no. 40 knowing how it feels

Hullo to readers old and new!

Sunday morning feels to me like the right time to read essays about food and society. I hope you agree.

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If, in thirty years, anyone is left on earth who cares about this kind of thing at all, we may come to look back on the time between the great mortgage robbery and the first pandemic of the 21st century as a golden age for the preservation of culinary traditions. In the last year alone, I have found myself poring over intensely detailed cookbooks for any number of cuisines which, given the global distribution of purchasing power, seemed unlikely candidates for careful documentation in America. To name a few: Mouneh, on Lebanese preserving traditions, The Food of Northern Thailand, on the foodways of one of the most remote portions of Southeast Asia,  and Jia!, about the cooking of the Teochew diaspora. 

The book that gave rise to this observation, The Way of Kueh, was actually not written for an American audience. It’s by a Singaporean author, Christopher Tan, and published in Singapore for the regional market (though it can be found stateside, and is highly recommended). 

Kueh are the pastries of Southeast Asia, in particular Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. They fulfill the same function as pastries in that they are often sweet, and almost always eaten as dessert, snacks, or breakfast. However, most are based on starches rather than wheat flour, and cooked by methods other than baking. 

Like most food from that part of the world, kueh are incredibly labor-intensive to make. Making them was usually a communal activity, undertaken together by extended families, civic groups, or entire villages – precisely the kind of community activity that doesn’t fit contemporary urban habits. Some bakeries and hawker stalls make them, but hawkers of kueh, perhaps even more than other hawkers, find it hard to charge enough to make a living. All in all, they are a culinary tradition under threat.

So it’s wonderful to see these recipes recorded by a professional cookbook author. Writing about cooking in a way that other people can follow is a specific skill. Tan provides metric measurements for every recipe, along with vital background on ingredients and basic techniques like soaking and frying starches. 

I suspect most people who have tried to learn a kueh recipe from their grandmother, as nearly every cook in Singapore has, will find this a great relief. My grandma, as nearly every grandma in Singapore does, measured in rice bowls and teacups and quantities like “not too much.” Once, when I asked which kind of rice flour to use, I was told “the Thai kind with the two elephants on the package.” I was in the US at the time, and the only rice flours I could find had packaging with either three elephants, or no elephants at all. Things were done “until it feels right,” and of course, when I was making the kueh with her, things would feel right, and when I tried to replicate the process, things would feel very, very wrong. 

Tan is externalizing the knowledge of people like my grandma, living repositories of cultural capital. Books can be much longer-lived than people, and you can consult them anytime without feeling like a burden. This book is hugely empowering – there are generations of cooks in Singapore who feel cut off from their traditions, and here it is, specified down to the gram and illustrated with step-by-step photos. 

But I also found myself asking, as I read, whether these recipes should be expressed as gram weights at all. Somewhere in my notebooks is my grandma’s recipe for ang ku kueh dough. I remember the afternoon we spent making them. I had her put her mixing basin on a scale so I could record the weight of every ingredient. She laughed.

I think she held her recipes in her head, not as sets of steps and quantities, but as sets of sensations and results (I think most experienced cooks do, whether or not they would put it in these words). My grandma knew how the dough should feel when she was done, and how quickly it should firm as she kneaded and ergo, how high the rice flour should mound in the basin. That ability to feel her way to the end product is what she was trying to pass on.* Of course, “knowing how it feels” isn’t something we can easily transmit from person to person, not without brain wiring or skillsofts or other things that take us deep into cyberpunk territory.

The more detailed a recipe, the more mechanistic it seems. The process photos in The Way of Kueh remind me both of Jacques Pepin’s photos of French technique and of the assembly photos found in many chain restaurants. The more you specify, the more consistent you might expect the results to be, and the less the cook should matter. The way this discourse plays out when it comes to the value we place on cooking is telling. Zoom all the way out, and the monolithic skill of “cooking” seems simple and commonplace – there are so many people who know how to cook! Zoom all the way in, and the component tasks seem mechanical and replicable to the point where anyone could do it, so you may as well hire minimum wage labor and have them make it look like the photo, which many chains actually do. Either framing presents cooking as “unskilled”, low value labor.

That unsystematic combination of instinct, reflex, and handfeel that actually makes cooking a skill, that made my grandma the cook she was, is something we cannot write about except in elliptical terms, judge except by subjective experience, or quantify at all. It’s as though we don’t know how to make it matter to society precisely because we don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. 

A couple of weeks ago, I did something that I have never done before. I made some kueh, on my own, from start to finish. I made koo chai kueh, a savory kueh of garlic chives wrapped in a rice flour skin (you can find these in dim sum restaurants in the US). I followed Tan’s recipe to the gram. The results were recognizable. I ate my grandma’s koo chai kueh by the hillock when I was growing up, and these were close enough that I would have eaten these by the hillock too. 

My mother asked to see the recipe I’d used (the one in her notebook is measured in rice bowls too) and then derided it when I showed her the measurements. The dough was like the kind they made in factories, she said, dominated by tapioca starch rather than rice flour to make it easier to handle. The tapioca starch made the skin translucent and elastic, whereas my grandma’s were opaque white, with bounce and a clean bite. There is something glorious about having your kueh critiqued from ten thousand miles away, and also something essential.

Recipes should be authoritative, because the weight of research and the cook’s point of view should yield a clear set of instructions with a particular, replicable outcome. Precisely for this reason, they’re static records of the dynamic phenomena which we call dishes. 

One of the things that made my grandma the cook she was is that she made the same kueh over and over. Her charcoal stove was replaced by gas, she moved from a shophouse to a skyscraper, her family grew and shrank and grew again, and it is simultaneously true that her kueh were always the same, changed from batch to batch, and evolved over her lifetime. And just as integral was the act of eating, the discovery of small difference from batch to batch, and the delighting in that variation. How could this process be measured except in imprecise quantities, and what good are imprecise quantities to a cook several oceans away? We have no choice but to measure all this out in grams, no way to document it but photos of kueh being wrapped – nothing but the hope that someone will cook a dish again. 

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*There is more than a passing resemblance here to the teaching and transmission of martial arts. If you are ever very, very bored, ask me about this.

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This is let them eat cake, a sort-of-maybe-bi-weekly essay about food systems (and also, food). I write about these things because I’ve worked in food for over a decade, mostly as a chef, and am writing a book about how deeply fucked up, and how deeply worthwhile, this whole enterprise of feeding people is. Also, writing is cheaper than therapy.

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best,

tw