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Lim Tse Wei, "Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore" (Kitchen Arts and Letters, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:08]
B
Network welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Ernest Lee and today I'm speaking with writer and chef TW Lim about his remarkable essay collection Little Eating in Singapore on food, labor, migration, memory and a host of other topics. At first glance, it seems like these essays are really about cooking, but what impressed me so much is the sheer range of topics that you go into. Over here. We look at things ranging from hawker food and recipes to questions about labor and the political economy in Singapore. But what hawker food is actually worth but thank you so much for joining us today twice. And my first question for you is actually, what is the thought process behind this book? You take us through your journey as a chef. For instance, in the opening pages, why do you go from this to the hard work of being a chef and then this reflection you want to do as a writer? What was the biggest thought process that led you to writing this remarkable collection of essays?
- [02:02]
C
The essays came together over a long time. A lot of them were written for substack or for other publications. So in a way what you're seeing is me returning to the same or related topics over and over again and seeing the sort of evolution and accumulation of different ideas that comes about when you spend a long time thinking about something. I think it's impossible to it's impossible to me, it's impossible to really engage with food just as a material reality. Like, you know, you can't. I don't think that we get all that much out of food if we just think about its tactile or castatory qualities. I think it's actually a window into the rest of the world. And especially because everybody eats, right? Like, it's such. It's such a truism. Everybody eats. And so why would you not choose to engage with this thing that is essential to life?
- [03:16]
B
Yeah, that's striking to me. And I think the thought that everybody eats but not everybody cooks, for example, is something that seems to really animate the book. And I think there's a kind of easy way in which we see that, you know, you can just order a bowl of noodles, for example, at a hawker center. Right. You can sort of shop to a family gathering. And this is often very gendered process, especially in Singapore, of eating. And I think one thing you want to really do is to kind of dispel all of that. And one entry point, I think that you sort of begin with the book is really that cooking was maybe not always the sort of easy journey for you. That's kind of what I understand. I think there's a kind of different path you could have taken as the early part of the book goes into. And, you know, you enter the restaurant industry through a very unorthodox sort of way. And I want to sort of maybe zoom into the process of labor first. And this kind of tension that I see between the sense that cooking is this meaningful craft, one that you can learn from many different people, from chefs who teach you to family members. And there's a kind of sense that cooking in some ways is also exploitative in some sense. Right. There's the systemically undervalued nature of hawker food within Singapore, for example, that grapples of all these other market forces with questions of entrepreneurship. And you don't seem to really romanticize this either. Right. I think this is kind of reality of cooking that you acknowledge. And is there a kind of way you reconcile maybe these different forms of cooking? Is it something that you think is. In some ways. I guess my question is also, what advice would you give to someone who might think about following in your path over here?
- [04:42]
C
So I think one of the most powerful feelings for a human being is to sense that they have agency to affect the world around them. Right. To feel like you can make the world you live in and to understand that you actually do make the world you live in on an everyday, continuous basis. And I think this is a truth that we often forget in the world we have today that we're reminded of when we just use our hands to do something. Right. I think that's the wonderful thing about some of the basic manual crafts, like cooking, like making. Like sewing, making clothing. Right. Like doing small projects around the house. I think each of these things is a reminder that we literally make the world we live in day by day. And so, you know, if you're asking for advice, my advice is try cooking. Right. Because this is a way in which you exert agency over your world. Of course, we have also put a frame around these activities, a capitalistic frame around these activities, which feels. Which often feels extremely exploitative or when it. Or when it feels sort of empowering. It feels empowering for the wrong reasons.
- [06:20]
B
Right.
- [06:20]
C
Like, we look at. We look at celebrity chefs, we look. We look at the chefs we lionize, and it often seems like we lionize them not for the care they are putting into the world around them, but almost for the fact that their famous.
- [06:41]
B
Right.
- [06:42]
C
It's the way that their fame has sort of gotten to the level of being almost sort of a distortion field that causes us to forget what it is they do that's really of value.
- [06:54]
B
Yeah, I like that reminder to just try cooking, you know, that ultimately it's a kind of process of working with your hands, that it's different from the, you know, media ties, TV shows and things that we see. And one thing that strikes me is actually that, you know, I think in this book there's a huge modesty that comes across in contrast to the kind of celebrity chef Persona that could exist. We have a number of them in Singapore, of course, and elsewhere. And I was kind of wondering what kind of audience you were writing with in mind here. So I get the sense that this is kind of journey that you have with a chef that's very personal. There's plenty of Singaporeans, I think, who maybe are quite detached from the food that they eat. And I think that maybe that's part of the group you have in mind as well. And I think there's a group of Singaporeans, for example, and people around the world who are interested in Singaporean food, however they encounter it and want to learn more about how to cook this. And one question I had in mind was actually your book is somewhere between a collection of essays from Substack, like it points out, but it's also a cookbook in many ways. Right. These are recipes that are through there. They don't follow the conventional logic of, I think, a cookbook sometimes in how you sort of resist giving precise measurements all the time. And this is kind of powerful intuition over here. And at the same time, you sort of think about cookbooks that you've encountered yourself. I'm thinking about the Southeast Asian food cookbook, for instance, written at a time of Gestapo in Indonesia, or the canonical cookbooks like Bushon that you mentioned quite early on. And I'm wondering about the nature of genre in your writing too. How does this kind of affect you? And would you have written this book as a cookbook? Do you have plans for one in the future? For instance, what is the relationship between this and this particular genre of a book that's made many different people famous, for instance, but one that you seem to resist doing in some ways?
- [08:29]
C
Well, I'll point out that the cookbook industry in the US is getting. The cookbook economy is getting worse and worse, much like every other sector of publishing. Sales have leveled out and the arrangements with cookbook authors are getting more exploitative in a way. Right, because the advances are getting to the point where they're non existent and authors are increasingly expected to do not just their own publicity, but own photography and design as well. But that aside, you know, the little perfections as a whole, I think is just an invitation to be curious about food and to find out more about it. And I hope I give a sense of that in the recipes as well as the essays, which is why the recipes roam so far. And so why.
- [09:25]
A
Right.
- [09:28]
C
I really wanted to do not just kind of ancestral recipes or recipes that could be called fully traditional, but to give a sense that the idiom is alive. And the way to keep it alive is to just remake it every day. Which is why there are recipes in there that are just complete neologisms like the one I have or Dao Sa pia made with a French subleto. So for folks who are not from Singapore, these are salty. These are biscuits filled with a yellow bean paste. The most distinctive thing about them is that they are. The filling can be sweet, salty or a blend of the two. And in Singapore they are seen as a sort of old fashioned Chinese baked good. Right? Because they are a traditional baked item usually done with flaky pastry dough, Chinese flaky pastry. Whereas in my book I offer a recipe where I use that same filling and wrap them with a classic French sable dough, which is a sort of buttery, crumbly biscuit dough. And I just happened to do it one day at home. And I just love the results.
- [10:46]
B
So, yeah, no, I love that. And I think there's a sense almost that, you know, Singaporean food is something that needs to be put in conversation with other kinds of cuisine, but not always in a way that people expect. Right. Sometimes it's kind of extracted. You know, I'm thinking about ways in which YouTubers or like, famous celebrities kind of have this touch and go relationship sometimes with food that lies outside the canon of cooking. I think one thing you want to do is to resist that at this point in time. I do want to sort of point out for our listeners that this is a book full of these descriptions of foods that are familiar to myself as well as a Singaporean. And reading this book, I got hungry. I want to hop in the kitchen after this and have a go at many of the recipes that you make. And one thing that thwarts me, as I think it did for you, is realizing that many of our listeners, and myself included, yourself included, lie outside Singapore. And there's this relationship, I think, with ingredients, too, that you want to talk about. These ingredients sometimes are fresh, sometimes they transform. And I really like the bit you give about the mortar and pestle. Right. How a sort of simple technology has a rhythm to it, has a kind of intimacy to it. And I want to talk about your relationship, I think, to cooking at a distance now that you live in the US I think one thing a book does really well is for people who are from Singapore but now lie at a distance with the food is to make us long for it. What is it like to cook at a distance?
- [12:03]
C
So the first chapter of the book talks about learning to cook in these French kitchens in Singapore. And so something that is implied but never quite said out loud is that I actually didn't really start cooking Singaporean food regularly or frequently until, I want to say, 2017 or so, you know, almost 20 years after I left Singapore, because the restaurant that my wife and I ran was an American restaurant. We didn't serve Singaporean food. And so I sort of found myself, having cooked professionally for many years, in a position where I wanted to start making Singaporean food. Both, you know, I'd done bits and pieces at home, but I wanted to start serving Singaporean food a long way from Singapore. And so I was trying to figure out many different things at once. I was trying to figure out. I was both trying to teach myself how to make it and trying to figure out how to present it in a place that's literally on the far side of the world. And when I cooked at home, I could explain it to the people who are coming to eat in great detail because I have a personal, direct relationship with them. They're my friends. We're sitting down to dinner together. I can tell them stories. But when it's in a commercial setting, I have two to three sentences to tell you about this. And you're probably zoning out or waiting to get back to your conversation with your friends, because that's just how restaurants work. And so I think. And so I think the process of having to figure out, having to negotiate both these things together, like learning to cook and learning to present it, made me really want to make sure that I was learning something that felt true to me. And on the other side of the world, that developing that confidence, knowing that this is correct, is almost impossible. So it's been a very tentative process. It's felt very fraught. And I hope some of that comes through in the writing.
- [14:28]
B
No, definitely. And I also sense this frustration that away from the kind of maybe choreographed intimacy of having a restaurant who are interested in a food present the food to you, there's another way in which people, you know, consumers, for example, in the US and beyond, encounter Singaporean food, and that's through a food hall, for example, any number of kind of fast casual restaurants. I think you mentioned the sort of legion of mediocre Malaysian restaurants that sometimes provide this approximation for Singaporean sometimes. I certainly encountered them in Chicago as a last resort. And this way in which Singaporean food gets assimilated into this multicultural pantheon of things. Right. So, for example, I think we're talking about food halls in Kossiblo, and I think you have this umbrage sometimes of what they do with the cultural imagination as well as the political economy of food. Going to talk more about that, since I think that's the other way in which Singaporean food gets presented overseas. Sometimes a parody of a hawker center, as you almost get at.
- [15:19]
C
I was just eating at a Singaporean stall in a food hall in the US and it was a pretty diverse food hall, and it was just one Singaporean or Malaysian stall there. And I think, you know, in that context, we present hawker food, but we. Because that's what if you've been, you know, if you're from that part of the world, and you think, well, I'm going to open a place in a food hall. Where else is your head going to go? But the hawker tradition that we all grew up with.
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B
Right.
- [15:52]
C
And I think that winds up being a relatively one dimensional view of what the food culture really is like. But what are you going to do? You can't just summon an entire culture into being around you. So in a way it's kind of an impossible problem because the true richness is not that, you know, that there's laksa next to chaguay, teow next to chicken rice, it's that there are dozens, if not hundreds of stalls serving the same thing.
- [16:23]
B
I kind of see an echo of this in how you discuss something that maybe is similar but not exactly the same as the food halization of, you know, culture. And that's back in Singapore, right, where you talk about this idea of entrepreneurship going on. So maybe for the benefit of our listeners, can you talk a bit more about how you observe the structural and economic transformations of pork culture food back home? What do you think it's supposed to be or how's it evolved? I know you sort of suggest that even things like central kitchens have been going on for actually longer than some Singaporeans think. But is there something that is distinct about this generation of entrepreneurship or sort of the upselling of some kinds of hawker food and what's it doing to this cultural economy?
- [17:03]
C
So for folks who haven't spent the last 30 years eating in Singapore, I guess when I was growing up in the 1980s and you went to a hawker stall or your family said that you were going to a hawker, you were going to go get hawker food, you were virtually certain, with very, very, very rare exceptions, you were certain to be buying your food from a sole proprietor or you know, maybe a small family, like husband and wife running a stall together. And the hawkers, this husband and this notional husband and wife had been making that one dish continuously, day in, day out or their entire careers. And sometimes they learned this craft from their parents too, right? And the important thing to me about this is that it's not just that they had that long history with the dish they were making, but that they were sole proprietors, so they were working for themselves and nobody themselves. And over the last 30 years, this industrial organization has changed gradually such that more and more often now you see the same dishes being cooked by employees working for a for profit company. So that by there is a huge and I think to most people not very visible change in the industrial organization of the hawker, of the quote unquote hawker trade. I don't even think it's fair to call it the hawker trade anymore. So this comes across in two ways. One is, I'm not sure if most Singaporeans are aware of this. But if you go to a food court, so a hawkers, a food hall in a shopping center in Singapore, chances are that every stall in that food court, while it has a different, even though they all have different signboards, they all actually are employees of the same corporation, which is the food court operator. So that's one way in which this happens. But another way in which this happens is that increasingly hawker stalls in hawker centers are occupied by franchisees of hawker brands. And these are sometimes, but not always. These are, you know, once upon a time, these brands were actually run by individual hawkers as individual hawker stalls. But as they became more famous and more successful, they started literally franchising in the same way that McDonald's is franchised, or they became chains where, you know, it is the same. It is a single company running multiple outlets in multiple hawker centers across the island. Again, a change in industrial organization without necessarily a change in the menu.
- [20:09]
B
And I think there's some reasons why this kind of franchise situation's been occurring, right? And I think the most powerful way you break this down for us is at the end of your chapter across classes where you have an essay titled How Much a hawker Food Cost. And perhaps if the logic of Singapore in some ways is all about these dollars and cents about legible balance sheets, you break it down for us. You point out, I think, that there is this almost systemic undervaluation of what hawker culture is and what labor goes into this that's undervalued. And there's a kind of almost paradox in that competition. For example, this kind of idea of a free market that needs to operate to keep costs low for the consumer is the solution that we see in the public, even though this means that there's very little profit to be made for these individual entrepreneurs compared to franchisees, maybe, who can afford to do so. And this seems to be a huge, I think, structural problem. Perhaps it's happening elsewhere. I'm unaware of the kind of. If this is a similar situation happening in other societies with hawker culture, I'd like to hear your thoughts about this if that is the case. But the situation doesn't look very positive, I think, in the future for what it suggests about these individual hawker entrepreneurs, for example, or rather proprietors. I've had a similar experience to what you described later on, when one of my favorite essays in the book is about when you're in quarantine and you sort of encounter food that's clearly coming from a central kitchen, right? These zombied forms of Chinese Vegetarian cooking or fried rice that doesn't seem to really taste like fried rice. And the panacea seems to be the food that you get delivered by your family instead. That seems to be the counterpart, full of flavor, et cetera. Maybe there's a kind of story in here to be talked about the central horror that comes from the centralized kitchens that come over here. But is there a positive story to this, too, you think? What might the kind of future of preservation and memory look like? I think some of it lies in your cookbook recipes and your attempts to sort of say that this is evolving in some ways. But, yeah, what are you? Are you an optimist? Pessimist? Is this too crude a question to be asking?
- [22:08]
C
Well, for listeners who are not in Singapore, you might be interested to know that the Ministry of Education in Singapore recently started replacing school canteens with a system where we feed school students meals prepared by the army cook houses.
- [22:29]
B
And what was the school canteen?
- [22:31]
C
Oh, the school canteens when I was growing up, and I think when you were growing up, too, were essentially miniature hawker centers in each school. So a school canteen in Singapore is not like a school canteen in the west, where, you know, a school canteen in the west is generally sort of a buffet line. A school canteen in Singapore is a small hawker center located in every single school, where the operators are basically given very reduced rent in exchange for keeping their prices at a level where primary school students can afford it. So you grow up and you are acculturated to eating this way from a very young age. And I think that's a wonderful thing. It is kind of tacit acculturation in the same way that school lunches in France, as I understand it, are like, at some point they start giving you the entree, plat, dessert. Yeah. And I think one of the most insidious things that happens here is that as you change what we feed our kids, I think people start to lose the expectation or people's expectations of what something should taste like start to change. And part of this is, you know, as sambal, as chili sauce in Singapore, 10 gets sweeter on the whole. Like, our expectations of what certain dishes taste like start to quietly change. And the change is not just on the level of the individual. The change is sort of across a generation. And I think that is how culture on the whole, changes. Generational change is sort of the most powerful force there is. Right. And we can look at this as, okay, well, culture is a living thing. We can't freeze it in amber. It has to evolve or it may as well be dead. But I think we can also ask, why is it changing? What are the forces changing it? Do we want it to change for these reasons or not?
- [24:40]
B
Yeah. And that sense of change is really powerful. In this book, I'm thinking about your chapter across time and in sort of back to back essays, what happens is that we see, for example, cases where it's like the replacement of neighborhood bakeries, right? These institutions where you could buy bread in these plastic bags, colorful ones, the different kinds of fillings for the cheap. And then there's replacement by corporate equivalents like breadtalk. You have a chapter about essay about an artisanal soy sauce maker, for example. And you also have another one and one of my favorite pieces about lokai, which is a Cantonese dish of braised chicken wings. Right. But many other things mixed in. I think I encountered this in People's park complex in Chinatown in Singapore in a small stall. But certainly it is a rare dish. And the thing that I got as someone who's encountered these only on the margins, I think as a consumer, it's almost the feeling you get when you go to a zoo and see an endangered animal. Right. This sort of sense of wonder mixed with fear, I think. And maybe that's kind of what we're getting over here. And it's a series of minor indelible losses. I think that's a phrase you used in your book too, that makes it so hard to kind of understand what's really going on. So maybe it's about this kind of social and cultural contract of fluid changing as we talk about. And I want to sort of go into how much of it is also to do with the valuation of food that comes from something you sort of allude to many times in the book as a sort of colonial mode of thinking. Right. And I want to sort of press you a bit more about this, so I quote from you. You know, we don't talk about colonialism in Singapore because if we did, we might need to rethink our entire sense of national self in history. That's a really powerful statement, I think, in a book where you go from everything from, you know, the observing the bar of Raffles Hotel to thinking about the logic of the post colonial Singaporean government and the way itself imposes these top plan modes of thinking. What is the role of colonialism in food in Singapore and how Singaporeans view their own society, you'd say, oh, goodness,
- [26:31]
C
that is a huge question which I'm not sure I'm really qualified to answer, but Let me tell you. So I'm going to answer with a story instead. This is a story about Singaporean foods that I have been trying to write for years, literally, and haven't been able to find quite the right words for. But one of my favorite restaurants in Singapore is a place called Candlenut. And they serve. They serve home style, straight Chinese cooking, but they serve a pretty refined version of it. Right. And they, you know, full disclosure, I. I know the chef. I have had long conversations with him, and they really do it properly. Like, the staff work four days a week because they pound everything by hand. And like, at that scale, pounding all your spice pastes by hand is just a degree of care and commitment that is almost unimaginable to me.
- [27:41]
B
Right.
- [27:42]
C
And you know, they have to charge high prices to pay the staff that they need to do this correctly. Right. And they. And in. And the restaurant has gone through several iterations now. You know, it started out feeling pretty simple, almost like you were going to someone's home to eat. And they have gotten fancier with each new location, right. Where the decor has gotten better. Now they have a Michelin star. And I think, because I don't know the numbers, I think they're now finally able to charge what they need to charge to make this kind of cooking sustainable. And what I keep asking myself is, well, have they only gotten to this point because of the Michelin star? Sometimes it feels to me like they were sort of known and loved before, but like it's really this recognition that has enabled them to get on stable footing. And I wonder, why does it take a Michelin star? Why does it take a guidebook that was started in France to do this?
- [29:01]
B
Yeah. So I've encountered the food at Candle Nut. Well, encountered is a very bland way to say that I've greatly enjoyed the food at Candlenut. Only in the era where postmodern star, you come on an extremely fancy occasion and the kind of script almost feels like what you described in every sort of genre of fine dining right around the world. It's not like it's unrecognizable to me as a restaurant that would conjure up feelings of going to someone's home, for instance, in the early days, as you mentioned. And yeah, I do wonder that as well. And I guess maybe it sounds like your suggestion is that the clonial mode of thinking in here is that there needs to be an external validation of what exactly is valued before it can be compensated accordingly, Right?
- [29:42]
C
Yeah, it's external validation, but I think it's also about the changes we have to make to earn that external validation. So if you've been to Candlenut, you know that they present you, you know, like you can get what they call the amaakase, and that starts with like a little batter of snacks, like the quip, like this miniaturized whip ID is almost always there. And then there's some other things. And, you know, I think, and I am left to wonder, like, well, this isn't how. Is this how the cuisine would have evolved without the pressure of having to conform to Western expectations about tasting menus? Is there a sort of native. Could there have been a sort of native, like, Singaporean vision of what this could have been? I don't know, and I don't think it's possible to know, like, the world, you know, history is too thick, history is too heavy. These are counterfactual questions.
- [31:00]
B
I want to throw out one organization, or maybe it's a kitchen that plays with that kind of idea of history and culinary questions and counterfactuals. And that's Orang Laut, who I think I mentioned once. So for the benefit of our listeners, they are a group of indigenous seafaring people in Singapore. They travel between the real islands, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia today. And what's interesting is that they're one of the only groups that I've come across interested in asking questions about what indigenous people in Singapore were like and how they continue to live. And they do a home cooking business as well. And I think you mentioned tasting that when you return to Singapore, and perhaps that's a kind of difference take. Right. And to me, it sort of raises two questions. Number one, what was that experience like for you? Just from a more culinary perspective? I've not tried them, even though I've always been meaning to. And number two, what is the role of home cooking in all this? We've talked about things like hawker centers, food courts, fine dining, restaurants, the personal kitchen. But what about home cooking businesses, for example, or the experience of a different sort of communal dining experience? Does that have any promise, maybe for cooking in Singapore? You mentioned this a few times in your book, and you've done something like that yourself. Right.
- [32:06]
C
So to start with the question about Orang Laud, it was delicious, really. The food was really fantastic. And I think that's an achievement given that, you know, it is actually like home delivery. You're literally what happens is you order from them online and then at the appointed time and date, they will show up at your place with a bunch of takeout containers give it to you and you go up, you know, you go up to your flat, you unpack it and it is really fantastic cooking. I don't know the economics behind that business. I hope they are charging what they need to charge, but the sense I have is that a, it's possible to do that at really small scale. So, you know, I think. I don't think our own laud serves all that many people a week. And so at that scale, I think it's doable. I think it speaks to the power of rent and real estate because again, I don't know quite how or where orang laud are doing the cooking, but one of the ways the hawker economy at large works is that hawkers will do a lot of prep at home. Right? A lot of hawkers will prepare at home and carry the food to their stalls. And I think orang laut might be working out of a home kitchen as well. And without that rent pressure, I think a lot more is possible. And for listeners outside Singapore who might not know this, one of the enabling forces behind in the hawker economy as a whole is that hawker rents for a long time were subsidized by the government. Increasingly, that's not the case, but that's one of the forces that's really shaped that economy. And you ask about the role that home cooking plays in all this and I think I want to touch on the thing I said earlier about what culture is. Right? Culture is not laksan. Next to tsague te, next to chicken rice. Culture is hundreds of stalls all cooking chicken rice. Culture is hundreds of home cooks, millions of home cooks all working from the same canon and doing their own thing with it. And I think it's almost impossible to think about what food can cost or should cost unless you have tried growing it and cooking it yourself.
- [34:37]
B
Yeah. And I think that sort of sense that you need to just encounter this yourself is another reason why I encourage every listener out there to really pick up a copy of this book and go through the myriad of recipes available in here. The one thing I might try pretty soon is what you have in Across Borders as vernacular chicken curry, an invention that you mentioned is created in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And, yeah, that sense that cooking is a kind of first step, I think, to knowing more about the world that you can make yourself. I want to sort of move towards the end of this interview by just asking some questions about the. What else didn't make it into your book? We've got lots of excellent recipes in here. Was there anything that you were kind of experimenting with but didn't end up having in this book. That's my first question. And the second question for you is about, what do you think? Tell me more about the story you said you wanted to write but didn't get around to writing. The colonialism thing. How close were you to sort of telling a tale that was completely different from what we end up seeing in this book? So one about recipes and one about the story that you want to tell?
- [35:33]
C
Well, the colonialism question, I'm afraid, has a brief and uninteresting answer, which is that, you know, I. I don't. Which is that I can't give you an answer, right. Because I literally haven't quite managed to get those thoughts together properly in my head. But on the cooking front, I can tell you that something that I. That didn't make it into the book there is, as I said, I. I want. I. I found myself having to teach myself to make Singaporean food from cookbooks and memory, right? And because I have a sort of systematic spreadsheet brain, I actually went and made a spreadsheet. And, like, you know, like, a lot of cookbooks will give measurements in, like, two stalks of lemongrass, five cloves of garlic. And I'm standing there scratching my head, being like, well, is your clove of garlic the same size as my clove of garlic? And so, you know, I went and, like, took a bunch of these cookbooks. I took Mrs. Lee's cookbook, I took Mrs. Wee's cookbook. I didn't take Mrs. Long's because I didn't have it. I took the Southeast Asian food book. I mentioned the one from this Australian woman, Rosemary Brissenden. And, like, I start writing out the recipes for the wampas, and I translate them into gram weights, and I sit there comparing them, and I realized that, well, hell, at the end of this, like, I'm not sure I have actually learned much at all from this exercise because, like, the comparison has not enabled me to see any patterns. And. But somehow just spending that much time thinking about it and spending that much time, I actually at one point did side by side taste tests of, like, the Gulai Ayam rempas from the three books. And I don't write about that at all. But I think it's also a really hard thing to write about because what I was trying to do was develop an internal confidence. And I don't know how you do that. Right. Like, I think the process of learning to do something is fundamentally mysterious and human and Individual and intransmissible.
- [37:55]
B
I like that itself almost feels like a corrective against these kind of like food lab type scientific experimentations where we'll make the perfect Carbonara after about 10 goals in a test kitchen somewhere. And the kind of idea that there's a personal, like I said, intimacy, I think is really quite interesting. And I'm sure that people making the recipes that you have in this book are going to realize that, yes, a clove of garlic is not the same. The kind of, you know, is chilli party. Always chilli party when you buy it. That sort of question. And I'd like to sort of end with two questions. Well, I'll save the last one for after this, but what else are you working on right now with your writing? Is it cooking related? Is it more to do with technology? I know you run an active substack, which you will find in the description of this podcast episode, but where have your thoughts gone?
- [38:37]
C
So I. So I write for substack and I have at least one more book project in the works right now, which I'm not yet ready to talk about, but there are more books coming for listeners out there. My day job is actually as a technical writer, which is a completely different field of writing from anything we've talked about today.
- [39:06]
B
Okay, so a bit of a mystery there, and I think one that you'll be able to answer perhaps with some difficulty, which is. I got this question, a cliche question of another New Books Network interview. What will your last meal be? You get every course you want. Don't worry about it. Not that that's a common thing. And I would say, like most of the styles of cooking I've been thinking about.
- [39:25]
C
So I know it is a trope that in restaurant kitchens everyone talks about this, but in the kitchen, we vanish. We never once discussed this in seven years. So I don't have a great answer for you. But I also have a recommendation for you, which is that there is the most fabulous, fabulous essay about President Francois Mitterrand's last meal. It is out there on the Internet somewhere, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
- [39:55]
B
All right, so we'll defer to the President himself. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today at the New Boats Network tw. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
- [40:05]
C
Thanks, Ernest. It's been such a pleasure.
- [40:08]
D
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