A Tiger in the Kitchen Read Online Free PDF

Shake ’n Bake boxes and Campbell’s soup cans in my own kitchen, Daphne was light-years ahead of me. Having gone to Cornell University’s elite School of Hotel Administration for her undergraduate degree, Daphne had been exposed to glimpses of life in professional kitchens and had begun trying out some of her lessons at home. During a visit that my childhood friend Jeanette and I made to Manhattan one summer in our mid-twenties, Daphne had offered to make dinner for us one night. In my own kitchen in Washington, D.C., I had treated Jeanette to simple grilled steaks and prepackaged creamed spinach. When we sat down to dinner in Daphne’s midtown Manhattan apartment, I instantly felt shamed—the younger sister had outdone her elder.
    As Jeanette and I watched, Daphne put on oven mitts and pulled roasted squash out of her oven. She dumped it into a blender with cream and a few spices, and presented us with a beautifully smooth roasted squash soup. Then she impressed us even more as she masterfully whipped together an Italian sausage risotto, nonchalantly stirring in cup after cup of broth as she chatted with us over the kitchen counter. This was like nothing I’d even contemplated trying in my own kitchen.
    With the help of Southeast Asian blogs and Web sites, however, I managed to piece together some semblances of the dishes I grew up eating.
    One of the dishes I desperately wanted to know how to make was tau yew bak, a stew of pork belly braised in dark soy sauce, sweet and thick, and a mélange of spices that is a signature dish of the Teochews, the ethnic Chinese group of my paternal ancestors. When done well, the meat is so tender you feel almost as if you’re biting into pillows. The gravy is salty, sweet, and gently flecked with traces of ginger, star anise, and cinnamon—just perfect drizzled over rice. And the best versions come filled with hard-boiled eggs and wedges of tofu that have been steeped in the stew for so long that they’ve turned the color of a good milk chocolate.
    My Tanglin ah-ma used to make this dish—often with duck instead of pork belly. You’d smell it the moment you walked into her apartment, and it was always a signal to rev up your appetite for the feast ahead. The idea of making it was daunting—I’d never even seen it being made—but with the Internet at hand, few things are difficult to attempt. After some days, I’d cobbled together a recipe from reading several versions online.
    It looked simple enough. After slicing the pork loin I’d bought—pork belly being just a little too fatty for me—I fired up the wok until the vegetable oil got nice and crackly. In went the sugar, followed by rapid stirring to keep the sugar moving as it slowly melted and caramelized. Once that happened, I threw in bashed garlic, ginger, a cinnamon stick, and star anise, and fried everything up together until it was an intoxicatingly fragrant goo. Everything after that was simple—dump in the meat, stir it up, add soy sauce, dark soy sauce, water, stir and simmer.
    I had been nervous about making this dish, feeling the discerning eyes of my Tanglin ah-ma on me the whole time. But as my very first tau yew bak simmered and the smells of dark soy sauce and spices began to fill my apartment, I almost started to tear up.
    As much as I’d loved my Tanglin ah-ma and her food, I’d never been able to fully communicate that to her. She spoke only Teochew, which I barely spoke, knowing only how to wish her “Happy New Year” and say “thank you.” I’d always wondered what she must have thought of her very ang moh granddaughter, who generally preferred to keep her nose in her Enid Blyton books until dinner or pineapple tarts appeared. She probably thought that I never wanted to learn anything from her, that I might never know how to cook. I wondered what she would think of this effort.
    The end result wasn’t perfect—the meat could have been more tender, and I’d completely forgotten to buy