food memoir... Elizabeth Haigh
The chef savours the pleasures of passing down family recipes
Peranakan or Nonya cuisine comes from the Peranakans, the name given to the descendants of the early Chinese migrants who settled in the Malay archipelago, in particular Penang and Singapore, and intermarried with the local Malays. This is my family’s heritage. In my book Makan, an exploration of the food of my family, I wrote a chapter called ‘Nonya secrets’, which was the most challenging. It’s called ‘secrets’ because my mother would have gone to the grave with those recipes, but I’ve managed to convince her otherwise by reminding her of what she’d be passing onto the family.
It’s definitely brought us much closer, discussing and reminiscing over the dishes we’ve not had for a while – asam ikan pedas (fish curry), babi pongteh (pork stew) and five-spice pork rolls. They invoke memories of dining back in Singapore or Malaysia.
Many of the recipes were tough to write, because they are based on which, in Malay means measuring by feeling, sense, or literally ‘estimation’. This cuisine really connects the cook with the dish. Ingredients were quite difficult to quantify, and this was only made more challenging in the UK as we didn’t have access to our usual spices like ground turmeric, curry powder or herbs like galangal or laksa leaves without a lengthy trip to Chinatown. I tried to recreate the dishes from both our hearts and our taste memory. My mother, aunties and uncles have cooked these dishes countless times, and so the ‘guestimation’ was second nature to them, but I was having to learn from them and interpreting the recipes using the culinary knowledge I had. Mostly though, the dishes are best understood through eating them, and I definitely didn’t have a problem with that.
I felt like I was a child again, watching my mother cook, and I hope that I can do the same with my son Riley, who’s now three and taking an interest in the kitchen. I wrote the book so that this wonderful cuisine won’t be lost in generations to come and to show other proud immigrants like us that we are represented too. ‘Makan: Recipes from the Heart of Singapore’ by Elizabeth Haigh (£26, Bloomsbury Absolute) will be published on 13 May.