SINGAPORE – The buah keluak nut, which I name the black diamond of Peranakan cooking, evokes in me emotions of awe and admiration.
Its appropriate preparation and cooking had been the gold customary of the culinary expertise of a Peranakan maiden of the old fashioned. If she didn’t crack the shell proper and broke it as a substitute of crafting a easy, spherical opening simply giant sufficient to insert a teaspoon, she was thought of unfit for marriage. This and pounding the flesh proper had been the litmus assessments of her cooking expertise.
By the point I turned up on the scene in 1949, World Struggle II had modified that world and ladies like my mom had been blazing different trails of success.
My mom Nancy Oon neither cooked nor sewed. A Raffles Ladies’ Faculty alumna, she possessed shorthand expertise of 180 phrases a minute. This landed her a quick stint as secretary to Mr David Marshall when he was Chief Minister of Singapore within the Nineteen Fifties.
Not having had the benefit of piano or different classes of an inventive nature, she enthusiastically enrolled me for each sort in fact attainable – piano, ballet, singing, Balinese dancing, jazz – the whole lot however cooking.
Though I used to be introduced up on the brink of the ladies’s liberation motion, I made a decision to play contrarian by behaving like a basic Nonya lady, entertaining the lads of the family – particularly my father Oon Beng Quickly – with meals and singing on the piano after dinner.
My determination happened after we lived for a number of months with my grand-uncle Khoo Heng Loon and his spouse Nanny Zecha, so famed for her culinary expertise that the Chilly Storage grocery store on the finish of Emerald Hill Highway ordered two freshly baked kueh lapis from her every single day.
Hooked, I requested Auntie Nanny to show me the best way to make kueh and Indonesian dishes corresponding to daging chabek and ayam goreng.
From my father’s sisters, primarily my aunt Nona Bong, I learnt the entire repertoire of Singapore Nonya cooking, all whereas I used to be 16 to 18.
Rising up through the girls’s liberation motion, it was thought of old-fashioned and demeaning for girls of schooling who had “burned the bra” to cook dinner. The wok and ladle had been thrown out of a considering lady’s arsenal as they had been thought of symbols of bondage to the patriarchy.
This explains why, in my era, my concentrate on cooking and the female arts made me uncommon.
In October 1980, I used to be inducted in France as a Noble Dame of the Grand Order of Rocamadour du Diamant Noir – the Black Diamond of Perigord, an elusive black truffle that’s buried underneath the earth and must be sniffed out by pigs or canine.
The reverence by which the French maintain nature’s items of the harvest taught me to treasure our personal buah keluak.
Peranakans know that the buah keluak tree and its nuts are toxic and the nuts must be buried in ash for 40 days to take away the toxins. When the nuts are unearthed, the entire shell and flesh can have turned black.
