On Recipe Book Collections and the Stories They Hold

Nyonya Noreen Chan finds treasure in the form of her recipe collection.

In my kitchen, I have a bookshelf of recipe books; if the upper shelf were not already packed with trays, tins, racks and other baking utensils, there would be recipe books there too. Most are bought, some are gifts and a few have been passed down through the family. The latter are the most precious; dog-eared, stained and scotch-taped in parts, they represent the efforts and stories of a few generations of women.

I used to feel guilty about my stacks of recipe books, especially when I knew I would never cook from most of them. That is, until I discovered that my grandmother (Mama Elsie) was an avid recipe collector, even into her 70’s and 80’s. She would return from the hairdresser’s with a page torn from a magazine – or the entire magazine! – to cut out the recipe. After her death, I found that she had even organised her collection into fish/seafood, chicken, pork etc.

Home cooks have always exchanged recipes, and although recipe books were available, they were not as common as now. In pre-independence Singapore, choices were very limited especially for local dishes. Mrs Susie Hing’s In a Malayan Kitchen with its hand drawn illustrations, was a slim volume containing handy kitchen tips and a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indonesian recipes. Inside the front cover, my mother had written her name and 14^th July 1956, which suggests it could have been a birthday or pre-wedding gift (she got married later that year). “Pastal Toetoep” or Java Shepherd’s Pie is still a family favourite to this day.

Around that time, Ellice Handy published her cookbook My Favourite Recipes (in 1952) and it rapidly became a popular classic, reprinted multiple times with different design covers over the years. Books that focused just on Peranakan cuisine did not exist until the publication of Mrs Lee’s Cookbook by Mrs Lee Chin Koon (mother of Lee Kuan Yew) with its distinctive orange cover. Many Peranakan households probably have a copy somewhere.

In my family however, Singaporean Cooking by Mrs Leong Yee Soo, was the “go to” book. It contained not only Peranakan, but also Malay and Western style dishes. Mama’s annotations can be found on some of the recipes, where she has added notes and made changes to suit her taste. 

It is a myth that Peranakan cooks somehow memorised recipes; almost everyone I know had a recipe collection, even if they were not always organised in one place. And so it was that whenever we had to cook a certain dish, we also had to know where to look for guidance – Mrs Lee, Mrs Leong, or my grandmother’s collection of handwritten recipes (more of that later)? 

What recipe book(s) do you have in your collection, and what are your family favourites?