Elliott - Not Quite Nigella

I was never the child that my parents wanted. That was my sister, the Ideal Chinese Child. She excelled at school in the right subjects (maths), was the teachers favourite and went into an acceptable profession after victoriously breezing through high school. I did no such thing and as a result, I was all wrong. I had no talent for piano or violin or maths. I preferred creative subjects and studied psychology and arts at university and then went into advertising, for Gods sake. I think that if my parents could have handed me in for a return at the child production factory then they would have. They would have passed me over the counter and said, This one is all wrong, shes nothing like what we ordered. We have no idea what to do with her.

I wanted to be called Jane. I wanted a devon or jam sandwich in my lunchbox. I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to be just like everyone else. What I was, when I was young, was very thin with a china-doll haircut. I had a name that people liked to shorten to Lori, which just sounded like a truck to me.

My Singaporean mother (a teacher) was strict, no-nonsense and, if I am to be blunt, quite superior in her attitude to things. Shes different now she has mellowed a lot as the years have passed, but she was a fearsome creature when I was growing up and indignant and opinionated about everything. My Hong Kong-born father (a biochemist) was a silent man, and deeply patriotic. This is the man who has a Chinese accountant, a Chinese doctor, a Chinese solicitor and, amazingly, a Chinese mechanic. He would also only eat Cantonese food.

My sister and I absolutely craved the foods and drinks that we just werent allowed to eat. When I was ill with a cough I was given some raspberry-flavoured cough liquid. My sister, eager to try raspberry-flavoured drink, stole into the fridge one night and drank some and promptly fell ill afterwards. My parents just shook their heads at her but I understood why she did it. If I were she, I would have done the same.

On birthdays we would eat junk food as if it were the most precious commodity on earth. Crinkle-cut chicken-flavoured chips with their almost kryptonite green powder on top may as well have been topped by gold dust as far as we were concerned. They were like currency: the larger chips could be bartered, while the smaller crushed-up chips at the bottom of the packet were less valuable, so they were like loose change. And slowly, languidly, wed eat them ridge by salty ridge, the flavour bursting on our tongues with an undeniable umami sensation until our tongues and palates were scratched raw by their rough surface.

Every weekend my mother would cook up a big plate of fried rice or Singapore noodles, and after eating our fill Id take advantage of my birth right order and scrape off the lovely crunchy charred bits from the bottom of the pan. Theyd be packed with flavour with a delectable char and crunch to them and it was always a good moment when I could remove a whole large pancake-sized piece with a triumphant dance.

My family has always been utterly obsessed with food. If we werent buying it we were cooking it; if we werent cooking it we were eating it; if we werent eating it we were thinking about it. Dinners were always eaten at the dining table and they were usually conducted in relative silence. My parents werent big talkers, and any conversation was usually only about school (what sort of marks did you get?) and the food we were eating. At the insistence of my father my mother only cooked Chinese food, specifically Cantonese dishes, and her wontons were a favourite with my sister and me and our friends. Occasionally she would sneak in a curry from her native Singapore, but this would be met with some disgruntlement from my father as he uniformly proclaimed it too spicy.

My mother is a very good cook interested in experimenting with non-Cantonese food, and she would sometimes try to cook lamb or use butter but my father would inevitably say, Are you trying to kill me? I have high cholesterol! So, for the first fifteen years of my life, mealtimes consisted of a parade of Cantonese dishes across our kitchen table (which is no hardship, you do understand), although everyone but my father yearned for something different.

My grandmother from Hong Kong came to live with us when I was a teenager, and she too was eager to try new food beyond Cantonese cuisine. Some nights she would slip us twenty dollars from her savings and say, Buy pizza! with an urgency to her voice. She had learnt English from watching Days of Our Lives , and at over eighty years of age had probably figured that it was now or never to try different food. My sister, grandmother and I would then sit contentedly munching pizza, much to the displeasure of my mother who had cooked a meal for us and the disapproval of my father. Ungrateful, perhaps, but we just wanted something different.

The brilliant thing about growing up in Australia is how absolutely multicultural it is. So even if my dad was monocultural my friends were not, and this allowed me to explore a huge range of foods from many different countries. A high-school friend who lived nearby was Russian and we would swap our after-school meals. First wed visit my house, where she would fill up on my mothers homemade dumpling soup with fat, juicy sesame pork dumplings and slippery noodles submerged in a rich broth (made richer from the deglazed pan juices of the previous nights dinner) or crunchy handmade spring rolls fried up by my grandmother.

Then wed walk the two blocks to her house, where I would devour caviar on buttered bread. I loved the way the pearls of caviar popped on my tongue and released their rich, salty gel. I wont lie though, my first reaction was not as rapturous or kind. I took one bite of the caviar bread and refused to finish it. A Russian stand-off ensued and my friend told me in no uncertain terms that I had to finish it because it was so expensive. I did as I was told and somewhere between that first bite and the last I changed my mind 180 degrees. Forget drug abuse, Im now more likely to be caught thieving a giant tub of caviar to support my habit. The mother of another friend, who was also Russian, loved to feed us and I feel as though I grew up on her fragrant borsch redolent with dill and made rich with a stirring of sour cream. Alongside this were soft pillows of perfectly seasoned gefilte fish.

When I started cooking it was a battle with my mother as the kitchen was strictly her territory and I was not supposed to intrude. I tried to cook but my mother did not like it one jot when I was in her kitchen and would make comments like, It smells burnt, which was discouraging. My kitchen confidence was low as a result and I rarely cooked after that.

I now realise that lots of mothers and grandmothers can be reluctant to share their recipes for fear their children and grandchildren will no longer come home to eat them. But I didnt know this at the time. My grandmother on my mothers side was keeper of many recipes, some of which she shared with my mother but others she held close to her chest. I think people had assumed that she would eventually share the recipes but she deteriorated quickly with Alzheimers after a fall, and her treasured recipes were lost forever.

My mother was no different. She and her friends were reluctant to share recipes and if they shared one, it would be missing a couple of items so that there was no chance of bettering hers. Once my mother handed me a recipe for a sticky-rice dessert. I tried it and it was a pale imitation of hers, a failure even. When I told her about it she looked at the recipe and took out a pen.

Well, you have to do this, and then this, and this, she said, making at least half a dozen changes to the recipe.