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.
Auntie Alice laughed when I mentioned the word dowager. “Aiyoh, your mummy ah,” she said, shaking her head. “In those days, your mum and Auntie Jane were younger, they didn’t do much housework, and they were so naughty! I was the one who had to learn how to keep the house clean, you know. If I’m cleaning the house, whoever stepped on something, I would just scream at them!” Housework was just one of her worries at the time. “Your ah-ma had a little gambling den on the weekends,” she said. “We were living in Selegie House,” a building in a neighborhood that currently is dotted with karaoke and KTV lounges, where everyone knows the girls usually can be paid to do more than just sing. Well, into just a microphone anyway. “We used to have gamblers come over and play see-sek,” Hokkien for “four colors,” which is a popular Chinese card game involving slender, long cards of four colors. With gamblers filling the house on weekends, Auntie Alice and her sisters were relegated to being girl Fridays who fetched tea or noodles from the nearby coffee shops when anyone got hungry.
“Did you ever get upset over having to do this?” I asked, thinking about my pretty auntie Alice and her sisters having to deal with hungry, sketchy, sometimes angry men in their own living room. Auntie Alice’s large, bright eyes widened, which often happens when she’s really thinking about something, giving her face the look of an innocent girl on the cusp of some amazing discovery. “It didn’t occur to me at that time, you know!” she finally said, erupting in soft laughter again.
And that was that. Being the tea girls for strange men in their mother’s illegal gambling den on weekends was just something practical. You didn’t question it. If you wanted to be able to put food on the table, you just did it. I started thinking about my question and how silly it had been. I’d grown up in a comfortable home with not even a whiff of want, much less poverty. I’d approached life with the view of the pampered—expecting the right to a myriad of choices, never having had to suffer or do something I loathed in order to make a few dollars for my family. I realized how fortunate I’d been. Or unfortunate, perhaps, as I didn’t appear to have as much figure-it-out spirit as my auntie Alice had. As much as I adored chicken rice, I’d never thought of trying to figure out how to make it. And there Auntie Alice was, curious about chicken rice, then questioning hawkers or professional cooks she met, trying to figure out on her own how to put the dish together.
The chicken, by this point, was almost done. Auntie Alice grabbed a chopstick and poked it through the bird at its thickest part. “If there’s no blood, then the chicken is cooked,” she said. With no blood in sight, she hoisted the chicken out of the pot and set it aside to cool, saving the water it had been boiled in. Heating a large wok over high heat with a little bit of cooking oil, she tossed in the snipped-up chicken skin that she’d saved and started frying it. “You must fry until it’s crispy and all the oil has been extracted,” she said, swirling the sizzling skin around the wok as it became smaller and smaller. Once the bits of skin had gotten about as small, brown, and crispy as they were likely to get, she gently removed them, replacing them with minced garlic, shallots, and ginger, frying the combination until its heady smell started hitting our nostrils. Next, in went the uncooked rice, which had been washed and drained, and six knots of pandan leaves from my mother’s garden. Quickly, she fried up the mixture, trying her best to make sure that the rice grains were evenly coated, that the minced garlic, shallots, and ginger were getting distributed evenly. After just a minute or two, she moved the mixture to a rice cooker, added the cooking water from the chicken, and turned it on.
As the rice cooked, Auntie Alice set about chopping up the now cooled chicken and making the soup. There was still some water left over from boiling the chicken; into it, she tossed some dong cai (about one to two teaspoons, by my sense of agak-agak) and began bringing that to a boil. “You can put some little cubes of tauhu [tofu] in the soup if you want,” she said, as she sliced up a few shiitake mushrooms to add flavor. Next, she heated a little bit of sesame oil in a wok, stir-fried some whole scallions in the oil until we could smell the scallions, then drizzled the oil over the cut-up chicken.
Soon enough, the rice cooker button popped and we were ready to eat. The chicken was delicious and tender, just as it should be. And the rice and soup, though not as flavorful as MSG-laden restaurant versions, were divine. As I nibbled on the rice, Auntie Alice asked why I wasn’t eating much. “I need to lose weight!” I said, noting that I’d started to see an alarming rubbery tire around my waist as my year of cooking, bread baking, and eating progressed. “Aiyoh!” she exclaimed. “If you need to lose weight, that means people like us no need to eat already lah!”
With that, I began to really tuck in. Auntie Alice smiled as she watched me. “Cooking ah,” she said. “If you do it with your whole heart, then it tastes good, you know. If you do it grudgingly, then better don’t do it at all.”
I thought back to the meals I’d made, the meals I hoped to make. Whenever I’d been rushed or busy or just plain stressed about putting dinner on the table, there hadn’t been much enjoyment involved—making the meal was tiresome. If I tried to carefully yet quickly follow steps in a recipe, the food was often only okay, and the actual act of sitting down to eat always felt forced.
Auntie Alice was right. I had slowed my life down so I could try to watch, to listen, to learn. And slowly, I hoped, I was learning to cook with my heart.