When I was little, there were another 2 cousins under the care of grandma. Unlike what you may be thinking right now, somehow, she was in fact not favoring me. But that bias does not haunt me anymore for she passed away 3 years ago and I rarely think of her.
But one good thing I am happy to recall about her is the onion pancake, something like roti. She used to make the flour dough really tender, leave it for a while so the dough gets tensile. Then the dough would be rolled into a huge cake shape. What was amazing is she could mix chopped onion, soya bean oil and salt into a sauce and spread it on it, and wrap the cake back into a dough. Because of the separation of oil, dough would be given a intertwined structure.
It’s heterogeneous, if in MIM terminology.
That big dough with intertwined pattern, then again would be cut into smaller ones, then rolled into smaller cakes. In pan, cakes get crispy, burnt onion chips get fragrant and intertwined pattern gets preserved, just like the fascinating thing on repeatedly folded and forged Japanese katana or Damascus knife.
As a kid, I have eaten many times onion pancake by her but not involved once in cooking it. For the next 16 years, my parents and me left the big family and uprooted from hometown for better income. Though we never settled down too much, life for myself was easier since I only stayed in boarding school then college with dormitory, until I got the first job.
Damn that shock of entering society was terrible. It was in a commercial vehicle 4s store in P. R. Zambia and the boss was, with all due respect, a bastard. Colleagues around me were mostly service technicians and I was the only white collar sales, so at first there were only a few things we shared in common. Like, we all have to eat.
Back to the dormitory, my blending-in plan was to make other fellows see breakfast before work and supper after overtime working. With the help of an App, I cooked noodle, stir fried rice, till some really complicated dishes. Unexpectedly, onion pancake was one of the most popular dishes. However, it was from my remote memory rather than App.
Soon things began to pick up: Whenever I was scolded by boss, someone would come up with a cover story for me or some pat on back later, despite the low position the pat is given sometimes. We together used to do dish washing, planning for weekend party and go to supermarket; I got a puppy from a guy and in return I gave him my guitar, though he gave up learning music and sold the 50 USD worth guitar for 500 USD to the next idiot.
Same like that 10 times margin business, my feeling towards grandma puzzles me till now. Shouldn’t I be grateful for the benefit of the memory from her, and how to explain the contrast of her nice cooking and her harshness to me, or more straightly, do I miss her. From somewhere I read that we human refresh body substance every 7 years, after which means all atoms leaves you eventually, while with 16 years of separation from her I still see her cooking works on me.
Now I rarely cook anything. Alone in Shanghai and more specifically in a tiny room in concrete jungle, for a single dog, cooking is more troublesome than grabbing junk food. Apart from the trouble, cooking for someone is like talking to someone. You should see doctor if you talk to yourself too much.
Or maybe cooking itself is a kind of communication, that’s why my father arranges hot pot every year I go home. Hot pot is like a mixed stew we together cook right at the table, and it involves up to 20 kinds of ingredients and tastes just like home. No matter how confused we have spent the year, this 20 ingredients proportion we can effortlessly get it right. In physics, it’s called 20-body system, and above-3-body a system is theoretically unsolvable. Just imagine how tricky it would be if 5 kinds of parameter is unknown on molding machine.
Back to hot pot, my father for sure would again talk about his sailor life on fishing boat and blast me if I try to talk about 3-body system. For similar reason, directors like using the discordance in cooking to represent inharmonic relation. There is a plot in Lost In Translation: a couple sunk into awkward silence after complaining the hot pot cooking.
Disclaimer: Use chopsticks when dealing with hot pot, which is hot