Tin Recipe Box Full Of Fleeting Taste

I looked at the caller ID on the phone. Amma. “What do you want me to cook for you?“.

I smiled even though I knew she wouldn’t be able to see it from across the ocean. She had asked the same question a hundred times before. To which I gave the same answer, my favourite has always been a famous local dish from the region she grew up in: “prawn curry“. Then I added, “but let’s cook it together this time“. I anticipated a “Why?” but it never came. Good. The answer to that particular why weighs heavily on my world, and I put it in writing here rather than explain it to her.

It all started when a friend, who lost her mother, shared her regrets. One of them was her struggle to “cook like mom” for her grieving family. How, even though she could remember some of the ingredients, some of the recipes and some of the methods, none of them was enough. Enough to bring the same taste to the same plates, served at the same dining table to the same people.

Her words woke my demon, who whispered into my ear as I lay in the bed, asking me, “what would my regrets be?”

The answer? Infinite.

Like my friend, one of them would be the fleeting taste of Amma’s cooking. Even though she had given enough advice to last seven reincarnated lives, Amma had never taught me to cook because I was never interested. That night, unable to sleep, I decided it needed to change when I flew home next.

The day I reached home, I was greeted by the smell of exotic spices filling the air and a warm bowl of prawn curry on the table. I half-heartedly complained that I wanted to learn to cook it but was secretly glad I didn’t have to right after the long flight.

The next day I used a different approach to capture the fleeting taste: I made her write the complete recipe with foolproof detail.

“Why don’t I dictate it for you so you can write it in English?” she complained. “No, Bahasa Indonesia is fine, but I want you to write it“, I replied. She complied and passed me the paper “make sure you cook it; otherwise, you just wasted my time!“

Putting her note in the recipe box, I promised her I would. I told her I planned to fill the box with other recipes from her, my friends, and even my own. It will be a sort of artifact to summon love and support from women in my life, including myself. She laughed and air-quoted, “cooking rice” is not a recipe.

Ha! She doesn’t know that I can boil pasta too!

The day I flew back to Melbourne, she hugged me tightly, enveloping me with the warmth of her love. I wish I could put that motherly love into the recipe box and keep it with me forever.

That’s when I realized it wouldn’t be her cooking that I would genuinely miss but the love she put into cooking the food for me. So that, even though I have the original blueprint inside my recipe box, it will still be a fleeting taste.

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