My nai nai (paternal grandmother) lived with my family in Los Angeles for a majority of my childhood. She spent most of her life in Tianjin, China, where she raised my dad and his three siblings. When my siblings and I were born my grandparents moved to LA to join us. My yeye (paternal grandfather) was a US citizen from his time in the US Navy and my nai nai entered the US with a green card and the hope of applying for citizenship. I often think about how lucky I was to have had her as such a fixture in my childhood. Not just for the unique warmth and care only a grandmother possesses, but for the seemingly never ending feast of delicious food that she prepared for my family for half of the week (my mom cooked dinner for the other half, I ate really good as a kid). Homemade dumplings, stir fried rice cakes, black bean noodles, congee, braised pork belly with tea eggs, whole steamed fish, graced the lazy susan on my family’s dining table night after night — cooked to perfection each time, as if my nai nai had made each dish so many times it had become muscle memory. As a kid I would pull up a chair and sit on the other side of the kitchen island, watching my grandmother at work, her glasses always perched on the very edge of her nose as she leaned over whatever was sizzling away in her giant wok. A dish that without fail always made a bi weekly appearance was this chicken curry. I loved eating everything my nai nai cooked, but this curry held a special place in my heart and stomach. The smell of yellow curry powder wafting through the house would always make me giddy with anticipation for dinner time. A few months ago on a particularly gray, wet and cold day, I had a deep longing for a bowl of my nai nai’s chicken curry. I did not have a recipe, but I did have very vivid memories of watching my grandmother make it, as well as remembering exactly what it tasted like. I knew she always used bone in chicken, good quality coconut milk, and threw in a few bay leaves before it braised, three key things that I think make this curry so perfect. It’s not an exact replica of my nai nai’s curry — I don’t think it’s possible to replicate something someone else cooked so perfectly — but it’s delicious and satisfied the longing I had for a dish that for years had only been in my memory.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to a balcony in Brooklyn: the newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.