THE PERANAKAN
Baba Colin Chee reviews The Tastes of Home – Easy-to-Cook Dishes from Singapore and Malaysia by Baba Ong Jin Teong.
When I first received Dr Ong Jin Teong’s third and latest cookbook by courier late last year, it looked unpretentious. The paperback’s size is 15cm by 21cm with 169 pages of simple recipes. Yet it recently garnered the Gourmand World Cookbook Award Lisbon 2025 for the Best of the Best 1995-2025 Food Culture, having been shortlisted for the Easy Recipe Category. The Tastes of Home is handy and practical. It won’t take up much kitchen counter space when you need to refer to it while cooking. Nor do its recipes take up a lot of mind space for the first-time cook.
It is not a coffee table book. It is a paperback that begs to be used.
And you will use it because it is simply written with 40 plus simple-to-prepare recipes that hark back to mummy’s and grandma’s everyday dishes, from Lap Cheong Omelette to Nyonya Sambal Fried Rice to Teochew Moi to Bee Hoon Fried With Canned Stewed Meat to Fish Curry and to desserts like Sago Gula Melaka.
Don’t these dishes sound familiar? I could enjoy every nostalgic aroma emanating from Singapore’s and Malaysia’s home kitchens just browsing the book’s pages.
These are familiar, everyday comfort foods that make life worth living!
Simply because they were set out to be such.
In his email to Baba Emeric Lau, editor of The Peranakan Association Singapore’s newly launched e-magazine, The Peranakan, Baba Ong, a Penang Peranakan Chinese, wrote:
“My original intention for my latest book was to help students going overseas to cook.
“It turned out that the easy dishes are those cooked at home by my mother, aunts and cousins and many of the dishes are similar to those in Singapore and Melaka.”
“I also realised that very few of our younger generation of Nyonyas and Babas can cook. The younger generation has to learn the basics of cooking before they can cook Nyonya dishes!”
My wife Linda and I, together with a few other friends have been fortunate to be invited to feast on Baba Jin Teong’s delicious and authentic Penang dishes.
He is a humble cook and always a little surprised and abashed that we should enjoy his cooking.
His mother taught him to cook simple dishes as a young man before he went overseas to study for his electrical engineering degree. And he studied abroad long enough to hone his cooking skills before obtaining his PhD in electrical engineering.
Who says engineers can’t cook!
The Tastes of Home, published by Landmark Books, is Baba Jin Teong’s third book. His two earlier works are Penang Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cook published in 2010, and Nonya Heritage Kitchen: Origins, Utensils and Recipes published in 2016.
Both books also won Gourmand World Cookbook awards.
