Preserving family heritage

FOOD is something both (right, from left) Szetoo Weiwen and Foong Li Mei relate to very well.
From the time they met while working part-time as waitresses in a nyonya restaurant as teenagers, these two friends understood the significance of food to people.
Upon completing their SPM, the duo took up different courses at a local university but continued to keep in touch.
Foong became a freelance journalist while Szetoo briefly dabbled in photography before opening up a stationery shop with her sister.
Foong eventually got married. Her father-in-law was a man with a colourful past, a jack-of-all-trades and a reformed triad member.
She described him as an excellent chef, who would cook elaborate Hainanese feasts during Chinese New Year.
Foong said he would cook 12 chickens, turning out dishes like Hainanese chicken rice and chicken rendang.
“There was this braised mushroom chicken feet dish that no one has ever learned from him,” she added.
Her husband and brothers-in-law learned all the other dishes when they were helping him in the kitchen, but not this signature dish, because their father would start cooking it before they woke up, as it took a long time to prepare.
Then, sadly, in late 2012, her father-in-law passed away.
Foong recalled: “[He] died of a sudden heart attack. After the funeral, when we were talking about him, one of the aunts said that dish was my father-in-law’s speciality dish [which was] cooked his way.
“That meant that now, no one would ever get to taste that dish again.
“I realised then that we did not just lose someone dear to us, but also that particular taste that we associated with home.”
Foong began to wonder about other families who faced similar predicaments.
Among her own family, she recalled how her own grandmother stopped cooking her signature dishes after she experienced a stroke.
So Foong decided “to document these Malaysian home recipes and the stories behind them, with the hope that the dishes, as well as the spirit of the cooks, can live on in words and images”.
She contacted her long-time friend Szetoo, who coincidentally was running her own food blog.
Szetoo said: “I was also approached by a publishing company to write a cookbook. I couldn’t do it, and around that time, Mei [Foong] needed my help to pitch the [idea] to the editor.”
The two of them decided to work together, and began compiling unique family recipes and the stories behind them with the intention of publishing them in a book.
While Foong did most of the writing, Szetoo shot video and photographs for the project.
When the first draft of her stories were ready, Foong sent the draft to the editor of the tablet magazine The B-Side, who offered her advice on how to improve the stories.
Eventually, her stories were published in the magazine as separate pieces from August 2013 to May 2014.
This year, Foong and Szetoo managed to self-publish their labour of love in a book – The Food That Makes Us.
Other than the stories about Foong’s father-in-law (which was told by her husband) and Szetoo’s mother, the two friends also found other stories about special recipes through friends and mutual contacts.
She explained that among the problems they had to deal with was making these home recipes readable, and trying to document the cooking process.
They would ask the people sharing the recipes to make the dish, while recording everything.
A dish that would normally take an hour to prepare and cook would take around five hours to document the whole process.
Foong said the project was about preserving the recipes and spirit of these special dishes.
“These are not celebrity chefs or food bloggers,” explained Foong.
“They don’t sell their food. When they stop cooking this particular dish, no one else can do it. These were the things I emphasised on.”
While it does contain recipes, The Food That Makes Us is not exactly a cookbook, and most distributors reportedly found it difficult to categorise it.
Hence, it is only available in selected bookstores.
However, the book can still be ordered via The Food That Makes Us Facebook page.
Foong said: “We are not saying the recipes featured are perfect, or ‘the best recipes’.
“We are just sharing with the readers what these home recipes are like and the stories behind them.”