Mr Ong Jin Teong, in his admirable book Penang Heritage Book: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cook (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2010), noted forlornly that many of the home-cooked dishes that he and his generation grew up with are gradually disappearing along with ageing mothers and fathers, and uncles and aunties.
These aged innovative and excellent chefs were generally home-taught or self-taught, or they had learned on the job, as it were, and their art thus tends to pass away with them. Seldom, if ever, were their recipes properly recorded. Passed down through practice and by word of mouth, the particularities of ingredients and of taste have tended to shift and are sometimes lost for good. While this may happen imperceptibly and irrelevantly to some, to connoisseurs (and every other Penang person would consider themselves to be such), this slow loss of what they see as the quintessence of Penang culture is definitely unacceptable.
