Kitchen chemistry

Welcome to Indiana: the Betty Crocker cookbook was meant to help ease Celeste Ng's mother into life in the US.

Growing up, I loved looking at the photos in my mother's old Betty Crocker cookbook the chocolate cakes, the cookie house, even the cheese balls and fondues. Then, as an adult, I actually read the text and discovered that, woven into the recipes, were tidbits of advice for the 1960s homemaker.

"The man you marry will know the way he likes his eggs. And chances are he'll be fussy about them. So it behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways," went one.

"If you care about pleasing a man - bake a pie. But make sure it's a perfect pie," said a second.

"Does anything make you feel so pleased with yourself as baking bread?" asked a third.

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Those lines, equally hilarious and horrifying, stuck with me. Every time I saw the cookbook, I felt compelled to read it again, as if to convince myself I hadn't made them up. "Didn't you ever notice them?" I asked my mother recently, when I went to visit. "Didn't they bother you?"

"Oh, sure, I saw," she said, leafing through her mail. "But I just thought, 'I'm not a housewife. I've never been a housewife.' So..." She went back to perusing her mail.

The Betty Crocker from my mother's cookbook is the quintessential all-American homemaker. But in 1968, my mother was neither American nor a homemaker. She was 22 and had just left Hong Kong for West Lafayette, Indiana, where my father was starting a PhD. Friends gave her the cookbook for Christmas, thinking she could use an American one. Until then, she made only Chinese food, when she cooked at all.

At the time, my mother had a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics; at Purdue University she worked as a research technician, extracting enzymes. But another of her tasks was killing the lab rats. I vaguely recalled that it was her job to put them into a shoe box and crush it.

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Kitchen chemistry