what I learned from making mantou with mama
life lessons always were best learned in the kitchen
We didn’t always make mantou together. Maybe it was my little sister that inspired our family tradition; she was always precociously good at baking.
I was jealous of the darling little girl with the mischievously sparkling eyes who knew the family recipe for steamed buns before I could. Who the family teased was the genius of the family, while I was only good for eating what she made. I can see her on the tiled floors in our airy house, kneading the dough with all the force a five-year-old can muster.
“I mixed my spit in with the dough,” she whispers to me confidentially as I take my first bite. I choke, cough, and spit it out immediately. “Just kidding!”
I remember stuffing myself so full of mantou one time that my mother joked I would become a steamed bun myself. I felt like I was expanding like one as I laid on my bed, dizzy. I didn’t really regret it though. There was something about the slightly sweet buns that made them delicious, no matter how many you ate.
Sometimes we made challah.
Growing up, one of my best friends was Jewish; my mom no doubt learned from her mother.
I helped my mother braid a glorious loaf and brushed it with egg whites to make it glisten and turn golden brown. We ate it with cream cheese and jelly, or with peanut butter and honey.
I didn’t question why we as an Asian family made a traditionally Jewish bread. And I watched with awe as my little sister braided loaf after loaf, each more intricate than the one before… I wondered how she knew how to braid bread when she didn’t yet know how to braid hair.
Sometimes we made banana bread.
As my parents’ health kick kicked in (or maybe my mom read somewhere that mass amounts of white flour was not great for your children’s health), we made sugar free, oil free banana bread.
I was on my own health kick at the time, as competitive swimming was in full force. I needed to fuel my body, needed complex carbs. I was also just perpetually hungry.
We made loaves of fragrant, cinnamon-laden banana bread, sweetened with bananas and applesauce, studded with chocolate chips and walnuts.
My mom and sister did not use recipes.
That was something that was foreign to me. I thrived with structure, with ingredients. I loved being told what to do and knowing that it would turn out all right.
Mostly because when I didn’t follow a recipe, things usually turned out horribly wrong.
“That’s… lovely,” my parents would say as I tried to not cry.
The perfectionist in me hated that it was the one thing that I could not achieve perfect results in every time.
The rest of my family was a stark contrast. They just made things, and they usually turned out more than OK. My sister baked anything under the sun; my mother cooked from her heart; my father used his chemistry background to create concoctions that I scoffed at but usually ended up devouring.
It wasn’t lost on me that it seemed like a metaphor for life.
I needed rules to live by; they gave me comfort, structure, stability. I needed an image of a final product to model mine after, and ultimately, compare mine to.
But life isn’t a bunch of boxes you can check off, or a pre-ordained set of steps that you follow to achieve a perfect result.
No, life is messy and winding and unexpected.
Sometimes you do things and they’re wonderful. Sometimes you do things and they leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Most of the time it’s somewhere in between.
Maybe that was a lesson my baby sister had learned long ago, as she failed, learned from her failures; succeeded, learned from her successes.
Maybe that was a lesson my mother had learned long ago, as she had immigrated to a new country with no cooking experience and little grasp of the language.
Maybe it was a lesson my father had learned long ago, as he had paved his way to his definition of success, taking the long and arduous route.
Maybe it’s a lesson I’m still learning.
Inspired by the New York Times article “What Children — and Parents—Can Learn from Baking Together.”
