A Taishan culinary legacy
Home cook Nicole Ann Ho continues to make the heritage Taishanese food she learnt as a child.
TAISHAN is a city in south-western Guangdong, China, that is famous for exporting people, which is why it is often called the “first home of the overseas Chinese”. In America alone, over 500,000 Chinese Americans are said to be of Taishanese descent.
In fact, dig a little deeper and you’ll find quite a starry line-up of people who descend from Taishan, including Hollywood silent movie actress Anna May Wong, Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen and Australian chef Kylie Kwong.
I learnt all this while speaking to home cook Nicole Ann Ho Choon Fah, a 52-year-old second generation Malaysian whose eyes still gleam with pride when she talks about the homeland of her ancestors.
Ho grew up in a kampung in Butterworth, Penang, where many of her elders originated from China. This fostered a culture of constant culinary exchange that spurred the safe-keeping of many heritage recipes. In fact, her own mother, 78-year-old Liang Kim Bee, learnt how to cook authentic traditional Taishan food from her grandmother, who hailed from Taishan.
“The elders made a lot of traditional cookies and dishes from China during festive seasons or even for everyday meals. So that’s how my mum learnt. And I spent a lot of time with her. Whatever she cooked, I observed and followed. Most of the time, she cooked traditional Taishanese food,” says Ho.
Which is how Ho grew up surrounded by the food of her forebears, an immersion process that has imbued her with a lot of pride in her culture and heritage. In a strange twist of fate, Ho married a man who also originates from Taishan and is just as passionate as she is about their roots. Which is why all three of Ho’s daughters can speak the Taishanese dialect (a dialect she says few Taishanese have preserved in Malaysia) and are able to cook the family’s traditional food.
“Now that my daughters have grown up, we make an effort to pass down the traditions so they are proud of their ancestors’ homeland. I have taught them all the heritage dishes, so they are able to make them independently,” she says.
Ho visited Taishan 10 years ago and was pleased to find that many of the dishes she makes here are similar to what can be found in Taishan. Like braised chicken with dried mandarin peel, which features a lightly nuanced but zesty sauce.
“This is normally our Chinese New Year dish, but now we cook it whenever we feel like it,” says Ho.
Dried mandarin peel is an element that Ho says is popular in Taishanese cuisine, but she always thought it came from normal oranges. Instead, on her trip to Taishan, she discovered that the skins of an inedible orange were used for this dish.
Then there is the rich and sumptuous dish of stewed lamb with sugar cane. Ho says people in Taishan often eat this warming meal at the start of winter. Although fresh sugar cane is a Taishan specialty, it’s harder to find it here, which is why Ho uses dried sugar cane instead.
“Our ancestors used to eat this meal during winter to warm their bodies. But because lamb is very heaty and the herbs are very heaty, they used a bit of sugar cane to tame it and also to add sweetness, so you don’t have to add sugar,” says Ho.
Glutinous rice balls and Chinese sausage soup features Taishan’s famed dried oysters. The dish is light and flavourful, and best served piping hot as it is another winter favourite. “Many years ago in Taishan, they used to serve this with spare parts like intestines and stomach. When times were better, they added more premium ingredients – my mum puts in prawns,” says Ho.
Another Taishan dish with glutinous rice is a dessert that Ho and her mother love to make and have perfected their recipe to a fine art.
“We normally make this for the first day of Chinese New Year because it is sweet and has a lot of auspicious elements. It is not difficult to make, but you must have a lot of patience to stir-fry the rice. Whether it’s nice or not all depends on the rice. In my kampung, we used to cook this over a wood fire, and it had such a nice smell,” says Ho, smiling
According to Ho, hardly anyone makes this dessert anymore. “My mother said that in the old days, when married daughters went back to their hometowns, they would make a lot of this dessert because it represented their gifts to their family. But now, I don’t see anybody doing this at all and people don’t seem to want to eat it anymore,” she says.
It is this element of tradition being wiped out over the years that has motivated Ho to press ahead and continue to cook heritage Taishanese dishes and encourage her daughters to do the same.
“I feel that very few people know about Taishanese food but I am very proud that I have had the chance to learn it. So I want more people to know how to do it, because it’s a dying art here,” she says.