Goh Ling Yong : The Cartography of a Family Recipe Box - Goh Ling Yong
The air in my grandmother’s kitchen was the hardest part. For seventy years, it had been a dense, layered thing, rich with the ghosts of garlic and ginger, the sweet tang of black vinegar, the phantom warmth of steamed rice. Now, it was just air. Thin, cool, and silent. The wok, scrubbed clean by a well-meaning relative, sat cold on the stove. The spice jars stood in perfect, un-dusted rows. It was a room waiting for a person who was never coming back.
My job was to pack the useful things and discard the rest, a brutal arithmetic of grief. Teacups, chipped and floral. A cleaver worn into a gentle curve. And in the back of a cupboard, behind a stack of melamine plates, a small, dark wooden box with a loose hinge. It was unassuming, smelling faintly of camphor and cardamom. I lifted the lid. Inside were hundreds of index cards, bundled with faded rubber bands, filled with my grandmother’s handwriting.
This was her recipe box. I’d seen her consult it a thousand times, pulling out a card, propping it against the sugar jar, her brow furrowed in concentration. To me, it had always been a simple utility, a database of ingredients and instructions. But sitting there on the cold linoleum floor, I began to see it for what it truly was: not a cookbook, but a map. It was the cartography of her life, charted not in locations, but in meals.
Reading the Stains
The first card I pulled out was for Tau Yu Bak, braised pork in dark soy sauce. The card itself, a pale yellowed stock, was soft and pliable, as if it had been handled a thousand times. Near the top corner, a dark, greasy thumbprint had blossomed into a translucent halo, a permanent record of a hand reaching from a sizzling pan. The ink of the ingredient list—pork belly, hard-boiled eggs, garlic, star anise—was slightly feathered from a long-ago splash of water or steam.
This card was a story of Tuesday nights. Of comfort. Of a dish so familiar she barely needed the instructions, but kept the card out for ritual’s sake. It was the food of ordinary days, the reliable anchor in a week of uncertainties. You could see the hustle in its smudges, a meal made between a day of work and an evening of homework with her children. It wasn’t precious; it was necessary. It was love expressed as sustenance.
By contrast, the card for "Sugee Cake" was almost pristine. It was written on a thicker, cream-coloured card with a ballpoint pen, the letters neat and uniform. The only mark was a tiny, pale yellow speck near the bottom, likely a stray crumb of buttery semolina. This was a celebration cake, reserved for Christmas and birthdays. Its cleanliness spoke of intention and ceremony. This was a recipe that demanded focus. You didn’t make Sugee Cake with a baby on your hip or the phone tucked under your chin. You made it with clean hands and a clear counter, with the reverence reserved for something special. The card’s condition told me this recipe was a performance, a deliberate act of creating joy.
Each stain, each warp and fleck, was a pin on the map. A faint red splatter on the Chicken Curry card marked a moment of happy chaos. The faded, water-logged corner of the Fish Head Soup recipe spoke of a steamy, rainy afternoon. These weren't flaws; they were coordinates, marking moments of lived experience. I wasn’t just reading recipes; I was bearing witness to the small, unrecorded moments that constitute a life.
A Life in Cursive
As I sorted the cards by decade, a timeline emerged in the evolution of her handwriting. The oldest cards were written in a formal, looping cursive, the kind learned by rote in a colonial-era schoolhouse. The ink was a faded blue-black, likely from a fountain pen. These were her foundational texts, recipes for Hainanese Chicken Rice and Bak Kut Teh, passed down from her own mother. The instructions were sparse, assuming a knowledge I didn't possess. "A rice bowl of flour," one read. "Cook until fragrant." It was a language of intuition, a dialogue between her and her ancestors.
Then came the middle years, the era of ballpoint pens and growing children. The elegant cursive gave way to a more practical, hurried script. Here, the margins came alive. On the card for Ondeh Ondeh, a note was scrawled: "Use less coconut for Ah Boy, he doesn’t like." Ah Boy was my father. In that small annotation, I saw not just a cook, but a mother, tailoring the world to the specific tastes of her child. Another card for a simple vegetable stir-fry had a frantic addition: "Can use cabbage if no choy sum." This was the script of pragmatism, of making do, of a woman stretching a budget and feeding a family on whatever the market had to offer. These weren't just recipes; they were records of adaptation, of resilience in the face of daily constraints.
The final bundle of cards was the most difficult to read. Her handwriting, once so confident, had grown large and shaky. Her elegant loops had become tremulous, wandering lines. A recipe for a simple steamed egg custard, a dish she made when someone was sick, was almost illegible. The hand that had once expertly folded dumplings and kneaded dough now struggled to hold a pen steady.
Some of the last entries weren't even on cards. They were newspaper clippings for "Healthier Pineapple Tarts" or "Low-Sugar Pandan Chiffon," taped onto index cards with yellowing tape. Her own frail notes were scrawled beside them, questioning the new ingredients, trying to reconcile her lifelong culinary instincts with the dietary demands of old age. This was the map of her body's final betrayal, a testament to a spirit that still wanted to create, to nourish, even as her physical abilities waned. To see her decline documented not in a medical chart, but in the faltering script of a cherished recipe, was a uniquely intimate kind of heartbreak.
The Cartography of Scratched-Out Lines
The most fascinating maps, I discovered, were the ones with crossed-out words and revised histories. An early recipe for a rich, buttery layer cake had "10 egg yolks" aggressively struck through. Beside it, in fainter ink: "8 egg yolks." I could almost hear the neighborhood chatter behind that edit, the gossiping aunties sharing tips on how to economize after the price of eggs went up one year. It was a micro-history of economic fluctuation, played out on a 3x5 card.
One card, titled simply "Aunty Mei’s Steamed Buns," was a puzzle. Who was Aunty Mei? The name meant nothing to me. The recipe was written in a hand that wasn't my grandmother's, though she had added her own notes about proofing times in the margin. This card wasn't just a recipe; it was a node in a social network, a testament to a friendship, a reminder that her world was populated by people I never knew. Women have always traded recipes like currency, a shared language of care and community. This box was her address book, her diary, her social ledger.
But the most profound instructions were the ones that weren't written down at all. The measurements were a lexicon of approximation: a "handful" of dried shrimp, a "splash" of soy sauce, a "thumb-sized" piece of ginger. There was no mention of oven temperatures, only "bake till golden." No cooking times, only "simmer until the meat is tender."
This wasn’t carelessness. It was trust. It was the inheritance of sensory knowledge. She was teaching me, across the silence of her absence, to stop relying on the rigid certainty of cups and teaspoons and to start trusting my own hands, my own nose, my own instincts. She was telling me that the real recipe wasn't on the card; it was in the cook. The card was just the map, but I was the one who had to take the journey.
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on her kitchen floor, the cards spread around me like a paper mosaic. I didn't pack them away. How could I? To put them in a box labeled "kitchen" would be a profound miscategorization. This wasn’t just about food. This was her story, told in soy sauce stains and shaky handwriting. It was a biography of a woman who expressed her love, her frugality, her creativity, and her resilience through the act of feeding others.
I took one card with me that day. The one for Tau Yu Bak. Back in my own kitchen, a room that had always felt sterile and functional, I propped the stained, softened card against my own sugar jar. I held the smooth, heavy cleaver in my hand, feeling its familiar weight. I didn't know if I could replicate the dish. How do you measure a "splash"? How do you define "until fragrant"?
But as I began to cook, chopping the garlic and feeling the heat rise from the pan, I realized I wasn’t just following instructions. I was tracing a map left behind by the person who knew me before I was born. And in the alchemy of heat and oil and memory, I was starting to find my way. The most important ingredient, the one she couldn't write down, was her. And the second most important was the part of her that now lived in me. The air in my kitchen began to change. It was no longer thin and empty. It was starting to smell like home.
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