A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Tan

Author:Cheryl Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hyperion

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I was a child in Singapore, my mind would inevitably turn to butterflies, dragons, phoenixes, and horses as each September approached.

With the Mid-Autumn Festival coming, the neighborhood provision shops, already crammed with an array of colorfully packaged candy and snacks, would start taking on a crimson tinge from the dozens of red lanterns shopkeepers would hang from the eaves. The blazing tropical sun would pierce through these lanterns, made of red cellophane fashioned into festive dragons or butterflies, bathing everything in a fiery warmth that was both titillating and comforting.

What we looked forward to each year was getting to pick out a lantern to take for a spin on the night of the festival, which occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar calendar month. It celebrates the autumnal equinox, the time when the moon is at its fullest and roundest—the reason the day is also known as the Moon Festival.

After carefully perching a toothpick of a birthday candle in the middle of my lantern, I’d race through dinner and wait impatiently for it to get dark so my sister and I could head down to the playground to join the impromptu lantern parade, a giggling procession of bobbing red lights in a river of black. I never had a dragon—those always seemed more for boys than girls. But a horse, a butterfly, a puppy. Those seemed perfectly acceptable. As I got older, however, lanterns became passé, too uncool for teenagers, to be sure. I stopped making trips to the playground—going there being a little unseemly if you were not, say, between the ages of six and ten or in possession of a child within that age range.

However, there was still one thing to enjoy about the Moon Festival, and that was mooncakes, round cakes of lotus-seed or red bean paste wrapped in either a soft, biscuitlike crust or a pliant pandan-scented wrapper made with mochi rice flour.

Now, there are a few old stories that explain the reason for eating these little cakes. My favorite is the one of Ming revolutionaries planning to overthrow the Mongolian rulers of China during the Yuan dynasty and spreading word via letters baked into mooncakes. (Julia Child, with her intrepid intelligence service background, would’ve been so proud!)

During my Singaporean girlhood, I’d known the stories, I’d eaten the cakes. As for making them? That seemed so laughably difficult it never once crossed my mind. I was perfectly content buying them from Chinatown every year—that is, until I found out that my aunties knew how to make them.

It turns out, they’re incredibly easy—you just need the right teachers. In my case, that was Auntie Khar Imm’s sisters, who make a massive production of mooncakes every year. With the list of family members and friends requesting mooncakes getting longer by the year, Auntie Khar Imm and her sisters have a serious production line going.

As usual, when I arrived at Auntie Khar Imm’s mother’s house, the activity was already well under way. You know you’re

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