Life.Culture.Discovery.

Leaving home for college? Here’s a cookbook for you

When Singaporean Shu Han Lee moved to London to study at the age of 18, she had to learn cooking from scratch. Her cookbook is based on her experiments in the kitchen – and what it took to get it right

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Published: 1:33pm, 19 May 2017Updated: 1:33pm, 19 May 2017

For many of us, leaving home means missing the food we ate growing up and suddenly having to learn to cook, perhaps calling parents to ask for recipes and advice.

For Shu Han Lee, that moment came when she moved from Singapore to London at the age of 18, away from the food her mother, “the best cook I know”, made for her and her sister.

“I wish I could say I grew up pounding rempah (spice pastes) and throwing things into woks, but I didn’t. Mum, like most Chinese mothers, preferred us to hit the books or the piano instead of getting our hands dirty in the kitchen. It was a rare treat and thrill to be allowed to help her peel hard-boiled eggs for tau yew bak (a dark soy sauce braise with pork and all sorts of goodies), or to tear dough for mee hoon kueh (handmade torn noodles) – usually as a reward for having finished our homework early. So despite being born into such a great food culture, I had no idea how to cook. And to be honest, there was no need to before I moved to London. My first home-cooked meal consisted of rice that was both uncooked and mushy at the same time [...] spinach fried with fermented shrimp paste that sent my flatmates running out of the kitchen in seconds, and a fried egg [...] But I loved it. I sat there proudly chewing on the uncooked grains, googling ‘Why does my rice not cook evenly?’

“I always think that everybody can cook if they really want to. For me, it was a mixture of desperation, greed and curiosity that got me excitedly researching recipes and playing in my kitchen. I would recipe-test something eight times until I got it right. Or I would Skype Mum and show her the clumps of fried bee hoon I had made and she would smile and tell me that I should soak the dried vermicelli in cold water instead of hot.”

Living in London, Lee makes no apology for substituting British ingredients for traditional Asian ones in her recipes.