Cooking with Three Generations
My grandmother’s kitchen has always been the busiest place in her house and today, even with more than half of its original occupants gone, it still bustles with energy and activity that one might think would only be reserved for the festive season or a visit from 10 army battalions, demanding to be fed by sundown.
I had taken my grandmother out earlier in the day to buy a few groceries and supplies at the local hypermarket. Over seventy years old and riddled with joint pains, she had walked at a crawling, snail-like pace and looked at risk of collapsing somewhere between the canned goods and dry goods aisle.
But there was something about being in her own kitchen that gave her endless reserves of energy. She was barking orders, darting from one end to another, mashing bananas with the kind of force and strength that would rival that of Xena the Warrior Princess. At her command was a well-oiled army consisting of her new domestic helper, my mom, and my mom’s domestic helper. And I, I was the trumpet player they sometimes brought along to stand around and make a lot of noise.
I would normally avoid my grandmother’s kitchen while she was working partly for fear of disrupting her battle plans (my mother claims that everything I touch turns to mess and I’d do best to stay away. She calls me the “Kitchen-Molester”) but mostly because I’m just lazy and would rather be sprawled on the living room floor, bitching about the heat and boredom and how we should outfit my grandmother’s house with air-conditioning, ASTRO and broadband internet connection. That is usually when my mother will make some kind of snide reference to me being a princess (“Tuan Puteri Diraja Pulau Pinang” – the fact that Pulau Pinang has no royal family only adds to the sarcasm). If I still insist on making no effort to conceal my domestic uselessness and laziness by disappearing out of sight, then my mother will proceed by comparing me to a beached whale and complain to her mother that she doesn’t know what she did to deserve daughters like this. She claims she was always a good daughter. My grandmother never gives any kind of response to this comment. Perhaps, she begs to differ.
Today though, was different. Today, this princess’ banishment from the Exalted Kingdom of Kitchens had been lifted and I was actually invited as an observer which meant that I got in everyone’s way by just standing around like a structurally redundant pillar in a crowded shopping mall. Among other things, my grandmother was making two traditional Malay desserts, Pengat Pisang and Lepat Pisang both of which I enjoy eating, clueless about preparing and tend to confuse the names of the two dishes with eachother.
“Ah tu lah, pasal nak makan pandai, nak masak tak tahu. This is your opportunity to learn,” said my mother.
“Wait, which one is the pengat and which one is the lepat again?” I asked.
Both my mother and my grandmother looked disappointed at my confusion which they had mistaken for ignorance. They pointed to the thingie wrapped in banana leaf in the steamer, “Lepat.” The creamy, stew-like thing boiling in the pot was “Pengat tapi orang Utara panggil ni Serawa”. I nodded, unwrapped a Lepat and swallowed almost the entire thing in one go.
My grandmother asked how is it that I managed to survive on my own in
(We had a pot-luck picnic for my college’s inter-cultural communications class once, where everyone was encouraged to bring a dish that reflected their own culture. I was the dolt that ended up bringing bottles of Coke. I came up with some sham excuse about being the child of Globalization, Capitalism and American Imperialism through soft-power and what better represents all this than Coke? Truth was, I was cheap, lazy and had forgotten all about the event until 10 minutes before and Coke was readily available at the 7-Eleven on the way. The Danish exchange students were smart enough to bring Carlsberg beer, at least the brand’s Danish, just like them. Wait, is Carlsberg Danish?)
My mother assigned me the task of mashing some bananas for the Lepat. Instead of shirking away from work like I usually do, I took it as a good sign that I was no longer Marie Antoinette, worthy of only eating cake and a trip to the guillotine and was now a proud member of the working plebs that will one day sick and tire of making cakes. I mashed the bananas as if they were the heads of all the people that had gotten on my nerves this past week – with much enthusiasm.
“You’re not doing it right!” yelled my mother. She grabbed the bowl of half-mashed bananas from me and nudged me to the side. “This is how you do it,” she said and mash, mash, mash, she went in what seemed to me, exactly the same way I mashed it. Is there really a proper way to mash things? Mashing is mashing, no?
Okay, okay, I nodded and tried to grab the bowl back from her. “Nevermind,” she said, moving away, “Faster if I do it myself.”
Fine, I’ll keep my incompetence to myself. I’ll go back to performing my beached whale act on the living room floor. As I walked out of the kitchen in a bit of a princess-y huff, hurt pride and all, grabbing a cooked lepat on the way, I hear my grandmother sharply reprimand my mother for not mashing the bananas in this mythical
My mother gave me the look she always gave me when she wanted to say, “Look how nice I am as compared to my mother.”
All I could say was, Ha-Ha….Ha-Ha….Hahahahahahaa.
