Cooking Experience: Why I was Never Meant to be a Chef

I love to eat. But I never liked cooking. And I never saw any problem with that at all. For, Emak was always there to cook for us. That was all fine and dandy, until I had to study in England, which was not exactly something I had planned for.

As the days drew closer for me to leave for Blackpool, Emak did offer to give me a crash course in cooking. But, nothing doing. I was just not interested in the whole idea of peeling onions and standing over frying pans in hot, stuffy kitchens.   

But, as they say…” always listen to your mum”. The stark reality set in on the very first day that my friends and I moved into our flat at No. 4, Cheltenham Road in Blackpool. For the very first time in our life we were faced with the dim prospect of having nobody around to feed us.

We were aghast at the very thought that nothing would ever get into our poor empty stomachs unless, and until, we worked on it – meaning to say, having to prepare the food ourselves. This was, after all, Blackpool. There were no mamak restaurants around, and certainly no roadside warung kopi to run to.

As our stomach rumblings grew louder, hesitantly my flat mates and I had to leave our television set alone in the living room and made our way to the kitchen to look for our frying pans and cooking pots.

I still remember the very first meal that I cooked. It was sardines. My housemates Safi and Hussain, had worked on the rice, carefully measuring the exact amount of water to use, enough to get it nicely cooked. So, I and Farouk were tasked to work out the best way to cook a can of sardines, bought earlier at the Fine Fare supermarket, to go with the steaming hot rice.

After much pondering, we finally started off by stir-frying some onion and garlic in a pan. Next, we poured in some tomato sauce with a dash of chili powder. Then, I emptied the sardine chunks out of its tin into the pan and threw in some green peas to go with them for good measure.

That was it. Sounds very simple.  But as it turned out, the sardines got slightly burnt from the intense heat of the electric stove. As a first timer, working with stoves was definitely not my forte, what more electric stoves – as were common in the UK – which I’d never ever laid my eyes on before. Safi’s rice turned out nice, though. So, I placed the hot, sardine-full frying pan right onto our small kitchen table and then the four of us sat around the small table to enjoy our first ever culinary creations. Not a masterpiece, but not that bad either. When you’re starving you can’t really complain. Certainly did the trick to appease our rumbling stomachs.

When I wrote home about our cooking exploits, Emak just couldn’t believe that I was finally cooking for myself. In fact, Apak intimated to me she’d really wished she could have a taste of my cooking. Lucky for me, she was six thousand miles away in Telok Intan. If she had stayed just around the corner and dropped by, she would have choked sampling my over-cooked sardines.

After some time, I got to recognize the various spices that Emak must have used daily at home. Names like turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, star anise, and clove were no strangers to me anymore. In my fridge, one could typically find stuffs like chicken, beef and lamb cuts apart from potato chips for deep frying, and simple to prepare vegies such as cabbage and lettuce. My small kitchen cabinet would be stocked with essential items such as vegetable cooking oil, onion, garlic and cooking salt. A bottle each of some soy sauce, chili sauce and tomato sauce, accompanied by the all-important Malaysian cooking staples curry powder and chili powder, more or less completed the list.

Unlike in Malaysia, chili powder and curry powder were sold in small tins in England. They were made by Rajah. Other spices such as paprika, turmeric, and black pepper came in small bottles labeled as seasoning, and they were produced by McCormick. During his days in Liverpool in the mid-50s, Apak said that chili powder was only sold at pharmacies because of their deemed hazardous effect onto people. How time had moved on.

Through lots of guesswork and experimentation, I did eventually become a slightly better cook. This was especially after going back home for the summer break in 1980 when I got Emak to quickly scribble me a recipe book. 

My usual – survival mode – menu would be chicken or beef curry cooked with lots of cube coconut cream, and plenty of star anise and cinnamon sticks chucked in. If I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I’d whip up the ayam masak merah, with loving guidance from Emak’s recipe book, of course.

But those were for dinner. For breakfast, it’ll be just fresh milk with cereals, or slices of bread with a fried egg. Eggs were truly a godsend. Depending on the amount of time I had in hand, there were lots of stuffs I could do with it such as scrambled eggs, chili stir-fried egg, and so on. And then there was the spaghetti plus scrambled eggs, cooked in Apak’s style. As lunch time would find me mostly at college, lunch would just be potato crisps or a KitKat bar with some coffee from the vending machines.

My most memorable cooking experience has got to be the one done with my flat mate and top cook, the chubby Khalid from Johor. I was helping him out in the kitchen of our three-story flat at Hodgson Road one afternoon when an English bloke who stayed on the third floor suddenly burst into our kitchen located down on the ground floor. With a distressed look on his face, he started yelling at us, “are you cooking your socks, or what?”

Actually, Khalid was onto one of his more adventurous cooking feats, grilling a cube of belacan over the stove. Belacan being belacan, its glorious aroma permeated throughout the whole house. The poor chap must have been suffocating and suffering for quite a while upstairs from the overpowering smell of the burnt belacan, and just couldn’t take it any longer when he finally decided to make the dash downstairs to reprimand us.  We tried desperately to explain how harmless belacan was, but he wasn’t having any of it. How we had a good laugh that day.

When I was staying at the university dormitory in Manchester, I shared the kitchen with five other English and foreign students. Time constraints meant that it would all be simple meals, with eggs featuring a lot. Tuna flakes in vegetable oil was another favourite for preparing sandwiches stuffed with lots of tomatoes, lettuce and onion. 

The English students hardly ever cooked. One other thing which I noticed was that, on the few occasions that I cooked something really spicy, they would start sneezing incessantly – especially when I used lots of chili powder. This forced me to tone down my cooking style, lest I be accused of cooking socks again!

Being the lazy cook that I was, I would jump at the slightest opportunity for a free feast at any of the mosques where religious programs and wedding dos or, walimah, were being held. But sometimes, I had to work for it – which was something I quite enjoyed, actually. Participating in cooking in preparation for a walimah was quite fun for the camaraderie, new cooking experiences and of course the eating part at the end of it. 

I had the opportunity to join in the preparation for a Pakistani feast at the UK Islamic Mission Mosque at Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, and it was an incredible experience. Lots of boisterous laughter, talking and chatter. But I also got to discover that when you cook curry Pakistani style you use lots of onion and tomatoes. Quite distinctively, they also use yogurt to go with the curry instead of coconut cream like we Malaysians. The end products were the heavenly chicken masala and lamb korma just to name a few.

With Manchester being a big city, buying halal meat was very easy because of the presence of the large Pakistani and Bangladeshi community. Then there was also the Chinatown right in the middle of the city centre. From the Chinese shops I was able to get my supply of soy sauce and Malaysian-made maggi chili sauce.

All these were very useful in my attempt to spice up my cooking and to add some variety. But I’d much rather be cooking with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi brothers at their feasts.

Nothing beats free food!