My mother self-identifies as a chef rather than a cook. Even though the recipe might say one teaspoon of sugar, she would change the amount to something else because she believes that her version would taste a lot better, and be a lot healthier. Her initial attempts at baking were quite unsuccessful, to say the least. My mother was usually quite sure of which ingredients to put in, but she seemed lost with the first few cakes she made. I walked into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water but instead, I found the kitchen in a mess. Untied flour, eggs, a weighing scale, and the chopping board were all spread out randomly. I had to scavenge in the mess to find where our kettle was.
I’ve never been that much of a baker myself. Of course, after my mother’s fiasco in our kitchen, that’s hardly surprising. I remember one of the few attempts that I made at baking. A friend of mine was hanging out in our apartment one day, and out of the blue, she asked me if I wanted to make something with her. I realized that we had all the necessary materials anyway, so I told her, why not. We opened drawers and cupboards, looking for all the materials we needed. The kitchen seemed to expand in size as I searched diligently for things in cupboards and cabinets.
The first cake my mother made was scorched on the outside. The odor of burnt crumb wafted through the kitchen and spread slowly into the rest of our home. The cake was covered in a coat of black, and the shape was also distorted. I think my mother tried to make it a regular cylinder shape, but the cake leaned to one side, and the base was smaller than the top. I scrunched my nose as I took in the cake—it didn’t look or smell good.
My mother forced me to try out her first product. I peeled away the skin tentatively, and took a bite from the inside of the cake. The inside, in contrast with the burnt outside, was quite soft and savory. It tasted a lot better than I expected.
“Well, what do you think?”
“It’s… well, it’s something,” I broke another piece and put it in my mouth. “It’s actually not bad.”
My mother took that as a hint of her natural talent in cooking, and decided to continue working on her baking skills, taking them to the next level.
My friend and I didn’t have so much luck the first time we tried. We never got to the final product because we were practically stuck on the first step. I had observed my mother using the electronic scale to determine how much of each ingredient she needed. Naturally, I told my friend that we should do the same thing to be more precise. We put a small cup of flour on the top of the scale with confidence, thinking that we were off to a great start. The numbers on the scale barely shifted. There was no way that that could be the right number. We were really confused and set up the scale again, but the same thing happened. We looked at each other in confusion. Our grand plan of becoming the best bakers that afternoon was put off because I needed to ask my mum about her scale when she got back from work. When my mum arrived at home, I pulled her into the kitchen and complained about how her scale was useless and broken. My mum took one glance at the scale and burst out laughing.
“You forgot to take the lid off.”
“What lid?”
“The lid on top of the scale.” With that, she took the transparent lid off.
My friend burst out laughing as well. All afternoon, we were obsessed with the preciseness of the scale, but we never considered that we might have used the scale wrong in the first place. My mother later told me that she also thought the scale was broken when she first started using it. She was convinced that her instincts were right though, so she went ahead with what she perceived to be the correct amount for each ingredient.
“No wonder the things you made were sometimes great and sometimes really weird,” I commented.
“Well, eventually I figured it out. You don’t really see chefs using scales all the time, right?”
My mother bought lots of tools, molds, spoons, and scales to help with her baking, and her baking skills improved bit by bit. She bought an ice-cream mold once and decided to put yogurt and milk in it for actual “frozen yogurt”. She then added strawberries and melted chocolate into the mix to add more flavor. Surprisingly, it tasted pretty good. I decided to follow her lead and made milk tea by myself. I boiled water and added the tea bag to the cooking pot. I then added milk to the pot, and waited for them to mix. For the first few times, the taste was a bit off because I didn’t control the proportion of milk, tea, and water. After a few tries, I got the hang of it, and was able to make my personalized milk tea. I started to feel that I understood what my mother meant by her cooking intuition.
My mother is skilled at cooking the dishes that we typically eat. When my mother cooks these dishes, unlike her baking, she is very sure of the exact amount of seasoning she needs to put into the pots or pans. I remember when I was young, I would be greeted with the smell of food when I came back home from school. My mother doesn’t eat meat though. She says she’s not a vegetarian because she eats seafood, but she hates the smell of meat like pork or chicken. On the other hand, my father and I love meat. My mother has no choice but to cook meat for us carnivores every day. I don’t know how my mother did it, but she managed to pull off perfectly cooked dishes of pork ribs or chicken wings without tasting them herself.
During the holiday season, my mother would make me and my father join her in cooking. During the Spring Festival, we would all make dumplings together. My mother would make the meat filling, my father would be in charge of making dumpling skins, and I would be tasked with filling the skins with filling. It was the best time of the year when every family cooks dumplings, and we would celebrate the festival together. It has been a while since I celebrated the festival with both of my parents because of COVID. However, since it’s tradition to make dumplings, my friends and I also made dumplings earlier this year in our kitchen together. Just like I would at home, I was also tasked with filling the dumplings. It was a night that all of us felt at home.
The food that I miss the most are my mother’s homemade noodles. On cold or windy days, she would boil noodles in the boiler first and then mix the noodles with tomatoes and eggs in a frying pan. Eating the dish would immediately warm me up in the pit of my stomach and spread through my entire body. The smell of tomatoes and eggs would linger in my nose and mouth. I thought it was a really simple dish to make, but when I tried to cook the exact same thing with my friends at Brown, we could never quite replicate the taste. I guess that is the taste of home.
I think my mother is a great chef, even though there were lots of times when she would make me question what I was eating. There’s always a specific taste to what she makes. She could sit back and let my father and I figure out what to eat every day, but instead, she’s always innovative and tries to find new things that my father and I would enjoy. Although to be completely honest, most of her new attempts are not that successful. When people ask me what home means, I immediately think about my mother’s cooking and her voice saying, “Don’t forget, you’ll get the hang of it the more you try.”
Sole Magazine