How to cook Peranakan food, the easy way - according to Terry Tan
- Nonya cuisine, as it is also known, unites Chinese, Malay and Southeast Asian influences and aromas
- In Nonya Cooking: The Easy Way, Terry Tan collates his mother’s culinary repertoire
To the interested outsider, the Baba-Nyonya people – descendants of intermarriage between the Straits Chinese and Malays – can be fascinating. They are famous for their ornate jewellery, distinctive architecture and clothing, and food.
Nyonya (also spelt nonya) cuisine is notoriously difficult and time consuming to make, and the recipes are traditionally passed down through the family, with dishes prepared by (or under the strict supervision of) the matriarch.
Singaporean food writer, chef and culinary instructor Terry Tan learned to cook from the best teacher: his mother. In the preface to Nonya Cooking: The Easy Way (1996, but originally published in 1981 as Straits Chinese Cookbook), he writes, “More than anyone else, it was my mother who gave me the best lessons in culinary arts.
“My sisters were all married by the time I was nine, and father having died the year before, it fell on me and my two brothers to help with the household chores. Each of us would do one chore and the task of peeling onions, beating eggs and pounding chillies usually fell on me, but it was the best way to learn.
“My mother, like her mother before her, never wrote anything down, committing every recipe she knew to memory. This may seem a prodigious task, knowing, as she did, some hundreds of ways to cook chicken, pork, fish or vegetables. It was sometime in the mid-fifties that I realised all these recipes would be lost if someone did not record them. I was no more than 14 then.
