A Tiger in the Kitchen (21 page)

In recent years, I had become obsessed with clam pizza. The first time I had it was unforgettable—my friend Greg, who worked in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote about food and fashion for the
Courant
, had been astounded that I had never tried the famous clam pizza at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. Finally, after years of raving about it, he made a date. Mike and I got in a car and headed to New Haven. After waiting in line for more than thirty minutes, we slid into a booth where Greg proceeded to order a large clam pie with bacon. The salty, cheesy, and crispy combination had me mesmerized right away. Bacon or no bacon, this clam pizza was phenomenal. I began swinging by Pepe’s whenever I was remotely close to New Haven.

“Do you like clams?” I asked Nette. “If so, I may make a clam pizza topping.” Nette looked a little skeptical—pizza places in Singapore tend to err on the traditional side. When menus offer adventurous toppings they tend to be Asian-inspired, such as tandoori chicken, for example. I had never seen a clam pizza on a Singaporean menu and it sounded like Nette hadn’t either. But as always, she was game to try anything. I had shared Peter Reinhart’s pizza dough recipe—which my bread-baking friends had unanimously adored—with Nette, and Eudon was hard at work tossing pizza dough into the air by the time I arrived in the large kitchen of her fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Singapore’s centrally located Tiong Bahru neighborhood. While much of densely populated Singapore is crammed with tall buildings—both residential and commercial—a small section of Tiong Bahru remains a quaint little pocket of relatively squat apartment buildings, some of which date back to the 1930s, when this government-created housing estate was developed. (An estimated 80 percent of Singaporeans live in comfortable, affordable apartments built by the government.) Some of these white, boxy buildings, which go up to five stories high, have a modern art deco feel to them. Before World War II, the neighborhood apparently was a place where the rich kept their mistresses, which earned it the name
Mei Ren Wuo
or “den of beauties.” In modern-day Singapore, however, the neighborhood is more like a den of yuppies. The relatively young and professional have been attracted to Tiong Bahru’s streamlined structures, which are modern yet also conjure a bygone era in Singapore—a time when buildings didn’t all loom dozens of stories high.

At Nette’s that night, Eudon twirled large disks of pizza dough in the air, readying them for the oven. The first few were delicious standards—basic pepperoni and a margherita pizza, dotted with mozzarella, basil, and fresh tomatoes. Then Nette cleared a spot for me in her kitchen for my clam pizza. Eudon had spread the dough out onto the stone; I sprinkled it with minced garlic, Italian parsley, canned, chopped clams, red pepper flakes, and grated Parmesan cheese, before drizzling olive oil on top of the mound of ingredients. (Since it was Nette’s first clam pizza, I figured I should make a pure version and left off the bacon.) After twelve minutes in the oven, the pie came out smelling delicious. It stood little chance of surviving more than five minutes outside of the oven, disappearing almost instantly.

As we capped the night with whiskey and homemade chocolate cake and surveyed the crumbs of our dinner scattered about, Nette and I felt pleased with ourselves. Guests had arrived ravenous and they’d been well fed—not with food purchased from the many great hawker stands that fill Tiong Bahru, but with pizzas produced in Nette’s own kitchen. In all our teenage years of daydreaming about the lives that lay before us, we had never contemplated cooking together or throwing a dinner party. We had never considered the act of making food for people as anything less than a chore, a necessity—something we were intent on avoiding as much as possible.

Looking at the satisfied smiles around the dinner table, I realized what silly schoolgirls we had been.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There are numerous things to love about my auntie Alice. The bottomless well of warmth and pure, well-intentioned kindness that she possesses. Her fervent love for her family—the thing that nudges her to try, regularly, repeatedly, to bring us all together for dinner or afternoon tea. The no-nonsense approach that enabled her to raise three handsome and close-to-perfect young men, each one more gentle and well behaved than the last. The infectiousness of her humor, her body starting to rock as she titters, one hand coyly reaching up to cover her mouth while the other reaches down to slap her knee when it’s a laugh that’s really worth enjoying.

The one thing I truly admire in her, however, is how practical she is, a problem solver to a fault. In her longtime job as a public relations manager for a big hotel in Singapore, this quality was, of course, handy. In the kitchen, it has proved essential. If Auntie Alice doesn’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter—she’ll figure it out. Which is why she knows how to make a whole host of dishes that are so labor-intensive and easy to buy at hawker stands that most Singaporeans never even bother to attempt them at home.

“Cheryl ah,” she said one day on the phone. “What else do you want to learn?”

“Kueh lapis?”
I said, hopefully. Auntie Alice had always been a wonderful baker—and my mouth still watered when I thought of her buttery slabs of
kueh lapis,
a pandan-scented, spiced, striped cake comprising multiple one-eighth-inch layers of dough baked atop one another.

“Um, I don’t really bake anymore leh,” she said, sheepishly confessing that her oven had been turned into storage space for pots and utensils years ago. “I don’t know if I remember how to make
kueh lapis
!”

Before I could start feeling sad, however, Auntie Alice volunteered: “What about chicken rice?”

Ah,
chicken rice
—two words that tug at the hearts of many Singaporeans who live overseas. Widely considered Singapore’s national dish, chicken rice—also known as Hainanese chicken rice because Hainanese immigrants first started making the dish—basically consists of boiled chicken and rice. When done well, the chicken is so tender that its juices practically spurt out, coating your tongue as you bite into it. (Boon Tong Kee, a hallowed chicken rice joint in Singapore, is known for steaming it and then cooling it in such a way that a hefty layer of gelatinized juices and fat sits between the meat of the chicken and its chewy, fatty skin.) But for many, the best part of this dish is the rice itself—ever so slightly pandan scented and oily, and made so that each grain of rice is slick with chicken fat and juices.

I’d eaten chicken rice and dreamt of it more times than I could count. But I had never once thought of making it. I’d had it made for me from scratch just once, fifteen years before, and the occasion had so impressed me that it’s been seared in my memory. During my sophomore year in college, a group of Singaporean friends and I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to attend a national conference of Singaporean students living in the United States. Sure, it was going to be an honor to meet S. R. Nathan, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States at the time. But the main reason any of us was going, really, was the remote chance that we might get to eat some semblance of Singaporean food.

On our very first day there, things looked promising. I met Andre, an eager young Singaporean student who was hosting me and my group of friends: Francis, Leonard, and Kevin, three guys I’d known since I was eleven, back when we were a rambunctious lot who spent hours playing Ping-Pong, skateboarding, and kickboxing in the swimming pool. As we sat around Andre’s living room lamenting the fact that it had been ages since we’d eaten chicken rice, he said the words: “I can make chicken rice, you know.”

There were audible gasps; our hearts started racing. Francis and Leonard quietly wondered aloud if I should take one for the team and make out with Andre to grease the wheels. Fortunately, no making out was in order. Andre the affable was instantly enthusiastic about making his chicken rice for us. Immediately, we drove to the grocery store to purchase the ingredients, and Andre set about working his magic.

I’d like to say that I helped—or that we helped—but really, none of us cooked or was even vaguely interested in the cooking. Instead, the four of us simply sat in the living room and waited for the smells to hit us. The result was okay—not as delicious as professionally cooked chicken rice. But it truly was amazing. Biting into the chicken and chasing it with garlicky, greasy rice, this group of loudmouths was reduced to a long stretch of silence. It was fall, and there we were in cold, cold Bloomington, Indiana—right smack in the middle of America’s heartland—and we were huddled around a table eating homemade chicken rice! I briefly considered making out with Andre after all, just because I was so grateful. The four of us began bickering bitterly over who would eat the last piece of chicken.
“Jie,”
Leonard said, calling me “older sister” as he had since we were eleven. “Eat it lah.” “No, you eat it,” I replied. And Kevin jumped in, too, urging someone—anyone—else to eat the last piece. It was only polite, after all; we’d all gone so long without chicken rice. One of your loved ones, not you, should really have the last piece. After several minutes of this, Francis, who had been watching mostly silently, jumped up from his corner of the table, holding his fork just so. “Aiyah,
I’ll
eat it,” he said, leaning over to spear the final piece and dump it on his plate. We watched, stunned, as he devoured the last of our precious chicken rice with great gusto, then laughed. It wasn’t until I was back in my dorm room at Northwestern that I started to feel the pangs of regret. I couldn’t believe that even in my fog of greed I hadn’t bothered to learn or even watch how to make Andre’s Singaporean chicken rice.

So this time, faster than you could say “chicken,” I was in Auntie Alice’s sunny kitchen with my notebook and pen in hand.

Auntie Alice moved quickly, washing two cups of rice and rinsing the chicken. I’d dealt with so much raw duck at this point that I didn’t even wince when I saw the cold, white chicken sitting in her sink. Auntie Alice saved me from touching it, however, grabbing it and deftly cutting off its head and trimming off its backside. “Make sure to cut off the extra skin ah,” she said. “Otherwise it will be too fatty.” Instead of tossing out the skin, however, Auntie Alice placed it in a bowl, gesturing for me to note that the skin should be saved. Next, she grabbed some salt, waving me off as I started to ask her how much. “I just use my hand to
agak-agak
lor,” she said, taking what looked to be about a teaspoon of salt and rubbing it all over the inside of the chicken. Then, she bashed up nine garlic cloves and a two-inch piece of ginger—“You want to bring the smell out,” she noted—placing them inside the chicken together with two stalks of scallions. With that, she pinched together the skin around the chicken’s behind and sealed it with a sharp toothpick.

Taking out a large pot, Auntie Alice brought some water—“enough to cover the chicken,” she said—to a rolling boil. Once the water had boiled, she placed the chicken in the pot, breast side down, covered it, and let it simmer over medium heat for twenty minutes.

As much as I love the chicken and the rice aspect of chicken rice, I also adore the little bowl of salty soup that usually comes with it. At hawker stands and restaurants, this soup is often flavored with monosodium glutamate, which I try not to use in my own kitchen. So I was curious to see how Auntie Alice would flavor her chicken rice soup. Shiitake mushrooms, apparently, were her secret. And so was
dong cai,
which are briny, brownish flecks of preserved Chinese cabbage. I’d never cooked with
dong cai
before. In fact, I’d never given it much thought beyond
Hey, this salty stuff tastes awesome
when I encountered it in soups. Auntie Alice pulled out a little bit to show me how it looked. “No need to use too much of it, just enough to add some flavor,” she said.

While the chicken simmered, we sat for a moment, putting our feet up and enjoying a light breeze in her large living room, which opened out into a little garden, as she kept one eye on her granddaughter, Bernice. Now, Auntie Alice had learned to cook as a teenager out of sheer necessity. With my grandmother having to work to put food on the table, Auntie Alice simply had to become the person making the food. Her repertoire then, of course, included nothing near as fancy as chicken rice. “I remember when I learned to fry fish for the first time,” Auntie Alice said, scrunching up her face and hunching over the table as she often did when she was getting to the meaty part of a story. “I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and when I slid the fish into the oil, all this oil splattered everywhere. I had blisters so big I had to go to the doctor, you know,” she added, pointing at me as if reminding me to always be careful when frying fish. (Being a big red-meat eater myself, I’d not attempted any fish frying before. I supposed it was good that I’d not attempted it without first hearing this sage advice.)

My mother and her younger sister, Auntie Jane, had always joked about Auntie Alice being “fierce” as a teenager. “We used to call her the dowager!” my mother had told me that very week. “She was so strict!” My mother’s recollection of those days largely involves Auntie Alice being a tyrant with a broom, yelling at her three siblings to keep their feet off the floor as she raced through the house, trying to sweep it clean.