A DAUGHTER REMEMBERS

HER eyes glisten. Her voice drops. Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah swipes the screen of her handphone with her index finger, looking for the foreword she wrote about her father, where she pays tribute to Almarhum Sultan Iskandar of Johor, for the life lessons he imparted and also for nurturing her love for cooking and food.

She reads an excerpt from it. “Bah told me to learn to cook. He said, “if Azizah doesn’t know how to cook, how would she know if her cooks are not doing it right?” confides Tunku Azizah, recalling one of the reminders that her late father, whom she addresses fondly as ‘Bah’, gave when she was young.

Tunku Azizah, who’s the Tengku Puan Pahang, started to “learn” how to cook at the tender age of six. “I was manja with my nanny, Mak Namah, and spent more of my time with her in the kitchen. I guess that’s when I started my cooking lessons,” she quips.

At the age of 12, she cooked roast turkey with chestnut stuffing for the family. At 13, she was tasked by her mother, Sultanah Zanariah, with the baking of the Johor palace’s special fruitcakes and Raya cookies. By the time she was 16, she was handling the palace’s barbecues for up to 500 people. “I wasn’t forced to do it. I enjoyed it,” she says.

With a gentle smile, she shares that Almarhum Sultan Iskandar also wanted for his guests to the palace to rave about the food that they were served and not so much about how beautiful the palace was. He also reminded her to look after everyone. “Azizah must make sure that the Tunku Azizah recalls: “Lee had written to my father about me but Almarhum never told me. Three days before he passed away, he told my mother that Lee wrote to him. Then Lee wrote to me.” It seems that Tunku Azizah had sent him 21 jars of the sambal belacan along with other local sambal.

And when her children are home from abroad, her dining table will heave with at least six dishes and her children’s favourites. Her husband, The Regent of Pahang, Tengku Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah, also prefers home-cooked dishes. “He’d tell me that he wouldn’t want to go out as there’s good food at home,” she confides.

In fact, shares Tunku Azizah, her husband would sometimes eat at home first before going for an event or make sure that some food is left for him to eat when he