When Ana Abdullah was a child, and she’d been naughty, her father - a school teacher, and a strict disciplinarian who, unusually for men in Malaysian society, did all of the cooking in her household - would make her sit outside the house in their village as punishment. Stubbornly, she would sit in the baking sun and refuse to come back in. “I’ll die out here!” she would say, with not a little drama.
But then she would smell her father’s crisp corn fritters frying in hot oil in the kitchen, and would come running back in. On a recent Tuesday morning beneath the Corn Exchange, she taught a group of us how to make them - equal amounts of plain flour and water, sweetcorn, red onions, turmeric - not too much - and then a dipping sauce made with lime, chilli, palm sugar and fish sauce.
It’s simple and homely cooking, but nonetheless transformative for that. I now want to make them every day. Ana, who has run a cookery school in Kuala Lumpur for 15 years, has recently made the move to Manchester, to Chorlton in fact. It’s a new chapter for her, her children now grown up and the opportunity to travel possible again.
