors.  She must have learned fast because he doesn’t seem to have too many bad memories of her cooking.  I, luckily enough, never felt like a guinea pig because by the time I got arrived here she was well on her way to exceptional cookery.

So how the hell did she do it?  It’s not as if she took a class or watched alot of cooking shows on television–I mean this was 1968.  From what I gather from my aunt and from my own personal experience, grandma just asked alot of questions and went with her gut instincts.  She already knew what great food was supposed to be, both in terms of taste and texture.  She knew exactly what to look for in produce, meat and fish–apparently having paid attention to what the servants were doing.  And, because as a woman of a certain social class, she knew how to get the “good” stuff–the best dried mushrooms, dried scallops, shark’s fin, etc.  Grandma was just plain fearless in her quest to conquer the kitchen.  There may have been more than a few duds here and there, but she never caved in under the pressure–especially given my grandfather’s highly refined taste buds and predilection for brutal criticism. She bravely trusted her instincts and cooked by feel.

I remember asking her how she knew when the wheat starch dough for her steamed dumplings was ready to be used.  She simply replied, “When it starts to make loud popping sounds.”  That was the reason why she refused to use a mixer to knead the dough.  “You have to be able to feel it snap and pop as you knead it by hand,” she said.    She never gave me a recipe for the dough itself.  You just get a feel for how much boiling hot water to add to the wheat starch to form a dough.  According to her, it was all in the kneading.  Same goes for the filling.  She could give you a list of ingredients but, well, the seasoning you had to do by taste.

As a pastry chef, I do have to use recipes and adhere to certain rules.  But I do go with my gut quite often–which kind of goes against all that I’ve been taught at school (at least relating to baking and pastry).  Sometimes my experiments come out great and other times they fail miserably.  And when they do fall flat, I try to remember what my grandmother taught me.  No guts, no glory.

Now if only I can put that in the recipe.

Posted January 30th, 2010  |  Leave a Comment

01/23: Unspoken connections

For my brother Ken, it’s always the lemon meringue pie.  Not that he doesn’t like other desserts in my repertoire–he’ll dig a flourless chocolate torte–but when it comes to his birthday, it has to be that pie.  Ask my nephew Justin and he’ll probably say his favorite was the pie-plate sized butterscotch creme brulee.  Mom?  Well that’s a toss up between chestnut creme cake and banana bread.  And, she has a curious way of letting me know when she has a hankerin’ for either one.

For instance, she’ll call me up to inform me that she just happened to buy a bunch of chestnuts from Chinatown and spent an inordinate amount of time patiently boiling, roasting, then peeling them.  I don’t bother asking her if they were tasty, because I know damn well she hasn’t really eaten any of them.  No, the sole purpose of her call, even if she doesn’t come right out and request it, is to have me turn her handy work into a lovely vanilla chiffon cake layered with chestnut creme.  So, I tell her to put the chestnuts in the freezer and I’ll make her the cake when I see her next.  Now, if she’s really impatient (which she usually is), Mom won’t even bother letting me get that far into the conversation.  She’ll just tell me that she’s taking the bus (two of them no less) to drop off the said chestnuts at my doorstep.  Way to work the guilt!

Mom and I don’t really talk much.  Sadly, we’ve never had a particularly close relationship, and I don’t think it is so much to do with the language barrier–I’m woefully inept at conversational Cantonese.  My late father spoke less English but we somehow managed to bridge that gap and forged a special bond that only fathers and their little girls share.  So food is how my mom and I communicate, how we let each other know we care about each other.  She makes fabulous bbq pork jerky and sticky rice in lotus leaf, among other traditional delicacies.  I make chestnut creme cake, banana bread, and chocolate chip cookies.  It’s the way we’ve learn to connect with each other, and also to others.

I suppose you can say it is the reason why I do what I do for a living.  More than anything else I’ve ever done, cooking and baking has been the most professionally and emotionally gratifying because the response is immediate, visceral–it goes straight from the taste buds and stomach straight to the brain and heart of the recipient.  Whenever I’m at a lost for words or want to go beyond words, I always fall back on food.  This was definitely the case when I was younger and much too insecure about my ability to interact well in social situations (chalk it up to a really long geeky adolescence).  My way to impress, to break the ice was cook or bake something–a fruit tart for the office, churros for the neighbors, fresh apple pie for potential in-laws (great folks, wrong guy), over-the-top assortment of Christmas cookies for boyfriend’s family (again, great folks, dead-end guy).  Okay, so I may not have been the life of the party, but my chocolate graduation cake made me feel less of a fourteen-year-old wallflower with a bad perm and uncool clothes.

I have more or less outgrown alot of my insecurities.  God knows I’ve had over forty some odd years to accept and embrace my inner geek.  I still, however, find it comforting to use food as a means of bridging gaps, because after all it is the common language we all speak.

Posted January 23rd, 2010  |  Leave a Comment

01/06: Saying goodbye to Mom & Pop

I wasn’t really all that surprised to hear that a restaurant I worked at long ago was finally closing its doors.  It had been hobbling along for the last few years and with the down turn in the economy ( and other more personal factors) the once favorite neighborhood eatery called it quits.  A local food critic lamented its passing and confessed to having abandoned it for more modern bright, shiny, hip places that served trendier “comfort” food.  Yes, he is fickle, not unlike many foodies in this town who obsessively tweet about finding the next great thing.  However, I have to say in his defense, it is his JOB to ferret out the yet to be discovered, to write about the hottest new restaurant.  Still, if he really cared about the sustainability of these treasured “Mom & Pop” institutions, he’d have devoted a little more print to praising their virtues while they were still alive, instead of giving a guilt-ridden eulogy.

While it was not always easy working in that cozy little space, filled with creaky lop-sided office chairs, leaking pipes, computers from the dark ages (we were STILL using Wordstar for God’s sake!), file cabinets stuffed to the brim with a decade of catering orders, and questionable ventilation, I can say that I learned practically everything I know about catering (not to mention Italian cuisine) from my time there.  I also honed in my talent for multi-tasking and thinking on my feet, because when you’re on a historical ship with no kitchen, a dwindling buffet with an endless line of hungry drunk wedding guests, and a sizeable chunk hacked off the wedding cake (no doubt from one of the drunken hungry guests), you pretty much have do a few “Hail Mary” moves to advert disaster.

Like many of the wonderful people I worked with, who to this day are great friends, I outgrew the place but I never really left it behind.  We, in fact, get together a couple times a year for mini reunions to catch up on the new and talk about the old.  Some of us are still in the food biz, some not.  What binds us together is not just the experience of working together but the shared memory of the place itself–everything from the storeroom filled with bottles of imported olive oils, balsamic vinegars, pasta, and ceramics, to the smell of chicken fat dripping off the rotisserie in the morning, piping hot plates of pasta alla norma coming off the line, and hazelnut meringue cake layered with fluffy whipped cream and apricot paste–all which is just that, a memory.  A very warm, tasty memory.

Posted January 6th, 2010  |  Leave a Comment