When I was a child, my grandmother collected dolls. Pedigree, antique – never Barbies. European dolls made from celluloid and bisque; Madame Alexander dolls with names like Baby Brother and Pussycat; pretty porcelain baby dolls from Japan; and once, an anatomically correct male doll she bought in the 1970s that was not long on the market.
Grandma travelled overseas on doll tours, and sometimes closer to home by tour bus, and quite regularly the doll society had gatherings in Brisbane. If I was at home from school (and being a rather keen doll collector myself) I would be allowed to tag along. The gatherings were bring-a-plate kind of arrangements, and Grandma would either make a delicious chocolate slice (that I have been known to bake) or a tray of devilled eggs (which I have made only the once due to its finickiness).
Grandma has written the chocolate slice recipe in the cooking journal my mum gave me one Christmas when I was a young adult. Mum is a very keen cook. She has a red hardcover exercise book, quite worn and food-stained, in which she’s written all the recipes she’s collected and cooked over the years: recipes like lemon delicious pudding and pickled leg of lamb, that were handed down from the women in her family, but also, the noodle dishes and curries she learnt from her Chinese Indonesian mother-in-law.
Carefully stored away in a glass front cabinet in my mother’s spare bedroom with all her most precious books is her own mother’s recipe book (Grandma’s), which is also red hardcover but more brittle with age. Even my dad brought out his recipe book the other day, in which he’s written his sister’s and mother’s Peranakan recipes in the most legible handwriting I have ever known him to use (he is a doctor). It is also red hardcover.
Every time I glimpse my mum’s or Grandma’s neat, looped handwriting in my recipe book I am touched. It’s as though I am hoarding pieces of these women I love so much against a future winter without them.
My new novel, A Short History of Longans, tells the story of an Irish-Chinese family over the course of 200 years, and a recipe book seemed an obvious way to make connections between relatives and their stories.
In my novel, there is a journal that is handed down through the generations that is largely based upon my grandmother’s, which reflects a certain period in history. It is full of handwritten recipes, others neatly clipped from newspapers, and wartime articles titled Illusion Ham is a Saver and Be an Ambitious Cook, plus a foldout list of Italian sausages.
I have also borrowed recipes from my mother’s cookbook. I’ve woven in a beef dish my mum used to prepare on a particular platter, one of my favourite childhood dinners, while a pork and fungus dish that appears at a wedding in 1897 is partly based on an old Chinese recipe I found and a chicken recipe my mother has scrawled upon a sticky note.
Once, after Grandma died, I mentioned the devilled eggs she used to make for doll meetings to my Auntie Ellen (my mother’s sister) and she was puzzled. She said she couldn’t recall her mother ever making them. We are a close family, so I thought it was pretty remarkable that she didn’t know about this dish her mother loved to prepare, a recipe that, for me, immediately conjures time with Grandma.
I can picture her in her neat, small kitchen, arranging the pristine eggs in a round Tupperware container. I remember how tiny she was. How her soft, cropped hair curled like a 1930s starlet’s. I remember her laugh, how she’d lift her left shoulder if she said anything remotely contentious. How she could easily touch her toes as though there was a hinge in her hips. These memories make me both happy and sad. All from a devilled egg.
My own recipe book is not red hardcover. Instead, the cover depicts kitsch red and green wallpaper and sprigs of herbs lying next to a wooden spork. Even though it’s a mess of loose magazine recipes, untidy scrawl and entrées written in the dessert section, I hope, (far) in the future, my children will also cherish the memories these recipes might harbour.
A Short History of Longans is published by UQP on July 14, $35.
