#ChineseFoodiesofIG: Christopher Tan, The Way of Kueh

 
Food writer, cookbook author and cooking teacher Christopher Tan, author of The Way of Kueh

Food writer, cookbook author and cooking teacher Christopher Tan, author of The Way of Kueh

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews I’m doing with my favourite Chinese foodies that I follow on Instagram. Come and follow the #ChineseFoodiesofIG hashtag on Instagram and leave a comment showing your support for these talented folk!

Where are you from? Where are you really from?

Singapore. I lived and grew up in London for over a decade, so that’s where my sense of humour is from. Narnia is where I actually want to be from — I hear their fresh produce is excellent. 

Share a food memory:

Wandering around Beijing and managing to score some great street food despite my non-command of Mandarin – roubing, jianbing, roujiamo.

What does home taste like?

I am Peranakan (sometimes known as Straits Chinese) — my Fujianese ancestors settled in Southeast Asia some centuries ago, absorbing local influences (and genes) into their families, culture and language. So our cuisine bears traces of Southern China, Southeast Asia and colonial legacies, for example in ‘itek tim’, a duck and salted mustard green soup with chillies, tomatoes, pickled plums, dried garcinia fruit (asam keping), peppercorns and nutmeg. So home for me tastes like intricate spicing and carefully layered flavours, whose interplay resonates for a long time on the palate.

How did you learn to cook?

One mistake at a time, like most of us! I started baking when I was in my early teens and worked my way from there. While at uni in London I couldn’t get decent Singaporean hawker food like Hainanese chicken rice and nasi padang, so I had to figure out how to make it myself. Later, working as a food journalist, I picked up and assimilated lots of culinary ideas and axioms from everywhere. I’ve never trained for or felt called to restaurant kitchens, to me the heart and source of any cuisine is really the home kitchen. Now, having written and co-written a dozen cookbooks, I realise that the more you learn, the more you realise how much you still have yet to learn.

Who's your Chinese food legend? 

I would have to say Barbara Tropp. When I first read The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, it was a revelation — the first English-language Chinese cookbook I’d ever seen with such exquisite attention to detail, coupled with a wealth of real practical advice for home cooks, all written with a deep understanding of and respect for the cuisine. 

Most underrated Chinese ingredient:

Soy sauce. It’s far more than just a part of the pantry ‘furniture’. A few years ago I collaborated with Heritage Artisans on a dinner exploring the nuances of naturally-brewed soy sauces from different Asian countries: tasting them side by side and then cooking with them taught me a profound lesson in how complex and versatile good soy sauce can be.

Dream dinner party guests:

Vincent van Gogh, Wendell Berry, Zheng He, and the cast of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, because why not.

Top three cookbooks:

This is nearly impossible, as I’m a total cookbook geek and collector. But if you mean Chinese cookbooks specifically: The Food of Sichuan, by Fuchsia Dunlop; Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings & Breads; and The Cookbook of Tham Yui Kai, one of Singapore’s ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ of the 1960s/70s restaurant scene — it’s a priceless snapshot of how our Cantonese chefs of that era composed menus blending straight-up Chinese classics with Southeast Asian influences.

What would you like to tell the world about Chinese food?

It’s as diverse as the diaspora is far-flung. We go everywhere, we cook everything.

 
#ChineseFoodiesofIGJenny Lauchinese identity, singapore, singaporean, peranakan, kueh, dessert, cookbook, writer, food writerComment