Helen Goh wears many hats: baking columnist, recipe developer, co-author with Yotam Ottolenghi of best-selling cookbooks Sweet and Comfort and psychologist. In her first solo cookbook, Baking & the Meaning of Life, she draws on her memories of life as a child in Malaysia, and then in Australia after moving at the age of 11, and her experiences since, to create a book that celebrates the many reasons we bake, from giving and sharing to learning and growing. In this extract, she shares how baking can help maintain connections across time.
I grew up with stories of my paternal grandfather, who came from China and settled in Klang, the port town outside Kuala Lumpur where I was born. He died before I arrived, and was always described to me as having been a big, kind man. I thought of him as a gentle giant, with patience for small children and an abundant supply of sweets (generosity with sweets was my main measure of kindness at the time!). When I was a little girl in Malaysia, each year we would celebrate his life during the Chingming, or Tomb Sweeping Festival.
The stories that we tell our children about our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, after they are gone, build in our kids a strong and essential sense of relatedness in belonging to a wider family community. For ourselves, it’s a way of affirming the importance of these people in our lives. We remember them, talk about them, share what they meant to us, even with people who never knew them. We bring them to life by telling tales of the music they loved, the things they used to say, the jokes they liked to crack and the foods they loved to eat.
Pineapple pudding cake with salted tamarind caramel. Credit: Murdoch Books / Laura Edwards
For our life to be meaningful, we need to feel that it’s coherent – that it makes sense and is connected across time. And for a life to be coherent, the deep meaning that someone brings to it can’t simply evaporate when they’re gone. Whether it’s the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or the loss of daily contact with a close friend who moves away, we grieve the loss, but that grief, while painful, is an acknowledgement of the role that person played in our life. The person may be gone but their meaning hasn’t, and we seek opportunities to remember and validate their importance to us.
Baking is also a way we hold on to times and places that have deep meaning for us, like the kitchen of our childhood...
Baking is one way we do this. Recipes are passed down from one generation of a family to another, from one generation of chefs to another. Baking is also a way we hold on to times and places that have deep meaning for us, like the kitchen of our childhood, or a special family holiday that turned out to be just perfect and which comes to life again in a breakfast cake that we ate at a sun-dappled table.
Our sense of self also needs to feel coherent. Our past is a gallery of our younger selves, and continuity with these earlier versions of us contributes to the sense of coherence, purpose and significance that characterises a meaningful life. A strong sense of continuity of self has been shown to be associated with higher levels of self-esteem, life satisfaction and psychological well-being, and lower levels of anxiety and depression. We remember and own the aspirations we had, the things we achieved (and didn’t achieve), the mistakes we made and the things we (hopefully!) learned. We remember the music we listened to, the books we read and the clothes we wore – in short, the choices we made. Some of those choices may fill us with pride, some with nostalgia. Some may make us cringe, but even the cringing is important, as it acknowledges our connection to that earlier self and points to the ways we have developed over time.
Strawberry iced finger buns. Credit: Murdoch Books / Laura Edwards
The younger selves that I remember are not seen entirely through the prism of food, but it’s never far away. I reach back to those selves through the foods that I make. The foods of my childhood, the delicacies made for festivals, the day-to-day treats of soft sweet breads (such as iced finger buns), the ubiquity in Malaysia of condensed milk, now in my kopi cakes [pictured below, recipe here]. The barbecues in the park that my family had when we came to Australia, thinking it was the Australian thing to do, and the nights when my father came home and took us out to dinner at his favourite Chinese restaurant. The bakeries I frequented when I had my first job (funny, wherever I went, there always seemed to be bakeries!), and even earlier, the one I worked at when I was at university, which served a cheesecake that, to this day, I have never found anywhere else. And of course, the cakes I made in my own cafe, when I took the plunge into baking.
Credit: Murdoch Books / Laura Edwards
This is an edited extract from Baking and the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh, photography by Laura Edwards (Murdoch Books RRP $55.00).
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