Feast of Burden

"That is not our burden, honey. That is our gift." - Coach Taylor, on having to pay for daycare for baby Gracie (Friday Night Lights)

Cooking for someone is a tremendous responsibility. This is even more so if that someone happens to be a discerning eater with a knowledgeable palate, able to tell the amazing from the amateur. And it is especially so if that person happens to be your mother.

I recently moved back home to Singapore, giving up my kitchen in Washington DC and my numerous state-of-the-art kitchen appliances, and packing my knives and other implements. It was a bittersweet moment leaving, for I had been able to call that kitchen my own (Clayton rarely used it, and if he did his usage was limited to the microwave and the coffee maker). Moving back home meant moving back to the kitchen I grew up in, which was a good thing; but it also meant moving back to what was now my mother's kitchen.

As I have written before, I did not cook much growing up. Both my parents worked, and we had live-in help prepare our meals. Our maidservant ran the kitchen with ruthless efficiency, and had little tolerance for disturbances. She seemed to be able to do everything ten times quicker if she were doing it all herself, as if relieving her of a simple task was actually removing a crucial component of the process she had mapped out in her mind - so we gradually learnt not to bother helping out, and ceded control of the kitchen to her. She alone could operate the heavy machinery, she alone knew where everything was kept. It was amazing what she could squirrel away out of sight with just a lazy Susan and several leftover peanut butter jars. It was her castle, her domain, and we were just lucky beneficiaries of her daily sacrifices.

When we were all grown up there was then no need for live-in help, and my mother gradually took over the reins of the kitchen. She delegated little and had impossibly high standards for what she did allow others to do, and so she wound up doing almost everything herself. After all those years she still seemed intensely energised by that maternal drive to feed her children, which manifested itself in an unwillingness to accept assistance, and a propensity for self-sacrifice that was deeply humbling.

My mother alone knows what each of us like and do not like to eat, and how our tastes run; and looking back, I realised that she had spent a large portion of her life subjugating her desires to accommodate those of her children. We are all of us picky eaters and we take after our father in that respect; so managing to feed us a constantly varied, healthful diet that we all enjoyed must have been no easy task.

Morgan told me a story one time of how he and his brother absolutely loved this lemon chicken dish growing up, and made his mother make it so many times that the dish became patella non grata in their household. I can only imagine what I have similarly ruined as a culinary experience for my own mother. I realised that I had never seen her out of the context of being my mother, as an individual eater, with her own set of preferences. Thinking back, I seem to recall that in restaurants she more often than not liked to say, "I'll just have what you're having." Whether this was out of indecision or a deference to our knowledge and palate, it was very worrying. I could not live with myself if it were because she had gone so long without eating what she really liked, that she had forgotten what that was exactly.

Yet upon coming back from DC, I noticed a subtle shift in the dynamic of my mother's kitchen relationship with her children. Maybe I had been oblivious to it before, but she has slowly begun to extricate herself from that maternal provider role, and to cast off that burden of self-sacrifice. In the numerous meals I have made together with her since coming back, I have discovered so much more about her palate I either did not know, or had not noticed before. She prefers her food lightly seasoned, cooked with minimal fat, and only mildly spicy, yet had spent so much time and energy cooking to please a family that enjoyed rich, savoury flavours and spice so hot that it bludgeoned the tongue. She is alone in the family in her taste for soups, and prefers her meat off the bone and against the grain. Unlike me she is not a fan of shellfish, and turns her nose up at some of the more exotic cuts I want to prepare - pig's trotters, sweetbreads, even liver.

It was tremendously difficult to infiltrate my mother's kitchen. I felt like I was in high school all over again and begging to use the cars. When I did manage to, the pressure to perform was enormous. Would it be up to her standards? Would I enjoy it? How do I reconcile our different tastes? How do I apply what I have learnt of Western cuisine? What is this thing we call a wok and why does it so dramatically alter cooking times? Where's the damn salt!? Why can't I find anything around here?

And that's when I realised what I had missed out on in my cooking education - cooking as burden, cooking as responsibility. I had hitherto been so enamoured with cooking largely because I did it for my own pleasure: I made what I wanted to, and to hell with anyone else. Even as I organised dinner parties for friends or cooked for significant others, I only made what I wanted to eat, and nobody else had any say in the matter. Sure I dealt with the occasional twist and catered to the occasional preference - Kellyn's lactose intolerance, Amanda's love of scallops and (worst of all) Laura's vegetarianism. But I did not deal with them every day, and I sure as hell did not alter what I ate, only what they did.

And so I adjust, and accommodate. It makes the cooking process a little more challenging, I must admit. Before, I did things because it was the way things should be done, or the way I liked to do it. Monter au buerre, why would we NOT do it? Why would anybody NOT want us to do it? I suppose I never truly cooked for others so much as cooked for myself. The food I made came out of the kitchen filtered through my palate, not that of anyone else's.

Now I try to think about every action I take in the kitchen. Take adding salt - how much, and at what juncture? Should I balance the dish out with sugar? And so on and so forth. I cook with restraint, with care. Most of all I cook with the knowledge that the act itself is one of great responsibility, and not to be taken lightly.