Cover story
“I had to let go of what I thought my ambitions were”
Gulai lemak pucuk ubi kayu with rice noodles
to a goal which I wasn’t really sure of. I think I had hit a roadblock and I had to let go of what I thought my ambitions were.” At the family table in Singapore, she found
herself reassessing the food she had eaten as a child, excited by the complex, punchy flavours of regional dishes, that she hadn’t been able to find in London. All of a sudden she had a new sense of purpose and a new teacher, in the form of her aunt. “It was igniting all my senses”, she says.
“After not being around this sort of food for so many years and being so completely discon- nected [from it], it was so interesting to work with her and with these ingredients. I knew that’s what I wanted to bring back to London, as I knew there would be people who wanted to taste and experience this food too.” She and her aunt began cooking together
daily. “She’s a really inspiring woman,” Lee says. “She ran a bakery business and it was so amazing to see a woman in power, running it and developing all the recipes. The way she spoke about the dishes we were cooking, how my grandmother had made them and all the stories attached to them, she was so passion- ate about the food she grew up with and it was really inspiring. “I was trained with recipes and strict meas-
urements, but for her it was just instinct. She can put ingredients together for a curry paste by eye and then taste it raw and know it needs more shallot. I think that only comes with cooking dishes thousands of times.”
Fishy flavour Lee’s education began in the markets of Sin- gapore, where she began familiarising herself with ingredients. She describes “eye-opening” moments as she immersed herself in the fla- vours and fragrances of produce and learned the intricacies of techniques honed over generations. The pair spent six months going
32 | The Caterer | 10 November 2023
through her grandmother’s recipes, with Lee carefully measuring ingredients while mak- ing notes and videos to help her recreate them back in London. Perut ikan was a dish that particularly inspired her, its preparation beginning with a collection of herbs including wild betel leaf, bunga kantan (torch ginger flower), kaffir lime leaf and Vietnamese mint from her aunt’s gar- den and ending with a complex dish layered with flavour. She says: “The flavours are so fishy and deep
with so much tamarind, coconut milk and pine- apple, it’s really moreish – you want to drink a whole bowl of it. I was immediately like ‘some- one at home in London has to taste this’. But I wasn’t sure how I would present it – half of it is herbs – and I was thinking ‘who would chew through all of these?’. Also, it’s fish stomach, which is a hard sell, and I probably would have
had to start preserving fish stomach from my fishmonger – was that possible?” So began the challenge of modifying recipes
while retaining their flavour profiles. In the case of perut ikan this saw Lee add dried salted fish to oil, melting it down, before adding a curry paste boosted with shrimp paste and cooking it for around 45 minutes to release the flavour. She then layered ingredients such as pineapple and freshly squeezed tamarind, with the addition of fish sauce at the end. When it came to herbs, she turned to what
was readily available in London – kaffir lime leaves, laksa leaf, mint and lemon verbena – building up a profile that could replicate the taste that had proved so alluring. “That all came together and, drinking that
soup, I thought we could make it work,” she says. “To make it more visually appealing I added more seafood elements – some clams
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