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Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a Singapore-born Wall Street Journal reporter in New York, spent a year going back to Singapore to cook with her family. She learned dishes from her living maternal grandmother and aunts, and she also worked to recover the dishes of her late paternal grandmother. Having been steered toward books and a career as a girl, she came to this cooking as a novice in her thirties.
Tan's elders cook by agak-agak, a Malay term for estimating by feel, adjusting until the dough, smell or color seems right instead of measuring exactly. Tan picks up that judgment through tasting and repeated practice alongside her relatives. She also records recipes in the book, but the feel for adjusting them came from cooking side by side.
Tan finds that cooking with relatives draws out stories that direct questions never did. While they cook, relatives talk about the grandmothers, old rivalries and hardships, and why certain things were done a certain way. Treating food as a family archive means the dish is a way into memory and identity, not just an end product. Losing the recipe also loses the stories that were only ever told over the stove.