Imaginary Dinner Party Menu COURSE: IKAN KURAU 1. Distaste (Darren Wan) COURSE: DREAM FOODS 2. Lamination (Jill J. Tan) 3. Charred Lemon (Damanpreet Pelia) COURSE: FIG & FIGGED 4. Metamorphosis (Darren Wan) 5. ginger in case of turbulence (Aanchal Saraf) 6. [untitled] (Nurulhuda Arslan) 7. anew (Jill J. Tan) COURSE: FAMILY RECIPES 8. Lessons with Che Nom (Nurulhuda Arslan) 9. yours truly (Irene Hsu) 10. bitterness (Madeleine Han)
Art and Illustrations cooked up by Jill J. Tan
ISSUE 2 - contributors note little stud is a publication of writings and close encounters We grew out of wanting a space to think without the pressure of completion, to allow our attention to meander, and to spout shout sing, grounded in a community of voices This zine was compiled as part of an event little stud hosted at the 2020 Singapore Writers Festival, titled Imaginary Tasting Menu Imaginary Dinner Party was conceived through dreams of food and for the food of our dreams Over the summer, finding ourselves scattered through space, we gathered together at a digital imagined dinner party We each brought a dish we dreamed to make and share And in the fall, we gathered to flash write over several weeks Three of our contributors met in Singapore for writing sessions, at the working space of a nascent urban farm that used to be a school, but now houses silkie chickens and other delightful growing things We brought two ingredients of fig and threadfin, and read and wrote to each other over several weeks Other than our flash writing, our time together also resulted in various attempts at cooking with figs, including a beautiful in prep but disastrous lavender honey ice cream with a fig swirl, and a more successful fig tart Although all of us have ties to threadfin, we haven t yet attempted to cook it Maybe soon Four of us met over Zoom across Turtle Island during a time of unending anti Black violence, xenophobic terror, and a global resurrection of a fascism that never left Flash writing became our space of accountability when surrounded by overlapping crises Together, we typed, edited, and fermented We dissolved and burst into laughter and into one another s words, visions, and hopes for a different world ine littlestud ine tumblr com instagram littlestud ine twitter: littlestud ine email littlestud ine gmail com
IKAN KURAU /
马 鱼(Ma
yau yu) /
午鱼 (Ngor
he) / Threadfin
Distaste Darren Wan It was a ritual I d come to dread Whenever I would see fish on the dining table sometimes a fried pomfret, but often a steamed fish head decked out with coriander, scallions, and ginger, and doused in soy sauce I would know I would not get to eat it Instead, I d have to wait for my grandmother to prepare a steamed fillet of ma yau yu that only I was allowed to consume At first I was smugly delighted at having my own fish that no one else could so much as touch, a piece of my granny s munificence that only I knew Over time, though, I realized I wanted an out It was not only that I wanted to try the bonier, more gelatinous, more richly seasoned fish that the adults would polish off till all but a skeletal frame remained It was that my granny otherwise a competent cook unfailingly overcooked ma yau yu When steaming the adults fish head, she would put my fillet in the same wok and cook it for the same amount of time despite the fact that it was more delicate and often less than half the fish head s thickness Until now, I still don t understand how she didn t notice how dry every fillet was, when its exterior was always caked in white coagulated protein gunk, an unmistakable sign of overcooking She would lightly dress it with soy sauce, but it was never enough to mask its unpalatable firmness When I was maybe seven or eight, I started asking why I couldn t eat from the adults fish Ma yau yu, it was explained to me, is more expensive, so it must be more nutritious More importantly, its flesh always comes cleanly off the bone If I ate from the main fish, I would inevitably choke on one of its many bones, which takes skill to discern and separate from flesh when chewing Whenever I brought up the topic of separate fish dishes at dinner, my granny never failed to tell me this tale of how one of my uncles once accidentally ate a huge fish
bone, and swallowed a lump of rice in a bid to dislodge it from his throat The bone pierced his esophagus and was visible through his neck Because I disliked this uncle of mine, I always made sure to cast aspersions on the ma yau yu when it showed up at the dinner table so my granny would regale me with one of my favorite apocryphal family stories At some point I must ve realized that my granny never thought to cook ma yau yu differently Part of it was that a fish as tender and flaky was not accessible to her growing up, so she simply didn t realize that it was unlike other kinds of fish she was accustomed to cooking But it was also that its price made its value self evident, no matter how it was prepared It s more expensive, so it must be more nutritious
*** It s been four years since my granny stopped cooking, and two years since she stopped communicating verbally When relatives and friends visit her, they are obsessed with trying to decipher in her something that opens up the possibility of mutual understanding Do you think she can understand me they ask Do you think she wants me to keep talking What is she trying to say After seeing me scowl at this relentless line of questioning, most of her regular visitors know better than to ask these questions in my presence This demand for
something intelligible to latch on to frustrates me why is the onus on my granny to produce signs that can be readily understood Yet, in my own way, I do something similar all the time I search for signs in her subtle movements or her sounds that resemble some manifestation of the will As my granny gains nutrition through her feeding tube, her mouth is parched of flavor From time to time, we feed her drops of liquid that might excite her palate: honey, orange juice, soy sauce, melted ice cream Her response when she tastes these foods has always been the same Reflexively, her face puckers, no matter the flavor Before, we used to ask her to open her mouth if she wanted to taste something, which would give us a clear indication as to whether she wanted to eat or not Now, though, she s no longer able to respond as effectively, so a family discussion always ensues: how can we know if she wants to experience flavor at that particular moment or not We resort to various methods, like asking her to blink as a way to respond to a yes no question in the affirmative But how can we ever be sure of the reliability of such methods in making sense of the desires of someone who doesn t have adequate control over her body s muscular functions And even so, because her face always puckers upon consumption understandably so because of the persistent lack of sensory stimulation on her tongue how can we ascertain something that looks like enjoyment For a while, we stopped feeding her these drops of flavor in response to the difficulty of finding something we could unambiguously construe as assent But we noticed, too, that when we would consume strong smelling foods near her, her eyes would widen, wakeful The guilt that I started to feel, of being able to experience flavor whenever I wanted, made me rethink how I made sense of the terms by which my granny communicated her desire to eat
We ve started feeding her again, and in response, her face always crumples up tightly as she cautiously moves the drops of liquid around her tongue I ve stopped trying to attach a singular meaning to each sign Sometimes, I think I discern pleasure Other times, it seems to be something more banal like relief, or even an unwelcome reminder of experiences to which she no longer has access But I can only reciprocate the only way I know how, and offer her some simulacrum of taste
dream foods
Lamina i n Jill J. Tan
Feverishly I would dream of food and it would be all texture, all color, and no taste Enter: a needle pushing against soft ello alls Is this the processual probe of an endoscope There s not enough red No the alls are cake dr sponge to hich I am delivering moisture The s ringe t ists ildl more like an unregulated garden hose might than the precise applicator at m disposal I am in danger of e ceeding the bounds of the cake I don t even kno hat shape it is from the inside and one performs radial manoeuvres ver differentl hen orienting ithin a circular square or rectangular base There s no risk of flooding the structure ith such a thin needle but I am so afraid of breaching the crust On the most forceful jab from the center I ake ith a start
On yet another night: It makes ungodl little sense to slice a lotus root hen it has alread been coated in chilli oil and et Nor should I stick m finger through one of the holes for grip reall M hands hold firm on first grasp but slip on the second slice Blood trickles beneath the lotus root on the cutting board it is a different shade of red from the bright orange red of the oil I s irl the slice of lotus root in the mi ture until the reds blend I go to dr fr the lotus and it hisses as it hits the pan I feel the spatter on m face and
I rub my fingers between my cheek and pillow and my cheek is oil free, cool and dry, though my body is aflush As before, I d woken up, deep in the middle of making a dish, never reaching consumption In all these dreams I had about food, not once did I eat *** I couldn t taste and all I could think was: one day I d wanted to make writing my food blog my living One day, maybe, I could go from being overcome with the pleasure of eating to rendering the experience visceral on the page except now maybe not ever When I decided I wanted to take seriously this business of writing about food, and oddly being a decent cook helped not at all but voraciously watching YouTube cooking hosts did a little , I d tried to train my palate and my mode of attention to flavors familiar and not I overspent on dining out and called it an investment The effortful nature of trying to break down and make discernable kept transcendence, much less its translation, out of my reach Still I thought I might get better I continued to taste, take notes, taste and maybe I did, though I could not tell if I was improving in pen or tongue, or possibly learning less to think of these processes as binary Another dream: I am laminating croissants and the butter is leaking and leaking and the folds are disappearing into the heat and all the callouses and crevices of e perience I had developed are melting do n into a uniform slab I am past the point of pausing for refrigeration I press harder add more solid cold butter but m hands are hot and the butter turns to liquid and I am angr at the eather and angr at m hands angr that I keep pressing pressing on laminating because this is ho ou make croissants this is ho I have al a s made them
Coming back into my body on my bed, I looked down to see my palms slick not with butter, just sweat I tried to eat a croissant that day Even as richness coated my mouth and I felt the layers flake, I was abraded by how much the aroma of butteriness eluded me and how the appeal of a baked good is otherwise lost Were I to write: here was dry crispiness with a slick seepage some un nuanced saltiness The possibility that I might lose my sense of taste more permanently chilled To lose taste seemed like nothing compared to what else was at stake: I hadn t been able to walk for more than five minutes without completely running out of breath So why is it that I thought most about losing taste and smell when I could not breathe As if the return of pleasure might make the last days, were they to come, liveable
*** I read that when you are dying, you lose your sense of hearing and touch last you should keep talking to, keep holding someone in their last days and hours They will hear you as if in a dream state By then, vision will have been lost, and speech before it Thirst and hunger are the first to go But hunger is not taste Taste I will have lost, taste I have lost, even before When I hunger no more, I will crave the last flood of flavor that is never to come I salivate from what I knew as wanting when my body makes no more demands I want to taste what is to be my last meal I realize, many never get to ***
I tear open the cheese packet, sprinkling some of the powder on the counter top in my haste Ravenous at midnight and I forgot to boil the water first I fill and shove a pot onto the stovetop Instant noodles have a mercurial point between springy and soggy I have to keep biting at the ends like a savage until al dente is achieved In anticipation I test a sample strand much too early Again Again The
noodles are uncooked uncooked I keep tasting shoving ends and the jab at the roof of m mouth A bad angle and no a small ound I turn the heat up and jostle the pan and ater hot but still not boiling sloshes onto m arm and is that heat that rolls over me a burn or is it the fever returning I cut open the packet of chilli paste, pour out the half amount that usually suffices for me over the cheese powder at the base of the bowl My hand continues to tip the foil packet It has been over six weeks since I last could taste Spiciness is not a reception of flavor It is a registering of pain signals, but I ll take it I just want so much to be overwhelmed, just need to wake, to shock I squeeze the packet dry with greater force than necessary, and stir to make a sauce Noodles mixed in, twirled onto a spoon I eat
Charred lemon Damanpreet Pelia 1 In the first weeks of the pandemic, I made endless pots of beans inspired by Carla Lalli Music s recipe for brothy beans that I was first introduced to through Bon Appétit s now crumbling cinematic universe It s hard not to be swept up in Carla s admiration for this elegant preparation of beans, which she learned from the Brooklyn chef Patch Troffer A master of the nonchalance carefully cultivated in the popular Bon Appétit YouTube videos, Carla smashes garlic cloves, lovingly chops herbs, generously sprinkles coarse salt and drizzles olive oil into the Dutch oven as she repeatedly relishes in her love for beans She also carefully chars two lemon halves before adding them to the pot, a technique I was immediately taken with and had intended to repeat since I first saw the video in the months prior to the pandemic Once the pandemic began for me in earnest a week after the United States had begun to shut down, after I completed a long journey back from Panjab, where I meant to do archival research that never quite happened I immediately busied myself with the task of recreating and perfecting Carla s beans Everyone I spoke to over those early frenzied Zoom calls heard about the wonders of the beans, and the magic of the charred lemon
2 The intensified acid of the charred lemon enlivens the beans and the herbs, and, like Marcela Hazan s tomato sauce onion, is meant to be removed from the pot before the beans are served At first, I discarded the lemon without giving it second thought During my third or fourth attempt at the beans, however, I decided to bite into it, and I realized that it is the best part of the recipe it offers the intense pleasure of a preserved lemon without the month long wait When I made the beans for my family, many months after I had been making them just for myself, I thinly sliced the lemon and returned it to the pot Along with a hit of rice vinegar, the lemon offered roundness to the beans, if perhaps overwhelming them it was as if one were biting into a lemon with dramatically amplified flavors, the garlic, olive oil, and cilantro heightening its herbiness and tamping its acidity
3 Since the pandemic began I ve been tinkering with the pot of beans, and I ve been tinkering with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and I ve been tinkering with the famous Ne York Times no knead bread All of these recipes have differently gone viral, and all of them require time They are slow recipes that require soaks at least twelve hours for the beans , rests twenty four hours in the fridge for the cookie dough , and fermentations anywhere from a day to two days for the bread They are recipes that stretch across multiple days in a time when the days blur together and everyday I m surprised by how little work gets done when the world is on fire
4 I make these slow things in a time when history seems to have sped up Marxists teach us that this uneven temporality is precisely characteristic of history that there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen On Twitter, this has been captured by tweet after tweet bemoaning 2020, which watches over us as everything burns 2020 is unprecedented and unrelenting, throwing punch after punch on an hourly basis But in my kitchen things have slowed down The arrival of Zoom classes meant no longer needing to prepare the week s meals on Sundays or eat quick lunches between
meetings Instead, I started to soak beans in saltwater brines, age cookie dough in the fridge, and ferment bread dough over two or three days 5 Early in the pandemic, some time in March or April, I watched videos of Jacques Pépin on YouTube before bed, and that night I dreamed that I was braising chicken thighs with dandelion greens and the juice from an orange I garnished the braise with pomegranate seeds I became obsessed with the idea of making the dish in real life I bought the requisite ingredients during my first in person trip to a grocery store since the pandemic began since before Panjab and braised the chicken and dandelion greens with the orange juice and some sweated out onions, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and good mustard The sweetness of the orange and the acidity of the vinegar balanced the bitter dandelion greens, and crispy roasted potatoes soaked up the braising liquid
6 Historical contradictions develop over time, in the violence of the everyday, over the course of the catastrophic normal Revolutionary tendencies perhaps the instinctual creative capacities of the people emerge over the long course of history In CLR James s The Black Jacobins, the enslaved San Domingo masses begin their revolution instinctually, as they labor on Haiti s sugar plantation factories The instincts of the masses propel history
Contradictions accumulate and eventually they explode in revolution, which brings new tendencies, new worlds, and new futures the futures that are dreamt of after watching Jacques Pépin videos during yet another bout of insomnia, or maybe those that are dreamt up over Zoom, under the gaze of the neoliberal university Relation remains a possibility even in these fast times it becomes an urgent necessity as a new world feels closer When our dream worlds appear on the stage of history they speed history onward and necessitate incredulous memes about a relentless 2020, the explosion that might lead us to slower times
FIG
Fig 1 Nurul had a dream about tau huay and fig, so Darren, Nurul, and Jill wrote about around figs Tau huay is a soy beancurd pudding
Me am h i Darren Wan For most of my life I d never tasted fresh figs, mostly because I assumed that they would taste as mediocre as dried ones I remember the first time I had a bite, expecting to be disappointed, only to be puzzled How could a fresh fig and a dried fig be the same fruit The fresh version was refreshing and yielded to my bite in a satisfying way, while dried figs are often sickly sweet, their texture either rubbery which is okay or crunchy which is horrible How could anyone think to dehydrate a fruit, only to ruin its taste and texture My understanding of dehydration was conditioned by my granny s habit of drying mandarin orange peel in the sun which made something otherwise inedible edible, something otherwise acrid tart which as a process seemed categorically different from that of fig dehydration, where it seemed to engender intensification rather than a change of state In hindsight, the dehydration of the fig, like that of other fruits grown in non tropical regions, is probably linked to the exigency of climatic seasonality, something to which I had little access then Nonetheless, I found the gap between fresh and dried hard to stomach Is it that water helps smooth out the rough edges of sweetness Or is it that water conducts flavour, the same way metal conducts electricity
FIGGING INTERLUDE
ginger in case of turbulence aanchal saraf At the beginning, I had a difficult time finding ginger anywhere My aunt drove down to check on me, asking if she could bring me any food I relayed the absence of ginger in my life, and she echoed its lack, wondering who in white Connecticut was buying up all the ginger in the first place Nonetheless, when she came up to my doorstep, there was a gnarled and giant root nestled amid frozen rotis and kachoris Soon after my aunt stopped by, my partner ran into a small market to grab a lemon, and exited with both a lemon and a surprise for me Another ginger root! A good friend, a few days later, texted me to come outside He too held a ginger root in his hands, and handed it to me Was ginger gifting a kind of love language Suddenly, I had too much to reasonably get through without careful intervention I set aside an hour on a Sunday morning to dutifully peel all three roots with a spoon, and crammed them into a gallon ziploc bag I pushed the bag into my tiny freezer, between a bottle of unfinished tequila from a year ago, and a soup I had made when it was colder and was now waiting until autumn to revisit I thought I had sealed it tightly, but ice crystals around root edges begged to differ Ginger is medicinal, ayurveda says, doctors agree, your local bikram yoga spot assures This fucking Hindutva whatsapp meme says chew on ginger and turmeric and your Covid will be cured The thing is, though, people are dying because of ginger Keralan ginger farmers Covid, it s literally happening right now Farmers in India call it a risky business I mean, it s all risky business, all of this I have so much ginger now, but it s not working Love coming at me from all sides, and I feel gross It turns out ginger can t fix the mess we re in Maybe medicine only works when it s bitter, and not in a fun way either see: melons And ginger tastes so good, after all
I break off a nub and grate it into my morning chai, careful to wait until the milk is hot, so that the zingipain in my ginger doesn t immediately curdle it I learn about why this happens, when I am careless enough, or impatient enough, or reckless enough to not wait The milk curdled, and I looked at it like it was a betrayal My mama always said to wait or the milk would burst She always takes ginger ale on the airplane, she gets so nauseous It helps, she says Apparently, that s pseudoscience I find myself asking for the same For dishes that require bigger pieces, I let a broken off piece defrost just a little on the counter, before slicing it into long shards But mostly, I grate Into tea, into a hot pan with onion and garlic already browning Maybe if I was feeling vulnerable, I d share how chhonk is the basis of so much Indian cooking, but you already read that New Yorker article, and I m tired of explaining myself
I took a bookmaking class, and we started the semester with linocuts I forget what the theme options were, but someone suggested home and I hated that theme but it won anyway Immigrants writing about home is always so annoying I didn t know what to do, honestly, so I cut ginger and clove and cardamom into the linoleum And years later, I cut them into my skin lol jk, it was a tattoo, but doesn t that sound intense I say it s because I feel like I ve made home collectively when I ve made someone chai, when they ve had my chai because m chai is ver good I dunno if that s actually what home feels like But then again, I brought my copper chai pot with me into this temporary home to make it feel less temporary But there I go again, an immigrant writing about home I ll stop
I m unhappy with how my ginger tattoo looks, sometimes It s this ghostly thing I asked for shoots to be bursting out of the root itself, with leaves and wildness Ginger plants don t really have stems, even, just tightly wound leaves called pseudostems The artist superimposed the root onto the stems, which look woody and not pseudo at all, except that they re mysteriously fainter Like he thought pseudo meant they should be in the middle of disappearing, instead of preparing to unfurl Ginger is a warming spice, like cinnamon My mama told me not to have too much in the summer or I ll break out I want to say, you know ma, some people get fucked in the ass with ginger year round, and they don t have acne, I think It s called figging, isn t that funny Fig as fruit and fig as verb that means to stick ginger up your ass or the ass of another Of course, I don t say that You can t really be your whole self with your parents Anyway, I had plenty of ginger this summer and my skin looks just fine Better than fine I ve been feeling trapped, these days A cafe I love closed permanently during the pandemic Not to make this about me, but this is so sad Their honey ginger lemon tea was so good because it was soooooooooooooooooo gingery It made me feel better just to drink it, but as we ve established, it s sweet and peppery and perfect No bitterness means I m still fucked Figged I love the so much of ginger When lesser cooks say be careful! Don t let it overpower! Ginger says fuck you! There s a difference too, in ginger as foundation versus supplement In chhonk versus sweetener Empire likes ginger best when it s a hint of, just a tad, go easy on me Not when it s gloriously stinking up your kitchen and you have to shut the door to your closet or your woolens will all smell of mustard oil in perpetuity I have no respect for precision, a teaspoon is only a teaspoon because we say it is Ginger is best measured by the knuckle of my thumb, or andaaz, or more is more Paul Hollywood s assessment of your too much ginger gingerbread isn t personal, it s just colonialism
Speaking of and when are we not speaking of , this brings me to the topic of work life balance Ginger as self help Self soothe when I worry about the seemingly inescapable I worry about my work often I worry about empire gorging on the Pacific until there s nothing left I worry about how my writing is doing very little to change that I worry about how desperately I want such basic, absurdly simple things for this world I love, like housing and food and joy and sun, so much it gives me heartburn This is what I get for worrying in the summertime Hawaii exports the majority of its ginger to the US mainland, did you know It s supposedly better than foreign ginger because of its smooth skin and plump hands But the ginger being grown is Chinese, and Hawaii is an illegally occupied kingdom, so that sentence doesn t make any sense Except, maybe, that thing about plump hands That sounds cute In Hilo, on the Big Island, there is a street lined with imported Banyan trees and invasive mongoose It disoriented me, so I grasped wildly at what I thought I knew There, I mistook recognition for solidarity I saw some things I could call Indian in origin, and thought it was enough to cobble together a politics Thought seeing myself in something was how I built a better world for us both I hope I ve grown since then But so too has my sense of the struggle How do you give yourself to something, when everything is too much and there s not enough of you to go around
Once, I ate so much pickled ginger that I threw up What a relief
Nurulhuda Arslan i Deflate the round earth let it resume its four corners then The unbeing bursts into consciousness and understanding sprouts fists, kicks and rails at the womb till it escapes only to decry the bars of sunlight It hurts to be ii Inside me is a field of mimosas furled tightly sleeping I say, Let them sleep and look out at the oncoming storm heralded by the thunderous ovation of raindrops fearful of losing their place in the sky Inside me the mimosas are sleeping Watch them sway to the strains of the rain song You do not wake them but I throb
iii Crack! The river thrashes dredging echoes of thirst that claw up clay walls Splintered I am swallowed first You a slick skinned stroke behind Pulled under pulled along we are dashed again and again on the rocks till soil slurry suckles us to silence iv Cradled in the arms of the fig tree I evade the noon light and revel in the feast before The fruits yield but my delight is fleeting The heaps of figs rot quicker than i can reap
an ew
Jill J. Tan
Today is the day everything dances Clouds merging at their fissures slow two to one becoming agonizing to watch Moths chasing each other till their wings beat in overlap Premature harvest in dearth of gladness Scoop wailing flesh into hemp sling and feel milk solids drip onto the back of your brand new shirt Soap stir of murky white precise scent and bubbling clean, pruning palms and foot soles Don t let the water get in her eyes White meat of a custard apple, half is for her Tease apart cloudy flesh and pinch out the pips, spoon to smallest lips She swallows
Fig 2 Custard base for lavender honey ice cream with fig swirl by Nurul and Jill and our friend Mary
Fig 3 Disastrous lavender honey ice cream with fig swirl that looked like a frozen lake and proved inedible
Fig 4 Consolation 1: flower milk made with the dregs of lavender and blue pea
Fig 5 Consolation 2: Leftover fig jam on toast
Fig 6 Poached fig tarts
KITCHEN ISLAND DEMONSTRATION (OR, FAMILY RECIPES)
Lessons with Che Nom Nurulhuda Arslan Hi semua, the now familiar greeting is a warm embrace in the kitchen where my mother and I stand shoulder to shoulder staring at a full screen window watching dollops of creamed corn drizzle in slow motion onto the white centre of a crisp crepe Today Che Nom will teach us how to make apam balik
Six days into circuit breaker, and I was ready to risk my mother s scrutiny and judgement, if only to satisfy my craving for yachaejeon, a medley of vegetables turned pancake paired with the simplest yet scrumptious dipping sauce It was impossible to cook at home without my mother the softest sigh from the open fridge would conjure her and she would take over Cooking with my mother has all the energy of a restaurant kitchen falling behind on their tickets during a busy lunch service a rush of sequences dictated by a frenetic chef, quick to anger I hated it Yet, something about being stuck at home stirred a reckless appetite for novelty and nourishment I proceeded to the kitchen, phone in hand, recipe video on pause Entering, I noticed two things: 1 My mother sitting at the island watching a cooking video Calm Attentive 2 A soothing voice explaining the signs that indicate the fried sambal has reached the crucial pecah minyak stage When she spotted me, she gestured at the video, embarrassed Nobody ever taught me this, she said Do you… Do you want to learn with me
To make apam balik, my mother and I first roast the peanuts in a dry pan until their pink skins turn deep red She says, Your great grandmother grew peanuts when we lived in the barracks They were so delicious, I insisted on harvesting all of them and was sunburned to my scalp Giggling at the memory, we left the peanuts on the hot pan too long Some peanuts end up with black bottoms but Che Nom assures us it is alright Pressing the peanuts between our fingers, we
will slip them from their charred skins and grind them into a bronze crumble We prepare batter in a blender for the first time Learn to pour in our liquid before the flour so it doesn t get trapped beneath the blender blades Then we run the batter through a sieve The batter is ready I ladle it onto the hot surface of the pan My mother tilts the pan until the batter forms a full moon Together, we sprinkle on sugar and the peanut crumble Finish with dollops of creamed corn When the bottom of the apam balik is golden brown, my mother folds it in half and transfers it onto a plate I cut it into two equal pieces Gleefully we tuck in, burning our mouths on the molten filling I would do this again with my mother
yours truly irene hsu
bitterness madeleine han in the fourth grade a knot grew in my stomach, tugging one, two, three in math class, it held me down by my center, in english, history, biology in p e i ran a mile it showed up as one of the slowest the teacher had ever seen the doctors said it was ice cream, cheese, meat all the things i loved to eat every night for dinner i asked my mom if she could please make me the goopiest carbonara dairy epic of a dish, like the one they had at swiss chalet a picky eater: one who refuses to consume what is not pleasurable a ell child eats ell, our family cautioned my mother you could say i was unwell when i visited them for breakfast, my cousins told me i d ask for a bosok bar, a popsicle of chilled cider and jewel like sugar bits you could say i was questing to find out how much i could have of a good thing once i ingested so much jewelry in one go, i couldn t leave my bed for a whole afternoon i felt the knot freeze into a bitter seed i saw stars i imagined the papers: child, 10, dies by sugar ice my mother looked after my body, wringing itself under the blow of a standing fan i imagined what family would think that girl learned ho to take in s eetness ithout ever learning ho to give it afterward the knot seed in my belly seeped for years my skin puckered i grew hands feet as cold as my mother s sorr , she d say, before raising her palm to a fever the summer rolled around, i rolled a kyoho grape in my mouth i loved them so much, i pleaded for a box all to myself this time, the soft, glimmering flesh made my stomach turn my body had begun to refuse sweetness each newly nauseous taste made me pace through the house, cradling my wrists the way my piano teacher told me to, as if scooping t o apples glass orbs bab birds picture snow, soft as clouds, keep it all down an allergy doctor scattered my back with needles i sipped on hanyak through a plastic straw, nursing the berry bark liquid like a capri sun no more apple juice no more honey milk stuff no strawberries no mozz no heavy cream club it was the too bitter no good that i grew to love peaches harvested too early in the season the pale crease where watermelon rind meets watermelon flesh my ability to henceforth out bitter everyone elicited great praise from my uncles
aunts, who believed the healthiness of a thing could be assessed by its bitterness a bitter green i d refused as a child, it was perilla that i craved the most the spade shaped leaves grew in my mother s garden, where i plucked passed them into her hands, stacking, straining, pushing, pasting son mat hand taste: a name for the way work makes bitterness sweet my mother s hands spreading out each leaf over the next, running the dishes, folding my father s shirts my mother asking if i could please knead the knot gathered at the back of her neck her shoulders, my stomach, the sour strain maybe it s just bitter our pickled work, our slow circulating hands
CONTRIBUTORS Nurulhuda Arslan is an educator who dabbles in creative writing She is subscribed to too many cooking channels on YouTube Madeleine Han is a writer and graduate worker based in the Bay Area and New Haven She prefers her baked goods to be herby, and her savory dishes to be a little sweet Irene Hsu is a writer and graduate worker based in the Bay Area New York, and will eat honey out of a jar Damanpreet Pelia he him is a writer, graduate worker, and dreamer of recipes based in New Haven Aanchal Saraf is a creator and a graduate worker at Yale, an institution that stole Quinnipiac, Paugusset, and Wappinger land, polices the Black residents of New Haven, and invests in imperial debt collection without remorse She insists that feeding people and betraying the institution are both love languages Jill J. Tan is a writer, artist, and anthropologist living between Singapore and New Haven, who requested a blindfolded taste test of one inch cubes for her birthday Making the art for this issue was her 2020 comfort food Darren Wan is a writer, graduate worker, and editor of Mynah Magazine He eats everything except oatmeal