Too much ginger, and other family law

My aunt measures ginger with her thumb. She lays the knob against the ball of her hand, presses her thumb across it to mark a line, and cuts there. Ask her how much that is in grams and she will look at you the way you might look at someone who has asked what a song weighs.

We went to the wet market on Saturday, the early trip, the one that begins before six while the floor is still being hosed and the light comes in grey and flat over the stalls. The fish lay out shining on their beds of ice. Somewhere a cleaver came down on a board in a steady, unhurried rhythm, the sound of a morning that has done this ten thousand times. My aunt moved through it the way she moves through her own kitchen, touching everything, trusting nothing, holding a bunch of spring onions up to her nose as though it might try to lie to her.

The ginger seller knows her. He put aside the young ginger without being asked, the pale kind with the pink shoulders, the sort mild enough to use with a heavy hand. She bought more than the recipe needs. She always does. The recipe, if you can call it that, is a steamed chicken with ginger and spring onion, the dish my grandmother made on the days that mattered and plenty of the days that did not.

Here is where the argument begins, and it is an old one. I think my grandmother used less ginger than my aunt remembers. I have watched my aunt make the sauce, that bright raw slurry of grated ginger and scallion and hot oil poured over at the end, and I have watched her put in an amount that would have made my grandmother raise an eyebrow. When I say so, gently, she tells me I have my grandmother's hands but not her tongue, which is a way of telling me I am wrong without quite saying it.

The trouble is, I cannot prove her wrong, and she cannot prove me right, because the person who settled these questions is not here to settle them. What we have instead is the dish, made slightly differently in two kitchens, each of us convinced we are the faithful one. My version is quieter. Hers announces itself. Both of them, on a good day, taste like a Sunday I can no longer visit.

I have started writing the method down, in grams, with weights I bully out of her by standing over the scale while she protests that this is not how it is done. I do it for my own children, who will one day stand in a kitchen and try to remember whether it was more ginger or less, and will get it slightly wrong, and will pass that slight wrongness on. That is not a failure of the recipe. That is the recipe.

A method is only the part you can measure. The rest, the fist of ginger, the argument, the raised eyebrow of a woman who is not in the room, does not go into grams. You inherit it anyway, or you do not, and no card in a recipe box will decide which. So I keep buying too much ginger, and I keep writing down a number I do not quite believe, and I call it keeping the peace, which in my family is the same thing as keeping the recipe.