Few Cantonese meals, whether in restaurants or at home, can be said to be complete without that quintessential item on the dinner table - a steaming bowl of hearty soup.
In the Chinese culinary world, the Cantonese are famous for their variety of soups - delicious broths simmered over low fire for hours to bring out the delicate flavours of whatever ingredients that have been added.
Diners sip their soups piping hot and so the slurping sounds one hears at Chinese dinners are not considered to be acts of boorishness but sounds of gastronomic delight.
Cantonese recipe books are not frightfully plentiful in Singapore bookstores, particularly those which focus on local cuisines.
And this is why, a new recipe book, "madam choy's cantonese recipes" was a pleasant and exciting find for me since I have always believed that Cantonese fare is the best among all Chinese food.
I lost my mum when I was seven years old and spent the next six years in the care of a Cantonese maid who, needless to say, served my siblings and I Cantonese soups at every dinner - from elaborate doubled-boiled chicken herbal soup on special occasions to simple egg swirl soup when she was too busy with other household chores. On Chinese New Year we had pak choy soup with succulent slices of abalone.
The book is, of course, not just about Cantonese soups. Its eight sections start off with soup, naturally, and is followed by poultry dishes with the others being pork, seafood, vegetables, rice and noodles, savoury snacks, and finally, desserts.
The recipe book's author, Madam Choy Wai Yuen, at age 85, is a walking treasure trove of all that is good in Cantonese cooking, skills honed and amassed over a lifetime.
In the book's foreword, her daughter, former Straits Times journalist, Lulin Reutens, describes her mum as a "veritable housewife" and goes on the relate the family's history and her mother's many abilities other than the magic she weaves in the kitchen. One such achievement was when she earned a taxi driver's licence in the1950s making her one of the first women here to do so.
Publisher Epigram Books has once again come out with an exquisitely designed product - a handy 148-page publication with waterproof stiff cover and which features four colourful ribbon markers to allow the user to demarcate the various sections, or page, in the book.
The words and illustrations in this book are in dark green against pale yellow pages. As one opens the book, one can't help but smile when one sees illustrations of food products on symmetrical rows of mahjong tiles on both the front and back endpapers. These are the pages inside the front and back covers.
In this presentation, the usual Chinese calligraphic characters or symbols on mahjong tiles are replaced by drawings of fish, maize, lotus roots, a cockerel and so on. But there are also Chinese words which relate to food, such as sweet, sour, hot, delicious.
Ms Reutens expresses some frustration in not being able to get her mum to provide the exact amount or measurement of the ingredients for each dish. This is not surprising since older folk in those days whipped up their family fare instinctually - using a pinch of this and a sprinkle of that. But through painstaking questioning, Ms Reutens says she was able to come to some studiedly reliable guide but asks the reader to do what any good cook does - taste the dish and adjust the flavours.
Like the journalist that she is, Ms Reutens makes the recipes so short, sweet and simple that they are so easy to follow.
Madam Choy's recipe for superior soup stock is for me the most vital of all items. This is the basic stock for many dishes and this is what makes so many Cantonese dishes from sauteed vegetables to noodle dishes, as well as soups, so tasty.
She says that after the stock is made, it can be stored in smaller portions in the freezer for future use.
Such a stock can be added in ,say, winter melon soup, one of my favourites I found in the book. I have cooked this soup often but I never added fresh duck gizzard as an ingredient. Now I can't wait to try this out.
Madam Choy's crispy skin chicken sounds delicious and the recipe instructions make even the amateur dare to try this dish.
Pork ribs with bitter gourd is another of my favourites as is crispy roast pork. Instructions for both are clear and simple.
Dessert lovers will, well, love the many sweet-tooth items in this section and most are easy to prepare. Items here include steamed egg custard, double-boiled snow fungus, and gingko nuts with soy bean sticks.
Each dish has its English description as well as its Cantonese name. For example, paper-wrapped chicken is jee bau gye. Obviously the hanyu-pinyin spelling system is used here. I would have preferred to spell it as chee pau kai, the way the Caonese pronounce this dish.
There are 20 recipes for soup, 13 for poultry, nine for pork, 13 for seafood, 16 for vegetables, six for rice and noodles, four for savoury snacks and 13 for desserts.
For all this culinary harvest from a woman who fed a large famly so well for nearly than 60 years (Madam Choy married at age 16), the book at $18 (excluding GST) is a real bargain. It is already into its second print run and is available at leading bookstores.
