I am well-aware of what you think of patissiers, pastry chefs, desserts experts. That compared to culinary chefs, they're small, useless, insignificant, invisible--or as Bourdain says, like a bunch of orthopedists in a room full of surgeons. A bunch of pretentious people making fairytale,non-manly foods with the level of coolness being minus one out of five.
But you'll be damned if you think that it ever stops me from wanting to be one.
I know it's probably too late for me to learn pastry through an official institution by now; but a lesson is still a lesson nonetheless, right? Spending two hours in the kitchen on a Sunday with your mom (who is not any nicer than Gordon Ramsay when it comes to cleanliness and tidiness and efficacy) (and worse, she's doing it in Javanese) learning how to whip eggs the right way is just as useful as a session in Le Cordon Bleu, no?
I can't quite put my finger in how I got my first passion in desserts. When I was little, my sister and I used to be so excited every night before Lebaran because we got to help her make cornflake cookies using a recipe that goes back to my grandma's years. I remember seeing the scrawly handwriting in a yellowed note and thinking I wanted to leave my daughter and grandchildren with this kind of heritage, too; a family recipe. I remember climbing up the kitchen chair and shoving my small hands into a big bowl of batter and taking a lick whenever mom turned her back on us. The rush of feeling (perhaps from all that sugar) and giddiness was easy to recall. I remember mom teaching us and guiding my hands into making the perfect cornflake balls. Small, round, crispy and moist, and competing with my sister on who could roll the fastest (although after a while, she got bored and just left me alone at the table. She's fun like that.)
And my dad - I blame him for my constant craving of colorful, illegal-looking drinks I've had in my life. He's my partner in crime in smuggling weird syrups and ice lollies into the shopping cart whenever mom isn't looking. He shares my love for ordering colorful desserts and after my parents' divorce, when he still had the time to visit us every Saturday, I made him banana milkshakes or ice cream sandwiches which he always ate despite his dietary requirements.
I get most of my influence from my mom, though. My mom is a terrific cook. She's cooked since she was in her teenage years basically because she didn't have a mother to grow up with. No mother to look up to, can you imagine that? No one to hold you and tell you everything's ok when you're crying your eyes out after spilling a bowl of chocolate paste to the floor. My mom cooks cuisine and pastry, both equally excellent. We would go to a restaurant and I would order a dessert (the most colorful, weird-looking one) and we would discuss how we can imitate one at home.
We still do that now.
I remember a family event at home when my sister invited her boyfriend's whole family for dinner at our house a few years back. Always one to please guests with foods especially in my house, I volunteered to to make an frozen Oreo cupcake for desserts. Imagine Oreo in all of its gloriness, the thick vanilla filling and rich chocolate cookies. What happened was I presented them with a gooey mush of black-and-white fillings and lumpy cupcake muffins, with too much Oreo crumbs and too little chilled time. Luckily, being a bunch of polite people that they were, all the guests finished it off without forgetting to send compliments to the cook (and for that reason alone, kak, I think you married the right guy.)
The one thing I would change from my current routine now, the only good thing to have a strict 9 to 5 job is that I would have more time to bake. More practice. My hands are already rusty from all the non-baking over the past year, it makes me sad sometimes. But I still assure myself that I still have Sundays to squeeze it in and I motivate myself by collecting easy recipes from the web. Nothing fancy, nothing with a name I couldn't pronounce. Just simple pastry and sometimes they don't taste good. Sometimes I let it in the oven too long or too soon. Sometimes I incidentally used the wrong type of flour and it doesn't flourish like I want it to. Things go wrong most of the times and that's why I love it. It makes me questions things, makes me want to do better every. single.time. It tickles my curiosity, my desire to be better. I have had eggtarts that taste too egg-y. Chocolate brownies that are too sweet (yes, there's such thing.) Shapeless marble cakes and an even more shapeless Momofuku cookies, to cite recent examples.
But I can't wait to go back to the kitchen. I can't wait to lay out all the ingredients at the countertop table and try each step from the recipe. I can't wait to fail.
I just finished Bourdain's first book and that is perhaps where I got all this culinary sentiments from. It's amazing to read someone pouring out his passion like that. There was this particular page where he wrote an advice on how to be a great chef (coming from him, that's like bible.) I fully understand that both physical and mental solidity are required to be one and that you have to be prepared to work endless hours. Which, I think, will seem like seconds when you do something you really love. Check out the interview below with Craig Koketsu, one of my favorites who is also a former resident chef at Lespinasse. (It's hard not to idolize the guy when he looks like this, btw):
"Unlike many of his contemporaries, Koketsu didn’t go the culinary school route. Classes as a rhetoric major at UC Berkeley didn’t inspire him, but a visit with his sister, who was enrolled at the local community college culinary school, did: Koketsu realized that he wanted to be in a kitchen, too. But he’d worked his way through college and couldn’t afford more schooling. Instead, he lucked into a job with “an incredible teacher,” Chinese American chef Steve Chan at the Silicon Valley French- and Asian-influenced Martha’s Restaurant.
There, Koketsu absorbed the fundamentals of cooking during grueling 15-hour days that “flew by,” he says, “because I loved it so much and knew I was doing the right thing.” One night on the line at Jeremiah Tower’s Oakland Stars, he had a light-bulb moment. Koketsu asked Tower what the key to his success was. Tower’s answer: “I don’t separate my personal from my professional life.” It made sense to me, Koketsu recalls. “When you’re completely absorbed in something, it becomes your life.”
The book also mentioned one name that has stayed for me for so long and resurrected again in my mind thanks to Bourdain mentioning him as the greatest pastry chef in the world: Richard Leach. I've seen his book in Kinokuniya once, his Sweet Seasons recipe book with ingredients that allows cooks to mix and match that is now not available anywhere else THAT I DID NOT BUY and remains as one of my biggest DINDA WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING moments. (and to make things worse, I forgot to look it up in Melb.)
It made my day that I had the same preference with Anthony Bourdain. Nice. (and probably a million other people out there, but I'd like to think of it as a private moment with the chef.)
Anyways, I can ramble on and on and on here if nobody is stopping me. And I don't like rambling. I just needed to let this out, this frantic feeling of awakening and discovering what you like again. It's a pretty damn good feeling, though. It's a reminder that, despite the fact that it's impossible for me to be there now, at least I've gone here to this sacred place of mine, sat on one of the benches, peeked at its library, acted like one of its students - no longer admiring it from afar and thinking what it would be like to step through the gates.
And for me, that's good enough; for now.
