Home Cooking

Kelly Wong

If you look up #homecooking on Instagram, you’ll find over 21 million posts. It’s a hashtag I add to my posts whenever I present a gallery of dishes I’ve cooked up at home that look good enough for the ’gram. But honestly, home cooking is ubiquitous and banal. It’s just a way of life.

From a young age, I remember school friends and work colleagues telling me how lucky I am to have parents who are such good home cooks. This always struck me as odd, particularly as a child – doesn’t everyone cook at home?

But this leads me to another question; what defines a good home cook anyway?

Certainly, the rise of cooking reality TV shows such as Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules have set stupendous standards for home cooking. But let’s talk outside of that context. Why is preparing a meal with side dishes plated lovingly on delicate servingware made specifically for this ritual? Isn’t cooking for sustenance just as much a legitimate form of home cooking? Instant noodles eaten straight from the pot is a completely acceptable meal and the hill I will die on.

In my case, the food I ate at home growing up (and eat now, when I visit as an adult) was certainly varied and unlike anything I’ve ever eaten at a friend’s house. There were no regular Sunday roasts, or spag bol on Thursday. That kind of meal repetition frightens me still. At home, there was a complex, deep variety of dishes that my parents brought over to Australia from Singapore – a nation obsessed with food influenced by many different cultures, where eating is regarded as a national pastime. When they immigrated in the late 80s, these dishes moved along with them, and onto our plates.

There are many reasons why my Chinese Singaporean parents cooked so much at home. One of them was out of pure frugality (we were a single income household for about the first 15 years of my life). There were other reasons too: a certain disappointment with the food choices in our working-to-middle-class, white-dominated suburb, and a creative outlet for my stay-at-home mother before she re-entered the workforce. More so, it was a sense of recreating comfort and home for themselves while living away from their homeland, and especially as they try to pass their culture and traditions down to my sister and I.

My parents have lived in Australia for over 35 years now, cooking countless meals in their modest suburban kitchen. This space is the heart of our household, as mum and dad shout over the roaring range hood while they cook. For my dad, this span of time is exactly half his lifetime, and over half for my mother.

Both of my parents are competent cooks. But it’s my dad who usually takes over for the more complicated traditional hawker foods – think chicken satay, curry chicken, char kway teow, beef rendang, and Hainanese chicken rice with homemade chilli sauce – but also the special occasion top-tier dish; Singaporean chilli crab. My mother takes the wheel when it comes to the more homestyle, everyday dishes (such as steamed minced pork, mapo tofu, and fried rice), that keep the household going throughout the week.