They say that life is a cycle of ups and downs.
I was adopted as a baby by the staff nurse who delivered me from a family of 10. I don’t remember any of her cooking as she died of cancer when I was 3 years old. But I do remember that we had a part-time maid who came in to look after us when mum was sick and bed ridden. Legend has it that she learned all her awesome cooking skills from mum.
To this day, I remember papa’s (that was the maids name) awesome sweet soy sauce chicken rice slow cooked in a rice cooker. Papa left after my adopted father died when I was 10 years old. That was a painful memory. I remember being moved from one relative to another, more of a burden than a blessing to my relatives. I used to cry and hang on to papa whenever she made time to visit.
For a long time sweet soy sauce chicken rice was just a memory of better times. Some of my aunties that I lived with use to make sweet soy sauce chicken with lots of potatoes and onions, I guess it was a popular dish as it was in many households what we call comfort food. But they never tasted the same, never as good as papa’s dishes.
Fast forward 30 years down the road, a journey that would make a bestseller of a novel if I may blow my own horn. Growing up, graduating from an orphanage, yes I finally settled into an orphanage after having lived through some difficult years with some relatives.
I left the orphanage when I started working, I moved from Penang to Singapore and then finally to settle in Kuala Lumpur. I was fortunate to be introduced to someone whose home I ended up squatting in, one who I would grow to love and call my foster mother late on in life.
It turns out she is a great cook among many other things, teacher, activist, and the list goes on and her favourite dish is now mine, the 5 Spice Beef which I had entered as a recipe for #butterkicap:
I realised there is a common thread to food that I like in that they all have a sweet soy sauce base, whether chicken, beef or fish, but they don’t all taste the same. Because what papa and my foster mother had in common that none of my other relatives had was that when they cooked for me, it was a MANIFESTATION OF LOVE.
A bond between a mother and son/daughter/child can never be replicated by just anyone, especially when it comes to food; it has to be a manifestation of love. And that is how I rate Comfort Food.