My solution to a problem is always to get busy. I organise, clean, sweep or if that’s all done, I cook. I would say that I am a B+ cook, verging on A sometimes but over the years, I’ve lost some of my skills because I don’t cook as often as I used to. But I can still whip up a meal for 20 people at the drop of a hat. I have not stopped collecting recipes and I maintain an active account with allrecipes.com.
My love for cooking and recipes began from my love for reading. In my youth, there were few bookshops and not much reading material available. There was a mamak store in my neighbourhood where an Indian uncle sold a small selection of paperback books including an odd Enid Blyton. I bought them all and one day, I realised that I had bought and read everything he had. I asked him if he had anything else left for me to read and he offered me some back copies of Women’s Own, a women’s magazine, at a cheap price. I took them and that started my interest in cooking and collecting recipes. At twelve, I already had a bulging book of recipes and knew a blancmange from a soufflé. It helped that my teachers loved to cook too and they often asked me to help copy recipes for them into their own books in my-then-beautiful handwriting.
I started formal cooking lessons in Sec 1 and the first lesson was to reconstitute milk. Looking back, I must say that this is truly a last century task. I bet most of you don't know what reconstituting milk was all about. It’s simply making milk from milk powder because we did not have pasteurized milk in tetra packs in those days. This was quite a skilful task as milk powder in those days didn’t dissolve easily, and it was very easy to end up with lumps in your milk. After that, the first thing we made with the reconstituted milk was a banana milk shake. The first real food I made was scones, using the rubbing-in method. Looking back, I am grateful for these cooking lessons which went on for 3 to 4 years of my secondary school life. I learnt a lot about basic cooking methods, cleanliness in the kitchen, balancing diets and even won a prize for dish I created - Tutti Frutti Jelly – in a nation-wide contest when I was in Sec 3 or 4.
Cooking is always therapeutic for me. Many people cook as a hobby nowadays and have huge designer kitchens and fancy equipment to show off their skills. In my time, we didn’t even have an oven. My first home- made one was an aluminium pot with sand inside. There were hot coals under the pot and more hot coals on the lid and the cakes or cookies just got cooked or burnt in between. Still, the excitement of a perfect batch of cookies was hard to beat then.
Nowadays, I have more fancy equipment although I would say my collection of cooking equipment is modest compared to my sisters’. Last weekend, in a cooking frenzy, I made some apple-oats and some cranberry-chocolate muffins. Needless to say, I made too much and I still have two sad boxes in my freezer. Were they good? I think so. Hey, these are healthy muffins, and my son grew up on the apple-raisin muffins. The recipe came straight out of Sunset magazine. But truth be told, on bad days, I crave for fat-filled, moist cupcakes not low-fat, chewy muffins.
I learnt to sew too in school but cooking has been the one subject that has seen me through many good and bad days. I’m sorry that many young people don’t care to learn how to cook although there has been a great increase in food and eating in recent years. Unfortunately, there’s not enough interest in basic cooking.
Here are a few interesting thoughts about the subject:
Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. Harriet Van Horne.
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking. Gail Sheehy.
And they shouldn't stop.
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