Sharing Knowledge About Cookery
Recipes of favourite homecooked dishes are often passed down from generation to generation, whether you grew up cooking with your mum in the kitchen or were given recipes scribbled on scraps of paper. Today, cookbooks regularly top bestsellers’ lists and make great presents for friends and loved ones. But what were cookbooks like half a century ago? Associate Librarian Toffa takes a (tasty) trip down memory lane to find out.
When I was growing up, my mum would pack sandwiches for my school lunches. She also prepared them for picnics and gatherings with our extended family at East Coast Park or the Singapore Zoo. I remember that my favourite then was a tuna and alfalfa sprouts combo, which may not be to everyone’s taste.
Of course, my mum makes more than just sandwiches. She makes a wicked macaroni goreng (stir-fried macaroni), mee siam and kuih lapis (for Hari Raya) that our whole family enjoys. At the corner of her room, there’s a little collection of cookbooks that she thumbs through periodically in search of recipes she thinks we would like. Sometimes, after school when she was still at work, I would pick a book from her collection to read. From these childhood experiences, I developed a love and fascination for cookbooks, not to mention an appreciation for simple homecooked dishes.
Just as cookbooks are important repositories of culinary heritage, they also reflect and shape the aspirations of many women like my mum. Contained within them are a myriad of voices ranging from professional chef to educated housewife.
One such distinctive voice is Siti Radhiah Mohamed Saleh’s: wife, mother, daughter, compiler of recipes and cookbook author. Her cookbooks were published in Singapore from the 1940s to 1960s. Through them, she highlighted the importance of expanding and boosting Malay literature so that it also served the needs of women who wanted to know more about managing their household and raising their families. Encouraged by the success of her first cookbook, Hidangan Melayu, she went on to write three more until the late 1950s.¹
Siti Radhiah was the daughter of Mohamed Saleh, the principal of Serendah Malay School in Selangor. She was a teacher before she married Harun Aminurrashid, a celebrated writer and nationalist with whom she had 15 children, in the 1930s. During the Second World War, they stayed in Brunei where her husband was the Superintendent of Education.² They moved to Singapore after the war. As her husband had to work long hours, Siti Radhiah had the role of educating her children. She passed away in 1983, a couple of years before her husband.³
Attuned to the culinary trends of her time, she compiled recipes that were popular in the Malay world. Her second and fourth cookbooks focused on kuih.⁴ Published in Jawi in 1949, her second cookbook, Hidangan Wanita Sekarang (Dishes for Today’s Women) is a selection of 50 recipes, many of which were adaptations of Western dishes. She gathered the recipes from her friends, who were proficient cooks, and tested them herself. Siti Radhiah saw how Western recipes for cakes, tarts and biscuits –which she termed as the “new style of kuih”–could fit into the Malay culinary repertoire and encouraged her readers to increase the variety of kuih served in Malay homes especially during Hari Raya and other celebrations.⁵
Her fourth cookbook, Hidangan Kuih Moden (Modern Kuih Dishes), was published in 1957 by Geliga Limited.⁶ It was the first instalment of the publisher’s Women Series. By then, she had graduated from a cookery course taught by a Madam Asmah. The cookbook includes a recipe for “Hari Raya Cake”, which is basically a butter cake with fondant poured over it and then decorated with royal icing. That is one sweet treat I have not had the pleasure of eating during Hari Raya!
In 1961, a Romanised Malay version of Hidangan Wanita Sekarang was published (with minor content updates), demonstrating the popularity and enduring nature of kuih such as marble cake, kek lapis and kuih semperit (a kind of butter cookie).⁷ It was still being advertised in 1969.⁸
Moving away from the topic of kuih, her third cookbook, Memilih Selera (Choosing Tastes) published in 1953, contains 53 recipes, several of which were obtained from Indonesian women. It features recipes from different parts of Indonesia such as Sumatra, Kalimantan and Java. It also includes Indonesian dishes with European influences such as bistik (beef steak), kroket (croquette) and pastel (a type of filled pastry like empanada and curry puff).¹⁰
What struck me the most about Siti Radhiah was her spirit of sharing. Not only did she regard her work as a service to other women and the development of Malay literature, but she also saw cookery as an important body of knowledge that needed to be documented and disseminated.
Toffa Abdul Wahed is an Associate Librarian at the National Library, Singapore. She works with the Singapore and Southeast Asia collections and enjoys reading and listening to stories about food.
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[1] Her first cookbook, Hidangan Melayu (Malay Dishes), is not in NLB holdings.
[2] Abdullah Hussain. Harun Aminurrashid: pembangkit semangat kebangsaan (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2006). (Call no. R 899.283 ABD)
[3] “Anumerta kenang jasa Harun,” Berita Harian, 17 July 1995, 3. (From NewspaperSG)
[4] I have chosen to use the spelling kuih for this blog post as it is the formal spelling in Malay today. It can also be spelled, for instance, as kue, kueh, kway and kuey depending on the place and time. According to Christopher Tan, food writer and author of The Way of Kueh (2019), the word kueh refers to a diverse variety of sweet and savoury foods and snacks.
[5] Siti Radhiah Mohamed Saleh. Hidangan Wanita Sekarang (Singapore: Royal Press, 1949). (Call no. RCLOS 641.5 RAD)
[6] Siti Radhiah Mohamed Saleh. Hidangan Kuih Moden (Singapore: Geliga Limited, 1957). (Available via PublicationSG)
[7] Siti Radhiah Mohamed Saleh. Hidangan Wanita Sekarang. (Singapore: Royal Press, 1961). (Available via PublicationSG)
[8] “Halaman 10 Iklan Ruangan 4,” Berita Harian, 1 November 1969, 10. (From NewspaperSG)
[9] “Halaman 4 Iklan Ruangan 2,” Berita Harian, 9 August 1961, 4. (From NewspaperSG)
[10] Siti Radhiah Mohamed Saleh. Memilih Selera (Singapore: Harmy, 1953). (Available via PublicationSG)
