Sunday Vibes

Former beauty queen recreates "home" in a foreign land through her cooking

THE screen crackles for a while. "Hello!" I call out. And there she is. With a pair of high-tech and spiffy looking headphones covering her ears, Cassandra Shaman waves and grins. There's also a selfie light ring behind her. She's all set of course, I tease. But it isn't surprising.

After all, Cassandra is no stranger to putting her best foot (and face) forward. Before she was mum to Ephraim, 3, and Darius, 1, and wife to engineer Shaman Kulasekaram, she was Cassandra Santharay, one of the finalists of Miss Malaysia Universe 2010. "Oh my God!" she exclaims, rolling her eyes when I remind her of her beauty queen past.

Her smile is just as dazzling after all these years. "This is my husband's office," she explains, waving her hand dismissively. "He's taking care of our two boys at the moment while I do this interview!"

There's an undeniable air of domesticity about Cassey (as she's fondly known) these days. "My eldest boy caught the flu bug," she shares dryly, adding: "Last week his brother had the flu. Now it's his turn." It's one of those things, she shrugs her shoulders. "It's the change in weather over here," she says.

Over "here" is Oslo, Norway where Cassey has set up home for the past five years. "It's a beautiful country," she tells me smiling. But yes, she can get pretty homesick. "I miss Malaysian food," she confesses, adding: "There isn't a single Malaysian restaurant over here. I really felt the absence of being able to eat Malaysian food, or have the kind of food that my mother cooked."

The dearth of good home-cooked, southeast Asian food had been the one singular blight of living abroad, she tells me wistfully. "It was inevitable that I had to get myself into the kitchen and learn how to cook those dishes I craved," she confides.

When you're living thousands of miles from your home country, craving your mother's or grandmother's cooking is like getting hit with a wave of nostalgia from a fond childhood memory you can't fully recreate.

Food, especially dishes that were made and shared communally, has a way of linking us back to our families' generational hardships and triumphs. There's a rich and labour-intensive history in the ritual of preparing food that should be remembered, and perhaps even revered.

"I thought about the food I grew up watching my mother and my grandmother make, and I simply wanted to start making it for me and my family here," she continues simply. "It's something I took for granted when I was back home in Malaysia. I never realised how much I'd long for a taste of home until I got married and moved to Norway!"

The homesick Cassey taught herself to cook her favourite Malaysian dishes, and then went on to learn other Southeast Asian dishes that she enjoyed back home. "Simply put, I wanted to recreate the food that I loved eating!" she tells me, grinning. It just didn't stop there.

The young mum eventually decided to offer cooking classes featuring Southeast Asian recipes with a twist of her own. "When I arrived here, Malaysian and even Southeast Asian food were not known at all," she recalls, continuing: "I started cooking because I wanted to eat my own home cooking. The flavours of our food are difficult to leave behind, and eventually, I started sharing them with others."

The enterprising woman eventually set up an online grocery store carrying spices and spice blends, every conceivable Indian herb and flavouring, myriad hot sauces, pickles and much more.

"It's something that fellow Malaysians and Singaporeans living abroad in Norway have come to appreciate. They could now access basic things like rendang paste or curry powder to recreate their curries and such," she says, chuckling, adding: "I've also just brought in gula Melaka because that's undeniably the best kind of sugar for our local desserts!"

LIVE TO EAT

She remembers a time when she didn't quite know how to boil an egg, much less recreate her mother's curries, a staple in her family's refrigerator that didn't exist in Norway.

"I didn't think her curries had that much of an impact on my life until I moved away. They were always so readily available," she confesses sheepishly. She loved to eat, not cook; and goes on to explain blithely: "My mother and grandmother are such good cooks. So why bother entering the kitchen? They had it covered!"

You really didn't know how to cook? I can't help but ask her again. I mean, here she is — in Norway — cooking up a storm. I was half-expecting some tender sepia-toned memories of a little girl eagerly learning the rudiments of cooking from her mother in the kitchen.

But Cassey was blowing those sentiments to smithereens. "There was never a need to learn lah. Why would I need it? I had the best cooks already at home!" she replies, grinning.

Continues Cassey: "For my family, the women in our household are actually the captains of a ship. I remember watching my mother and grandmother giving direction while stirring the pots, and no one ever talked back or ignored them. They're the glue to the ship that ties everything together."

Born to a policeman father and a homemaker, Cassey is the youngest in the family. Ah, that explains the lack of cooking skills. "No, no! I wasn't spoilt at all!" she insists, chuckling. Mum was the disciplinarian in the family, she shares, adding: "Dad was my go-to guy and very loving. But he was also a disciplined man. He always emphasised on the importance of education."

The self-confessed tomboy took up her Bachelors in Marketing while working at the same time. "Looking back, I realise why cooking wasn't exactly my priority back in the day. I never had the time back then," she confesses.

To heck with cooking, she had other more interesting pursuits — like becoming a beauty queen. Cassey laughs heartily. "It wasn't planned!" she insists, waving a hand dismissively. "I think it was my height that opened doors!" she adds self-deprecatingly, continuing: "Well, I'm kind of tall!"

It's an understatement, of course. She's 180 cm tall — the "kind of tall" that would inevitably have to field comments like "How's the weather up there?". She nods, laughing. "I've been called a coconut tree, among many other things," she admits, adding: "I've also had people ask me to consider modelling or pageantry because of my height. I wasn't interested, of course!"

Her sister quietly signed her up anyway for the Miss Malaysia/Universe pageant in 2010. "I really wasn't keen and I missed the initial round of auditions. But then I received a call from the organisers asking me to return for the next round and so off I went!" she recounts.

It was quite an experience. Shares Cassey: "I learnt a lot of things. I learnt how to apply make-up; I now own a few pairs of heels and I wear dresses more often these days instead of living in my pair of jeans! Pageantry isn't something I'd do again but I've made some lifelong friends from that group of beauty queens since then."

LOVE AND FOOD

Another lifelong commitment was birthed after she was introduced to her husband by her church friends. "A good part of our relationship was done long-distance. Shaman was already based in Norway but he'd return to Malaysia every three months to visit family in Malaysia," she recalls.

The couple got married in 2015 after two years of courtship. Cassey moved to Norway four months later to join her husband. "Norway is an absolutely beautiful country," she enthuses, adding: "I'll never forget the first time I saw the northern lights. It was magical!"

She wasn't too homesick at first. "We used to return to Malaysia every December and spend the month back home. So, it wasn't too bad at the beginning."

She did miss her Malaysian food though. "I was on the lookout for Malaysian restaurants on my first month here but there weren't any. There were North Indian food and Thai cuisine that was very 'Norwegian-ised', so I realised that I might need to tinker around the kitchen if I wanted to eat something authentic!" she recalls, adding: "Norwegian food is delicious and we have that once a week. But I need my rice!"

So mum was her go-to for recipes that she could try to recreate in her kitchen. "It wasn't easy," she says dryly. Her mother never used a cookbook; her version of Indian cuisine was passed down to her through generations of their family.

Since moving to Oslo, she's more than 9,000km but just one phone call away from her mother in Setapak, Kuala Lumpur. When she called her mother to ask for recipes to satiate her hankerings, the latter gave her the usual obscure measurements, like "a dash of salt" and "you keep tasting and add until you know it's enough".

"It was difficult at first," she admits, continuing: "We finally managed to figure out the exact measurements between the two of us. Of course, my mother had a good laugh because I never really cared about cooking as much as I did about eating when I was back home!"

As she experimented in the kitchen, she found herself enjoying the process of cooking. There was a sense of achievement when a dish came out right. "It was hugely satisfying to be able to eat something you created," she tells me.

She went on to learn how to cook other favourites including Chinese, Thai and Indonesian cuisine by sourcing the Internet and adding on her own personal twist. Experience, she insists, is key.

"It takes knowledge and confidence," says Cassey, "and that comes with experience. You have to start somewhere. But that also means you'd have to experiment on someone. Who better than your husband?" Her husband, she continues, is her taster and critique. "He'd tell me if I've succeeded in recreating a particular dish or if there's something still missing."

After giving birth to her son in 2018, Cassey started practising her newfound skills and served up Asian dishes like wanton soup or curry mee during her get-togethers with other young mums in the vicinity.

The dishes were a hit, and she was asked if she'd be willing to teach them to cook Asian food. "I think the novelty of having something that isn't readily available got them intrigued," she says candidly, adding: "That gave me the idea that this was something I could do!"

The enterprising Setapak native posted on Facebook that she was conducting a cooking class. And the response was encouraging. "People were actually keen," she tells me half-surprised. Her clientele soon grew through word of mouth and the rest, as they say, is history.

It isn't enough to just know the rudiments of cooking a dish. The ingredients should be easily sourced as well and this proved to be challenging. "I used to be able to bring back my stock of curry powders, rendang paste and other condiments when I made my annual trips back to Malaysia," she recalls. But the pandemic upended her trips and her stock.

"I started my online store soon after. Of course, it involved a lot of paperwork and having to deal with bureaucracy. But my husband helped. I mean, that was the only way I could bring in the necessary curry paste, dried chillies, paste and sauces. My biggest customers are the Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians living in Norway!" reveals Cassey, adding: "Mainly because they know what these ingredients are for!"

These days, Cassey juggles between being wife, mother, chef, online store operator and cooking instructor. "It isn't something I envisioned for myself growing up," she readily admits. "It can get hectic, but it's hugely satisfying!"

She hopes her sons will eventually love the food as much as she does. Malaysian and Southeast Asian cuisine are as sensory as they are tropical. On what makes these cuisines stand out, she says it's "the combination of textures, balance of salt, sweet, sour, umami and heat and fragrance."

"I never get sick of eating those flavours, no matter how much I cook," she says passionately, before concluding: "I came to realise that is just a part of who I am, in cooking that food."

To source for Asian condiments in Norway, go to www.cookwithcassey.no.

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