The Same Old Story by Anya Ow (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with the narrator programing her food machine as she remembers her grandmother making onde-onde:
Grandmother combined the flour with pandan juice from the blended waxy leaves we grew from her planter box, kneading it gently. Her gnarled hands twitched hungrily over the pots, steaming coconut, pinching out pieces of rested dough, and filling the center of each flattened disc with a thumb of gula melaka. The water she used to boil the rested dough had been distilled and recycled from household wastewater the day before. The smooth rice balls floated to the thrumming surface in restless jerks. They looked like balls of phlegm spat into the pot by the dying, restlessly jockeying for attention. Not appetizing in the least. I stared at my feet and wished I was elsewhere as Grandmother removed the rice balls with a slotted spoon and coated them in a bone-white dusting of grated coconut.
The kuih was hot to the touch, the palm sugar bursting on my tongue. My four-year-old self had been gearing up to throw an ice-cream tantrum, but I now sat stunned on my stool, chewing slowly. I decided that I did not like it. When I looked over to my grandmother to complain, I was startled to see that she had closed her eyes. Tears pursued themselves down the timeworn grooves of her face. My resentment fled. We sat and ate in silence, mourning her memory of old Singapore. I wrote the mourning into my gula melaka, twisted my grandmother’s unresisting grief into its moreish sweetness. pp. 72-73
The rest of the story sees the narrator enter a cooking competition judged by world leaders in a Post Collapse world. She (spoiler) loses to a French chef’s imitation of a dish that she intended to present (there is probably some authentic vs. adapted or cultural appropriation point being made here).
If you like the passage above, there is more over-described food and angst here for you. I found it made for dull reading.
* (Mediocre). 3,450 words.