{"id":3099,"date":"2025-08-12T13:25:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T13:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/tpasmag\/?p=3099"},"modified":"2025-08-12T13:30:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T13:30:03","slug":"on-recipe-book-collections-and-the-stories-they-hold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/on-recipe-book-collections-and-the-stories-they-hold\/","title":{"rendered":"On Recipe Book Collections and the Stories They Hold"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nyonya Noreen Chan finds treasure in the form of her recipe collection.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shelf of Recipe books<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s and 80\u2019s. She would return from the hairdresser\u2019s with a page torn from a magazine \u2013 or the entire magazine! \u2013 to cut out the recipe. After her death, I found that she had even organised her collection into fish\/seafood, chicken, pork etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Recipe collection by category<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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\u2019s In a Malayan Kitchen<\/em> 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 14th<\/sup> July 1956, which suggests it could have been a birthday or pre-wedding gift (she got married later that year). \u201cPastal Toetoep\u201d or Java Shepherd\u2019s Pie is still a family favourite to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around that time, Ellice Handy published her cookbook My Favourite Recipes<\/em> (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\u2019s Cookbook<\/em> by Mrs Lee Chin Koon (mother of Lee Kuan Yew) with its distinctive orange cover. Many Peranakan households probably have a copy somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Leong YS book cover (left) and Leong YS book interior (right)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In my family however, Singaporean Cooking<\/em> by Mrs Leong Yee Soo, was the \u201cgo to\u201d book. It contained not only Peranakan, but also Malay and Western style dishes. Mama\u2019s annotations can be found on some of the recipes, where she has added notes and made changes to suit her taste. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s collection of handwritten recipes (more of that later)? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What recipe book(s) do you have in your collection, and what are your family favourites? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nyonya Noreen Chan finds treasure in the form of her recipe collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dalam-dapor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3099"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3103,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099\/revisions\/3103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peranakan.org.sg\/theperanakanmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}