There aren’t many memoirs about Singaporean food so I was looking forward to reading A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a Singaporean who has been in the US since her university years.
After being laid off from her job as a fashion journalist, she decides to return to Singapore to learn how to cook the food she used to enjoy in her childhood. She gives herself one year to learn from her aunts and mum, and during the year she shuttles between Singapore and the US – not bad for a person who’s been laid off.
Interspersed with her descriptions about Singaporean food like her paternal grandmother’s pineapple tarts, rice dumplings, otak and aunties’ teochew braised duck, salted vegetable and duck soup are narratives about her family history.
While Tan’s descriptions about Singaporean food are pretty good and accurate, I thought the book could have done better with some pictures of the food, or even of Tan and her family. Also, Tan seems to lose her focus at some points when she writes about her bread-making attempts and her love for all things Italian, including the food. I don’t know, it just seemed like she had derailed and veered off in another direction with those ramblings.
This book caters more to the American reader as it explains a lot about the food and some Singaporean slang that’s used in the dialogue. A Singaporean reading it might find there’s too much explanation (as was the case with me) and sometimes you almost get the feeling that Tan doesn’t know Singapore that well herself; that the explanations seem as if they are meant for herself.
Overall this book is an interesting enough read, but there’s still some spice and flavour lacking in it that would have otherwise made it a great read.
Book and eBook available from the Singapore National Library