For many years once I started living on my own, and as an ode to my paternal grandma, I would make a whole yu tou gao 芋頭糕 or Chinese savory taro cake around Lunar New Year. Since I was very young, I always loved taro. I also have fond memories of my grandma making it around Chinese New Year every year. She would fill her savory taro cake with generous amounts of Chinese sausage, shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp and scallops, then steam them and top them with scallions and cilantro. Unfortunately, having lived with just one roommate, and then one partner and now husband, we could never get through the cake in time before it would start drying out and feeling very dense. Taro is a very starchy root vegetable, and as such, once you cook it, it doesn’t really retain too much water. And after it’s cooked and you let it sit there, every day that goes by means more moisture loss, resulting in a dryer and denser cake. My grandma also made luo bo gao 萝卜糕 or Chinese turnip cake, but not as often as taro, likely because she preferred the taro one herself. One year, I told Chris that I was going to make the turnip cake. This is a bit misleading because no turnips are in the cake; the base of the cake is radish, usually daikon, which is high in water content. He didn’t seem too enthused by it… until after the cake was steamed and he had some pan-fried slices. He declared that it was much lighter than the taro one, predictably. And given the radish has more water in it, it also didn’t dry out after day 4 or 5 the way the taro cake did. So from that point forward, I started making the turnip cake more often or alongside the taro cake. And so it stuck.

I spent some time this morning grating and cooking the daikon, folding it into my rice flour batter with all the generous fillings. It steamed on the stove for an hour. And as usual, it was a beauty, one that I will be sharing with 13 other hungry people on Sunday when we host our Lunar New Year lunch.

My paternal grandma was an amazing cook. Like many women of her generation, she cooked simply by feel, taste, and approximation. She never measured out anything, unless you counted pouring things into rice bowls as “measuring.” She made endless Cantonese delicacies like a professional chef, yet I don’t think anyone in my family truly appreciated that about her until she was gone. I was only nine when she passed away, but I have so many fond memories of dishes she would make, from her labor intensive zongzi (dong, or Chinese tamales), savory Toisan style tang yuan (a chicken/shrimp/radish based thick soup studded with chewy plain mochi-like balls, napa cabbage, dried shrimp, and Chinese sausage; to her simple steamed chicken and mushrooms flavored with salted fish.

While I love my mom and my mother-in-law, I will be honest and say that if the two of them had one thing in common, it’s that neither really ever enjoyed cooking; they kind of got forced into it because of the men they chose to marry. My dad does not really think cooking is something a man should do every day; Chris’s dad can barely boil water on his own. So both mothers cooked out of necessity and were never truly passionate about it. Now that my mother-in-law has both her kids grown and out of the house, she does do more experimental cooking and some pretty good baking. And my mom, to her credit, makes a handful of dishes extremely well that I love, from her loaded jook, several variations of pork bone and vegetable soup, Vietnamese fried egg rolls, to her very rarely made Vietnamese braised pork belly and whole shrimp dish. But regardless of these things, I do not really look at either of them and think they have a signature dish or style that I’d necessarily want to replicate.

I was thinking about a basic Vietnamese condiment, nuoc cham, the popular dipping sauce today. And annoyingly enough, even though I’ve made it endless times, it’s never been a consistent result. I think it’s ultimately because my limes are inconsistent in how sweet/sour/bitter they are, and I don’t always remember to taste the “limeade” base before adding the fish sauce. So I texted two of my Vietnamese friends for their mom’s recipe. Of course, their mom had no recipe and went by feel. But she did confirm tasting the “limeade” concoction before adding in the fish sauce, garlic, and chilies first. If the lime is too bitter, it needs to be evened out with a touch of unseasoned rice vinegar — this is a key step, the tasting to see if the limeade is balanced; would you actually want to drink this as a beverage? That’s an easy addition, especially since I always have that on hand. My friends are trying to gradually document all of their mom’s recipes so that they can replicate it on their own. While that would be a labor of love, I think that’s one of the best ways to honor those who come before us — to continue the food traditions that they lovingly shared with us, so that our children after us can hopefully continue to enjoy and make these dishes. After all, food is culture, and culture is food.