Chin, Kar Yern 2018 History Thesis

Title: We Are What We Makan: Conceptions of Malaysian Food Practices, 1950s - 1970s Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No

We Are What We Makan: Conceptions of Malaysian Food Practices, 1950s - 1970s

by

KAR YERN CHIN

Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

APRIL 16, 2018

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 16 - Uncovering Roots of Malay Dishes 18 - Community Beyond Malays 25

- Framing through Food 33

Chapter 2 42 - Roots of Modernity in the 1900s 44 - As Told by Ratnamala 47 - Economical Cooking Competitions 50 - A National Fruit Campaign 58

Chapter 3 73 - Malaysia as a Cosmopolitan Paradise 76 - Backgrounds of Domestic Culinary Experts and Her World 81 - Examining Food Categories 86 - Socioeconomic Disparities 96

Conclusion 104

Bibliography 110

Acknowledgements

I am tremendously grateful to Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer for her diligent assistance as my thesis advisor throughout the duration of the historical project. Had she not convinced me of the feasibility of the project, this thesis would not even have existed in the first place, and I would not be writing this acknowledgement right now. Having the opportunity to make sense of my often ambitious and wacky ideas by talking to her, and being able to share my concerns, doubts, and excitement with her has made the year much more meaningful and enjoyable.

I’d also like to thank Professor Aparna Kapadia and Professor Anne Reinhardt for their helpful recommendations, particularly in research about food and cuisine. I also really appreciate being able to talk to them about my project and historical interests. A big thank you to Simon from the Malaysian Design Archive for providing me with important know-hows in navigating the archives in Malaysia, and for directing me to the online newspaper archive run by the National Library Board of Singapore, from which a lot of my primary sources were retrieved.

A shout out to my friends Eleasha and Hannah, my favorite food buddies from Malaysia, without whom I would not have made it to Williams in the first place. Always grateful for your support and kindness.

And a big thanks to Stephen and Tiffany, my new food buddies, to whom I owe my development in my culinary interests and skills. It’s been a pleasure cooking/eating with/for you; thanks to Angela for being my thesis buddy and a wonderful friend in general; thanks to Benjamin Drews cause, you know.

Lastly, I’d like to thank my parents for being who they are, and for always being there for me when I needed it the most. They were also crucially helpful in finding places for my research in the urban sprawl that is Kuala Lumpur. In particular, I’d like to also thank my mother for being an inspiration for this project, as writing a history of women as passionate about cooking as her has always been something that I wanted to do.

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Introduction

A Brief Overview of Malaysia’s Independent Past—1950s to 1960s

“At the stroke of midnight, a great roar tells the world: We are now a nation!” The Straits Times, August 31, 1957

As then Prime Minister-designate Tunku Abdul Rahman chanted “Merdeka!” seven times

during Hari Merdeka (Independence Day), he was replied in a collective fervor by thousands

gathered on the Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur. The Union Jack was lowered seven minutes

after midnight, heralding the end of British colonialism. The birth of the Federation of Malaya

was then witnessed by the crowd, as the Flag of Malaya was raised and “stirring notes” of the

new national anthem, “Negaraku” (“My Country”), were played out to the optimistic and hopeful

Malayans.1

Malayan independence was achieved by the Alliance Party headed by Tunku Abdul

Rahman. The party consisted of a political union between the United Malays National

Organization (UMNO), Malayan Chinese Association (MCA), and Malayan Indian Congress

(MIC), and was favored to win the Malayan electorate votes. Malaya then merged with former

British colonies Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore to become the Federation of Malaysia on

September 16, 1963, ending British colonial rule in Southeast Asia.

The late 1950s to early 1970s were a tumultuous time for Malaysia. The country just survived Japanese occupation during World War II, communist insurgencies led by the Malayan

Communist Party (MCP), and the British colonial government’s administration, which controlled and subjugated Malayan dissidents. The British government’s policies, among other things, displaced Malay subsistence farmers to improve rice agriculture and relocated Chinese diasporic

1 “Merdeka!” The Straits Times, August 31, 1957.

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communities to mitigate the powers of the MCP, which resulted in segregated communities. On

August 9 1965, Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman expelled Singapore from

Malaysia, as the People’s Action Party (PAP), the Singaporean party led by Lee Kuan Yew, was

seen as a threat by UMNO when it decided to participate in Malaysia’s general election in 1964.

Racial riots between Chinese and Malays then broke out on May 13, 1969, which led to the

declaration of emergency and the dissolving of the Malaysian government. At 1970, the

percentage of households in poverty in Peninsular Malaysia had been depressingly high—49.3

percent for the whole population, and 65 percent for bumiputera (a Malay term that referred to

Malays and other native communities inhabiting Malaysia).2 Citizens were concerned with livelihood, malnutrition, and child welfare. In response, the Malaysian government launched a series of economic policies between the 1960s and 1970s aimed at eradicating poverty and developing an economy that was not dependent on past British foreign investments. The new

government had to recover Malaysia from its upheavals and took on the task to rebuild the

nation.

As the founding of Malaysia led to the manifestation of a new national identity, it also

complicated ethnic identities of Malays, Chinese, and Indians living in the region. It became an important juncture for these communities to think about and re-constitute themselves in the wake of the destructive and displacing events that happened not too long ago. Following the interethnic narrative of the Alliance party, the three groups (and the government) framed

Malaysia as an interethnic union between them. Meanwhile, Malay writers continued to explore

Malay identity, a complicated term adopted as an ethno-national one during the early twentieth

century Malay nationalist movements, and their connections to the new nation-state. Chinese and

2 John H. Drabble, An Economic History of Malaysia: c. 1800-1990: the Transition to Modern Economic Growth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 278; bumiputera translates to “sons of the soil.”

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Indian immigrants who were brought in by the British to run their colonial economies before

World War II also had to consider the ways in which national identity complicated their ties to their respective homelands.3 The new Malaysian citizens grappled with the constructed ethnic relations between the three communities that framed the narrative of independence as well as their own ethnic identities.

The Central Question

While research on Malaysian national history is abundant, often neglected is the role of food in the constitution of national and ethnic identities during the independence period. And studies on Malaysian food often focused on present-day Malaysia and do not explore how conceptions of Malaysian food came to be. Thus, I traced the roots of Malaysian food all the way back to the decades that marked the beginning of independent statehood in Malaysia. During this period, multiple strands and conceptions of domestic food practices by women went beyond the notion of a central, homogenous Malaysian cuisine.

How did various kinds of Malaysian domestic food practices develop in the country during the late 1950s to early 1970s, the period during and after Malaysia’s independence from the British Empire? Domestic food practices in the context of this question mean cultural, social, and economic practices that relate to the production and consumption of food, often grouped according to ethnic communities in Malaysia, and conducted for personal and household meal preparations. Domestic cooking practices of women in Malaysian ethnic communities mixed with each other in processes of hybridity which made up and were central to a fluid understanding of Malaysian cuisine at that time. From these processes, such women, and even

3 Drabble, An Economic History, 33.

3 the Malaysian government, developed their own conceptions of Malaysian food. Together, they comprised a hybrid Malaysian cuisine that not only reflected the identities of the ethnic communities but a new national identity that united these communities.

Central to my argument about Malaysian food is the notion of food hybridity, the mixing and blending that happened between domestic food practices, which is an extension and application of cultural hybridity by Homi Bhabha in response to Edward Said. Edward Said’s situating of Europe as the imaginary center and construction of the Orient as a fixed other in

Orientalism develops a binary epistemology that “necessitates a sharp distinction between colonizers and the colonized.”4 Homi Bhabha critiques this approach, as to him, Said’s framework suggests “that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser.”5

Bhabha conceives then of different ways that discourse, knowledge and identity of the colonized are not controlled by their colonizers, and creates his own theoretical position called “hybridity.”

I look at prominent British postcolonial theorist Robert Young to help me better unpack

Bhabha’s complicated idea of cultural hybridity. To Young, Bhabha suggests that being hybrid was not merely combining two halves of different pure categories together to create a new category altogether. Young noted that, according to Bhabha:

Hybridity begins to become the form of cultural difference itself, the jarrings of a differentiated culture whose “hybrid counter-energies,” in Said’s phrase, challenge the centred, dominant cultural norms with their unsettling perplexities generated out of their “disjunctive, liminal space.” Hybridity here becomes a third term which can never be in fact third because, as a monstrous inversion, a miscreated perversion of its progenitors, it exhausts the differences between them.6

4 Michal Frenkel and Yehouda Shenhav, "From Binarism Back to Hybridity: A Postcolonial Reading of Management and Organization Studies," Organization Studies 27, no. 6 (2006): 855, doi:10.1177/0170840606064086, accessed April 15, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0170840606064086 5 Antony Easthope, "Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity," Textual Practice 12, no. 2 (1998): 145-146, doi:10.1080/09502369808582312.; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 200. 6 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. (London: Routledge, 1995.), 22-23.

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Thus, to Young, Bhabha claims that hybridity challenges “centred, dominant cultural norms” and

adds that, rather than creating a third category that exists alongside its progenitors, that the third

eliminates the differences between the first two. Bhabha argues that hybridity can never be a

third term because to be a third would imply that the first two still exist, when hybridity has

melded them together. Young then continues by explaining that Bhabha’s notion of hybridity has

extended “to include forms of counter-authority, a ‘Third Space’ which intervenes to effect”:

The “hybrid” moment of political change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the re-articulation, or translation of elements that are neither the One...nor the Other...but something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both.7

Here processes of hybridity (in our case, the mixing and blending of cooking practices) not only

complicate the progenitors of the hybrid, by melding them together, but also create a counter-

authority; Hybridity, the “re-articulation, or translation of elements” thus creates space, power,

and identity that contest the progenitors’ “terms” and “territories.” In the practice of food, this

can mean that the inclusion of an ingredient or cooking style marked as of a certain group to put

a spin on a dish of another group creates this hybrid identity. The inclusion of coconut milk, an

ingredient generally understood as a Malay ingredient, in colonial Indian curry, which uses milk

or other dairy products, for instance, is a hybrid process that creates a new kind of dish that

melds Malay and colonial Indian identities together. The hybrid processes of mixing and

blending between food practices of different ethnic groups in Malaysia from the 1950s to 1970s

thus challenged, complicated, and changed these food practices.

Yet despite these hybrid processes occurring in Malaysia, we did not necessarily see an

“exhaustion of differences” in identities; the dominant ethnic categories—Malays, Chinese,

Indians—inscribed by British colonials through their introduction of the population census in the

7 Young, Colonial Desire, 22-23.

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nineteenth century still pervaded in the categorization of food by Malaysians in the 1950s to the

1970s.8 Hybridities in dishes tended to be masked by the dishes’ neat ethnic names, given to

them by their producers; the names were a reference of the producers’ ethnicity. For instance, a

Malay curry would be claimed as a Malay dish, even though the very inclusion of ingredients

and cooking styles from colonial India already suggested the dish’s hybrid influences. Thus, investigating the hybrid processes in dishes and recipes that were named using essentialized and racialized ethnic categories was complicated. Singaporean sociologist Chua Beng Huat and anthropologist Ananda Rajah claimed that this “tendency to ‘racialize’ even hybrid food is… a form of méconnaissance (“misrecognition”) in [Pierre] Bourdieu's sense.” They argued that this

“misrecognition” was due to colonialism, as a result of:

Rigorous imprinting of racial categories on a post-colonial population by elite, nationalist leaders who had acquired these racial ideas through an intimate and studied familiarity with European thought, made possible by a colonial education.9

This imprinting of racialized ethnic categories, that is, the normalization of the use of these

categories to refer to communities in Malaysia, happened through population censuses,

newspapers, public speeches, and other written media. And the ethnic groups who found their

home in Malaysia embedded these categories on the food they made and consumed, despite the

hybridities present in such food. My analysis thus interrogates distinctions between the neat

categories labelling these dishes and the hybridities of dishes. Comprehending these categories,

and how they came to be, is useful to piece together the essentialized conceptions that food

producers had of multi-ethnic Malaysia, while gleaning hybrid influences of dishes helps to

8 Rie Nakamura, “‘Race or Ethnic Group?’ Politics of Race in Malaysia,” Sociology and Anthropology 3, no. 8 (2015): 392, doi:10.13189/sa.2015.030803, accessed April 15, 2018, http://www.hrpub.org/download/20150930/SA3-19604558.pdf. 9 David Y. H. Wu, and Chee-beng Tan. Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia. (Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. Press, 2001), 167.

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understand the connections between Malaysian ethnic groups that informs us of the groups’

integration into a more cohesive community. I aim to prove that Malaysian food practices were

not just a collection of ethnic food categories, but also processes of hybridity between the food

cultures, that is, the mixing and sharing of ingredients, cooking styles, and even names of dishes,

in the country.

In terms of how we can interrogate hybrid dishes masked by ethnic categories, Chua and

Rajah’s concept of an “ethnic” dish, a dish belonging to the food practices of an ethnic

community, is useful.10 They claim that:

Once so codified, anyone can prepare an “ethnic” dish by following the recipe; the food is detached from the ethnicity of the producer. Ethnic cooking and ethnic food thus circulates freely among those who are prepared to take the trouble to (re)produce them. At this point, a particular style of cooking and its results may be said to be fully inscribed with “ethnicity.”11

Codifying the dish means turning it into a formal written instruction, a recipe, one that in this

case includes ethnicity in name. The inclusion of ethnicity in the dish’s name is important, as it is

a reflection of the producer’s identity. The particular style of cooking or ingredient associated

with the codified dish then becomes inscribed with the producer’s ethnicity. This framework is

useful to talk about the relations between cooking processes and ethnic identity, and helps to

show the ways in which certain cooking styles and ingredients become associated with ethnicity

by writers in Malaysia. However, in defining what it meant to be an ethnic dish in 1950s-1970s

Malaysia, Chua and Rajah’s framework would not be sufficient. It does not address an important

notion that other ethnic groups, especially Malays, had, by changing cooking styles and

10 While Rajah and Chua’s analysis focus specifically on Singapore’s commercial food spaces, they’d also make ocassional references as to how their framework applies to Malaysia too, due to the significant cultural, ethnic and foodway similarities between the two states. 11 Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rajah, Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore (Singapore: Dept. of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore, 1997), 5.

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ingredients of an ethnic dish, recodified and reclaimed that dish as being part of their ethnicity.

Chua and Rajah also seem to not discuss the ways in which the power in claiming and codifying

dishes also lay in the performance, effectiveness, and promotion of the dishes that they talked

about. Rather, the ethnic dish becomes essentialized as soon as it enters the “public menu,” when

in my research, names of dishes were not fixed and were susceptible to change.12 I argue the aggressive codification and recodification of ethnic dishes, as well as the more nuanced changes of cooking styles and ingredients we see in such dishes, were representative of Malaysian food practices.

In thinking about communities in Malaysia and the tensions of hybridities with categories, learning about ethnicity and race, and the blur between them, as understood by

Malaysians during the period, would help to recognize colonial connections to identity-making and points of colonial erasure of identities. Rie Nakamura concisely describes the ways in which ethnicity and race had often been conflated by Malaysians as a result of British colonialism.

British population census and vernacular education inculcated amongst people in Malaya a racialized view of the ethnic categories of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, tending to group people according to assumed biological differences.13 As scholars of Malaysian history tend to recognize these categories as ethnic communities, I will do the same.14 However, I also want to

recognize the British history of racialized imprinting that developed these ethnic categories in the

first place. This recognition is useful so that I can identify and explore moments of significant

erasure of regional and sub-ethnic nuances of the different ethnic communities in my primary

12 Chua and Rajah, Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food, 5. 13 Nakamura, “‘Race or Ethnic’,” 392. 14 Nakamura, “‘Race or Ethnic’,” 392.

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sources. In some of the sources, I also examine the appearances of sub-ethnic identities, showing

an awareness, at least, of the different ethnic affiliations that reside in these categories.

Of the three ethnic groups, Malay was the most complicated to unpack and understand in

the period I am investigating. Since the sixteenth century, “Malay” was and is used to define

different native communities of peoples indigenous to the region of the Peninsular Malaya, and

often parts of Southeast Asia, like East Sumatra.15 In fact, though in scholarly works, Malay has been generally accepted as an ethnic identity that has sub-ethnic distinctions throughout

Southeast Asia, origins and past meanings of the term were and continue to be debated.

Important to my thesis is to incorporate Anthony Milner’s observation that calls “for caution rather than making assumptions about the past, particularly in projecting back to earlier centuries a modern concept of ‘Malay’ ethnicity [when researching early Malay history].”16 To Milner, it is important to be aware that Malay, having a different meaning to the natives in the past, became a unitary racialized category imposed by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century and British colonials in the eighteenth century on communities in Southeast Asia; this category was also later adopted and claimed by Malays in Malaya as an ethno-national identity during the early Malay nationalist movements at the start of the twentieth century.17 Understanding Malay

as an ethno-national term in the recent past to be new and still changing, it thus makes sense to

see the ways in Malay writers in the 1950s and 1960s talked about the roots of Malay food

culture; these writers were trying to unpack what it meant for a food to be Malay, implying that

15 Anthony Crothers Milner, The Malays (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Pub., 2008), 86-87. 16 Milner, The Malays, 13. 17 Anthony Milner’s The Malays provides a broad but comprehensive overview of exploring Malay origins, identity and ethnicity, and the ways in which the term’s meaning changed throughout the course of history, in writing and literature by colonials, traders and natives.

9 this work was not done prior. A significant part of my thesis attempts to explore the formulations of Malay identity, and its relation to the new nation-state.

Of Chinese and Indians, I mostly refer to the diasporic counterparts that settled in

Malaysia. Sometimes, however, these categories could also be conflated with mainland Chinese and Indians by sources, which was particularly significant to show the complexities and tensions of belonging to a new national community that these communities experienced. The nascency of the Malaysian nation-state is also the reason why I am hesitant to call Chinese and Indians as

Chinese Malaysians and Indian Malaysians during this time period. The sources tended to be unclear when referring to the diasporic communities’ relationships to Malaysia as a nation-state.

In particular, some urban Chinese writers’ continued to think of Malaysia as a region rather than a nation-state. Unlike Malay women who wrote about their political relationship to the government and the nation-state, these writers tended to refer to Malaysia more as a physical region and a community of multiculturalism.

Studies on Food in Malaysia

Scholarly works on food practices in Malaysia have been focused on three themes:

British colonial food cultures from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, ethnic food practices, and the contemporary Malaysian and Singaporean food culture, all of which elide the development of Malaysian cuisine during the late 1950s to early 1970s. Studies of colonial food culture, such as works by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Cecilia Leong Salobir, while significant in showing colonial food’s influence on Malaysian cuisine and domestic cooking practices, evinced

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little about Malaysian cuisine itself.18 Research on ethnic food practices like one by Chien Y. Ng

and Shahrim Ab. Karim tracks the development of an ethnic community’s cuisine without

necessarily considering the community’s relationship with other ethnic groups in Malaysia.19 As

such, it skirts around relations formed between the different ethnic food practices that comprised

the Malaysian food culture during the period I am investigating. I am interested in capturing the

changes and reconstitutions of ethnic identities and their relationships with each other, changes

that led to the formation of a Malaysian cuisine. The last category, that is, anthropological and

sociological analyses of contemporary Malaysian food culture, discusses connections between

food, power, space, and identity of contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, but does not tackle

the question of how did Malaysian cuisine come to be. However, the framework of these

contemporary analyses, like “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore” by Chua and Rajah

and “Food and Ethnicity with Reference to the Chinese in Malaysia” by Tan Chee-Beng, is

useful to examine ethnic relations and hybridities between food cultures that make up Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine in the 1950s to 1970s.20

Methodologies and Categories

My primary sources consist of accounts—newspapers, cookbooks, and magazines—that were about the production and consumption of food as discussed by women and featured in commercial eateries and public events. These sources are collected from the Malaysian Design

Archive, Malaysian National Library, National Library Board of Singapore, and secondhand

18 Cecilia Leong Salobir. “A Taste of Empire: Food, the Colonial Kitchen and the Representation and Role of Servants in India, Malaysia and Singapore, C. 1858-1963,” (University of Wollongong, 2011), 1. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1570&context=lhapapers. 19 Chien Y. Ng and Shahrim Ab. Karim, "Historical and Contemporary Perspectives of the Nyonya Food Culture in Malaysia," Journal of Ethnic Foods 3, no. 2 (2016): 93-106, doi:10.1016/j.jef.2016.05.004. 20 Chua and Rajah, Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food, 5.

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book stores. They are written in English and Malay, English being a language familiar to the

more urban Chinese groups, and Malay being the primary language of Malays and the national

language of Malaysia. I studied thoughts about local cuisines (local meaning originated in

Malaysia) as reflected in that period through these accounts. I glean what I can about writers’

conceptions on food practices by looking at choices made in what and what not to write about in

recipes: ingredients, cooking processes, and names.

I also point out that the processes of writing recipes and discussing food in written forms

through public media like newspapers, cookbooks, and magazines helped to articulate and realize

Malaysian cuisine in the 1950s to 1970s. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s research on French cuisine offers some light to this phenomenon: “culinary preparations become a cuisine when, and only when, the preparations are articulated and formalized, and enter the public domain.”21 Her

work shows the ways in which the very writing of recipes and food, and the public viewership

and discussion of such works, constitute the makings of a cuisine.

Nationalism and Colonialism

Another question that the thesis grapples with is the extent to which communities in

Malaysia identified with being Malaysian and embraced the Malaysian national identity. In

particular, what did it mean for women to label certain dishes as Malaysian food? I refer to

Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta’s idea of the practice of everyday nationalism, applied to their

exploration of what makes a dish Japanese:

By identifying a dish as ‘Japanese-style pasta’, people are involved in an active process of choosing the category of ‘Japanese’ in their routine of categorising and giving

21 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19.

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meaning to their surroundings; creating and sharing a ‘Japanese-style pasta’ recipe is an act of performing the nation, enacting what is meant to be Japanese food;22

Everyday nationalism, the ways in which people choose to consider and include the nation (in

this case, Japan) in the ordinary practices of their lives, exists through the making of food. The

act of performing the nation is the act of reifying its existence, and the relationship between the

nation and the person, through such practices. To apply further Chua and Rajah’s analysis, when

a dish is named after a nation, the dish is this time codified as national in the produced recipe.

Food practices in Malaysia also displayed significant colonial and Western hybridity.

Culinary influences of the British Empire, as well as nation-states in Europe and North America

were incorporated into Malaysian cuisine due to two centuries of colonialism and the cosmopolitan characteristic of Malaysian cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore from the 1950s

to 1970s. Bhabha’s hybridity is thus crucial to navigate between colonizer and formerly

colonized food cultures to conceive of a counter-authority and identity in the form of Malaysian

food practices. Such a framework thus acknowledges these foreign influences without implying that the new identity was dependent on or dominated by such influences during the time period.

Thus, the food practices of Malaysia, though marked by British colonial and Western influence, still developed as an independent identity.

22 Atsuko Ichijo, and Ronald Ranta. Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), 27-28.

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Chapter Outlines

My thesis is divided into three chapters, which are organized thematically and chronologically from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The first chapter explores public written conceptions of Malay food during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily through the lens of Berita

Harian, a Malay newspaper based in Singapore. Malay writers, most of whom were women, talked about the hybrid nature of Malay food and the other ethnic groups’ influences on it. The writers’ inclusion and framing of the different ethnic dishes, particularly Chinese and Indian dishes, suggested relations and a sense of belonging between the ethnic communities and incipiently evinced a kind of proto-Malaysian cuisine.

In the second chapter, which covers the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Malay women participated more actively and politically in national issues through writing Berita Harian articles and organizing economical cooking competitions. Applying modern economical and nutrition-based attitudes towards domestic cooking practices became a way for Malay women to grapple with national socioeconomic problems, such as poverty, that struck rural Malay communities. The government, to grow the domestic fruit economy, also a launched fruit campaign that tapped into the diversity of recipes of various local organizations to encourage the consumption of local fruits, especially among the urban populations. Malay women and the government in their own ways constructed a Malaysian national identity around economic frugality and the different ethnic food practices in Malaysia.

Whereas the first two chapters engage primarily with Malay sources and women, the third chapter looks into English-language sources and English-literate, urban, Chinese women. It focuses on the cosmopolitan food practices exhibited by urban Chinese women during the late

1960s and early 1970s. In particular, it tracks the rise of domestic culinary celebrities who

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became authorial figures in the categorization of Malaysian food, and the emergence of Her

World, a Malaysian modern women’s magazine that discussed cuisines local and foreign.

The three chapters attempt to capture the various conceptions of Malaysian domestic food

practices exhibited by the different ethnic communities in Malaysia. Chapters 1 and 2 in

particular explore the changes of Malay women’s food practices as Malay women grappled with

ideas of modernity and their new relationship to the nation-state. Chapter 3 studies urban

English-literate Chinese women, a community whose ideas of food production and consumption

serve as a contrast to those by Malay women because of the socioeconomic divide between the

two groups. Chapter 3’s difference thus importantly suggests the complexities and disparities of

multiethnic Malaysia during that period. However, the three chapters are also tied together by the

exploration of the relationship between food and identities by women. Similar recipes and dishes were also discussed throughout the chapters by various writers, which pointed to connections between the different conceptions of Malaysian food practices.

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Chapter 1

Food Hybridities in Malaya/Malaysia during the 1950s and 1960s

In the late 1950s, the Alliance Party, a political union between the United Malays

National Organization (UMNO), Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and Malayan Indian

Congress (MIC), garnered the confidence and votes of the newly formed Malayan electorate.

The party was in the final steps of negotiation with the British to officially declare Malaya independent on August 31, 1957. As Malaya (and later Malaysia in 1963) had become a new nation-state, Malays were still grappling with the Malay identity, which in the recent decade turned into an ethno-national identity to unify the Malay community against colonial rule of the

British and to deal with anxieties about foreign intrusion. In this period of time, food was a way in which thoughts about being Malay were explored by Malay writers.

In the midst of the march toward independence, Berita Harian (Daily News), a Malay newspaper was formed on July 1, 1957 in Singapore “as the main newspaper for the Malay community.”1 Berita Harian offered an avenue for Malays to write about and discuss news and issues centered on their ethnic community. Soon after its inception, Berita Harian began including articles that provided more options for Malay women to prepare meals for their families. These recipe articles contained steps to make dishes and thoughts by the authors

(mostly anonymous) on said dishes. While Berita Harian was dedicated to a Malay-speaking readership, which was generally most of the Malay ethnic community, the recipes covered a wide range of dishes spanning different ethnic communities that inhabited Malaysia during the

1 “Berita Harian mula diterbitkan di Singapura pada 1 Julai 1957. Sebagai sebuah akhbar utama masyarakat Melayu/Islam” taken from “Kenali Kami.” Berita Harian. http://www.beritaharian.sg/kenali-kami (accessed April 14, 2018)

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period.2 In these articles, we can see how Malay writers understood “Malay-ness” and Malays’ interactions with the other ethnic communities in relation to food. As a corollary, this chapter thus also explores the ways in which Berita Harian recipe articles revealed and promoted the aggressive blending and intermingling of food practices between Malays, Chinese, and Indians.

Relations and hybridities between foods produced by Malays and those by Chinese and

Indians can be gleaned from Berita Harian’s recipe articles. Writers of recipe articles, who were mostly Malay women, for instance, pointed out the similarities of cooking styles and ingredients between Malays and the other ethnic groups. An examination of Malay dishes by writers revealed their roots in Chinese and Indian food practices. Since the recipe articles also covered dishes from a dizzying array of communities, and were accessible to Malays and non-Malays who could read Malay, they encouraged reproductions of dishes of one ethnic group by another, and expanded the readers’ culinary ability to learn not just different recipes, but also ingredients and cooking styles. While such intermingling of food practices had existed in the past century, they flourished during the rapid urbanization of Malaya between 1947 to 1957, since contact between the different ethnic communities was less likely pre-1947 and in non-urban areas as the communities were separated by the British (and later Japanese) according to ethnically divided, specialized labor and economies.3

Berita Harian’s articles as a whole also provided an incipient understanding of and vocabulary for a proto-Malaysian cuisine, a network of the different ethnic food practices in

2 To give a general sense of the communities in Malaysia, here are the different national/racial/ethnic/dialect groups: Malay, Kedah Malay, Minangkabau, East coast Malay, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew, Mandarin, Tamil, Indonesian, Iban, Javanese, Tagalog Filipino, Hainanese, Northern Min, Kedayan (Brunei Malay), East Malaysia Malay, Eastern Min, Straits Chinese, Nepalese, Tausug, Dusun, Malayali/Malayalam, Bugis/Buginese, Lun Bawang/Lundayeh, Kelabit 3 According to T.N. Harper, the urban population rose from 26.5 to 42.3 percent of the total population from 1947 to 1957. Other major areas included the tin mines, which were mostly run and occupied by Chinese, rubber plantations, majority of which were inhabited by Indians, and rural villages called kampungs, most of which were inhabited by Malays who ran a subsistence farming and fishing economy.

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Malaysia. In some articles, writers focused on a certain ingredient and kind of dish as the articles’ main topic to group dishes from different ethnic communities together. This framework implied a conception of this proto-Malaysian cuisine by the writers that connected dishes prepared by different ethnic communities in Malaysia together. I use the qualifier “proto” particularly because the articles’ authors did not talk about the category or network of Malaysian food practices yet during the 1950s and 1960s. However, due to the ways in which dishes were often discussed in relation to dishes produced by different ethnic groups in Malaya/Malaysia, and due to the understanding that different food practices, like that by Malays, were hybridized in the region, I argue that the writers’ constant inclusion of these comparisons suggested an understanding that these food practices were intertwined in significant ways. These frames of references were a vocabulary to articulate the proto-Malaysian cuisine.

Uncovering Roots of Malay Dishes

Malay writers used Berita Harian’s recipe articles to discuss Malay domestic food practices’ hybridity and roots in other ethnic food practices. In particular, the recipe articles that talked about ethnic influences were mostly about Chinese and Indians, which also informed the ways in which Malay writers perceived Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities as the main ethnic groups living in Malaya.

In one of the earliest Berita Harian recipe articles, “Curry that Does Not Use Coconut

Milk,” published on June 30, 1958, the anonymous author covered a recipe for an Indian curry dish, but also used this article to acknowledge Indian influence on Malay foods.4 The curry that the author presented was the egg dhal, which used onions as the base of the dish, and dhal beans

4 “Kari Yg. Tidak Memakai Santan,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), June 30, 1958.

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and egg as its core components. While the article’s body was about the dhal, the introduction

was focused on the origins of Malay dishes. Before the author detailed the steps to produce the

egg dhal, they opined about Malay curry’s roots, along the way acknowledging the incorporation

of Indian food in Malay cooking.

The author endeavored to describe a Malay dish, like Malay curry, that had roots in but

was also distinct from Indian food. A reason behind this description of a Malay dish could stem

from the author’s desire to codify a distinctively Malay food and, by extension, a unique identity

for Malays.5 One way for the author to make distinctions between Malay and Indian dishes was through claiming the usage of different ingredients. According to the author, the differences between Indian and Malay curries were the smell of the spices used as well as a key ingredient—

coconut milk, called santan in Malay. By stating that Malay curry, unlike Indian curry, used

coconut milk in its recipe, the author formalized in written form a Malay dish to Berita Harian

readers; the inclusion of coconut milk asserted the Malay dish’s identity and inscribed coconut

milk as being a Malay ingredient. In this case, and in the case of other foods associated with the

Malay community, coconut milk became a key marker for many Malay dishes. Readers could in

turn reify the dish’s existence by producing it, reproducing it, and referring to it as the Malay

curry. Efforts like these by the author to identify and claim Malay dishes helped to codify Malay

food in written form and allowed readers to develop a language to articulate it in public

conversations.

The writer’s discussion of the hybrid relation between a Malay curry and the Indian

curry’s influence on the former was a fairly new phenomenon. Awareness and the formalization

5 The attempt to delineate a Malay food practice came at a time when Malay nationalism was vociferous, stoked up by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the recent independence of Malaya. Post-1957 was a climactic moment in which the Malays in Peninsular Malaya were to build their new nation-state.

19 of Malay food practices happened along with the growing consciousness of “Malay-ness” during the colonial period. While the roots of such hybridization could be traced to the early years of

Chinese and Indian immigration in the nineteenth century, the articulation of hybridization in written text and popular print became more common only with the proliferation of newspaper publications in the twentieth century.6 That the writer decided to talk about Malay dishes in relation to other ethnic food practices provided an understanding that Malay food practices, in their public inception, were hybrid.

An examination of the writer’s use of the terms “Indian” and “curry” also highlights the ways in which Malay foods were influenced by British colonial food practices. The article’s author claimed that “as you Madames had known earlier, curry originated in India.”7 Curry, a creation of British colonial India in the eighteenth century, made its way to colonial cookbooks and dishes prepared for the British colonials (sahibs) by their wives (memsahibs) and domestic servants hired from native populations (cookies) in Malaya.8 Curry referred to dishes made from a spice blend called curry powder, a commercial creation of British colonial India. The term was so pervasive that it was adopted by Malays, who called it kari.9 In fact, writer’s article listed a curry spice mix (rempah kari) as one of the ingredients needed for their recipe, a testament to

British colonial influence on Malay food practices.10

6 And even so, Berita Harian stood out amongst other publications to actually articulate such hybridization, compared to The Straits Times and other newspapers that, even when they talked about food, were concerned with mostly Western and colonial recipes during the 1950s. 7 “SA-BAGAIMANA yang puan2 ketahui masakan kari itu berasal dari India.” Most of the recipe articles covered addressed readers as “puan,” which were equivalent to Madame. Readers were assumed to be women. 8 Cecilia Leong Salobir. “A Taste of Empire: Food, the Colonial Kitchen and the Representation and Role of Servants in India, Malaysia and Singapore, C. 1858-1963,” (University of Wollongong, 2011), 31-36. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1570&context=lhapapers. 9 “Kari Yg. Tidak.” 10 Leong Salobir. “A Taste of Empire,” 10.

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Because of curry’s ties to colonial India, curry and India became intertwined, and this

connection became the de facto way for Malay writers, the Malay community, and even other

non-Indian communities, to talk about Indian liquid-based dishes in public discourse on food in

Malaya and later Malaysia. As curry became referred to as an Indian dish, curry also eliminated

the distinctions between the names of many Indian dishes, which varied in ingredients and

cooking styles. That the author did not make references to specific or nuanced regional, dialect,

or sub-ethnic aspects of the dish in this article further implied the author’s adoption of the “pure”

ethnic categories in Malaya/Malaysia. The Indian community’s varied cultural aspects, at least to

the British colonials and now to this recipe writer, either bore no meaning or was not known,

thus erasing those signifiers and grouping Indians into one category. The imprinting was so

pervasive that even Berita Harian, a local newspaper which was not as influenced by the British

colonial administration as the popular Malayan/Malaysian English newspaper, the Straits Times,

incorporated the use of such categorization.

While the above article evinced Indian and colonial influences, the following one

discussed Malay food relations to Chinese food. In “Boiled Noodles with Crab and Prawns,”

published in 1965, two years after Malaysia was formed, the author outlined a recipe for a Malay

dish that had roots in Chinese food and also discussed said roots.11 To begin the article, the

author claimed that:

Noodle dishes, which originated from the Chinese people, had become so popular amongst Malays that it can be said today that foods such as mi hun [rice vermicelli], mi rebus [boiled noodles] and mi goreng [fried noodles] are Malay dishes too.12

11 “Mi Rebus Ketam dan Udang,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), March 30, 1965. 12 Translated from: Hidangan2 jenis mi, yang sa-benar-nya berasal dari orang China, telah menjadi bagitu popular di-ka-langan orang2 Melayu sa-hingga hari ini boleh di-katakan bahawa masakan2 saperti mi hun, mi rebus dan mi goreng itu ada-lah makanan orang Melayu juga.

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The author postulated that Malays developed such a love for Chinese noodle dishes that they

incorporated the noodles into their own dishes, thus making noodles another important ingredient

in Malay food practices. Indeed, the recipe called for the use of yellow noodles or rice

vermicelli, two ingredients brought into Malaysia by Chinese immigrants. The recipe’s first step

was frying the fresh prawns and crabs with crushed white and red onions and ginger, and then

boiling them in water. Salt and paste were then added into the mixture of seafood and sauce,

followed by noodles and bean sprouts. When finished, the Malay dish, noodles in seafood soup,

garnished by raw cucumbers and green peppers, resembled Chinese soup noodles.13 According

to the writer, the popularity of Chinese ingredients like rice vermicelli amongst Malays allowed

them to adopt such ingredients as Malay.14 Such an adoption suggested not only the importance

of social and communal power in claiming ingredients but also the culinary curiosity of Malay

women. It also implied a kind of permeability between the different ethnic food practices in

Malaysia. This permeability, which was a result of an openness to learn and try different foods,

importantly encouraged a lot of hybridities between the foods of communities in Malaysia.

At the same time, the restrictive framing of food according to British inscribed ethnic

categories was evident in this article. I ask: why did the writer have to explain that the ingredient

became Malay for it to be recognized as a popular staple amongst Malay communities? One way

to explain this was how Malay writers felt the need to construct a substantive Malay food

13 Eating raw vegetables is very common in Malay food practices. According to the “History and Politics of National Cuisine” by Michael Hsiao and Khay-Thiong Lim, the e-brochure of Tourism Malaysia, a department in the Malaysian government, shows that “Malay meals are characterized as using many fresh fragrant herbs and roots.” Ulam, a salad that comprises Centella asiatica, and is usually eaten with cucumber, cabbage, and eggplant is also recognized as a popular main dish in traditional Malay villages. The paper is included in Re-orienting Cuisine: East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-first Century. 14 Mee Hoon/Mihun/Bihun/Bee Hoon both refer to rice vermicelli and also a stir-fry dish. One way to cook it, according to Berita Harian’s “MI HUN DENGAN DAGING CHENCHANG,” (Rice vermicelli with sliced meat) published in August 17 1965, would be to fry it with red onions, white onions, ginger, black pepper, sliced beef and oil.

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practice, as a way to affirm their “Malay-ness.” There seemed to be no way to articulate a hybridized discursive framework for a Malaysian food practice, as opposed to the essentialized

Malay, Chinese, and Indian categories. In other words, food or cuisine seemed to not exist outside of and had to belong to an ethnic community in Malaysia, a result of having ingrained in racialized imprinting during the colonial period for two centuries.15 Placing and interrogating the

different food practices in the language of the colonial was the first attempt to dismantle such a

framework of colonial language.

The articles that talked about Malay origins and hybridity suggested little to no anxiety

about Chinese and Indian influences in Malay culture. Rather than distance themselves from the

other ethnic communities that had become so prevalent in their lives, these writers embraced

these influences, and had no qualms about the hybridity of Malay food culture. This was striking,

since the 1950s were the period right after the Japanese occupation of Malaya, which also

fomented ethnic tensions between Malays and Chinese due to their unequal treatment by the

Japanese occupiers.16 The political climate was also heated as Malay political groups such as

UMNO and the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) were vocalizing a Malay nationalism and a reclamation of Malaya for the Malays, and only in the 1950s was there a sense of interethnic harmony by the Alliance Party. The lack of tension in the discussion of food from other ethnic communities could maybe then suggest that the vociferous debates were not necessarily internalized by everyone in Malaya and later Malaysia, that the political discussions were more isolated from everyday life. Perhaps tensions were also driven mainly by the intellectuals and

15 Rie Nakamura, “‘Race or Ethnic Group?’ Politics of Race in Malaysia,” Sociology and Anthropology 3, no. 8 (2015): 392, doi:10.13189/sa.2015.030803, accessed April 15, 2018, http://www.hrpub.org/download/20150930/SA3-19604558.pdf. 16 T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36- 37.

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middle-class elites who comprised and led the political parties in Malaysia, such that they did not

seep into conversations of everyday people.

Gender roles could also explain the lack of tension, as Malay women, which comprised

the writers and readers of these food articles, generally played more supportive roles in political

endeavors. The political narratives and movements during the 1950s and 1960s were primarily

driven by men. According to historian T.N. Harper, while:

Women had become pivotal to mass political movements...their role, however, was obstructed by their lack of representation. The idealisation of their domestic role was exploited by hostile male hierarchies to limit their participation in new political opportunities.17

Women were expected to channel their energies to domestic duties of caring for the family,

rearing children, and preparing food. Ironically, the ways in which women were more segregated

from official political platforms led them to find space for political thoughts through talking

about food. In writing recipe articles, Malay women created a space in which they could discuss

issues of identity in a constructive manner, without the intervention of men. That these writers

were talking about “Malay-ness” through food, at a time when the concept was a galvanizing and

uniting force for Malays, was their form of political participation. At the same time, they also

grappled with the hybrid relations of Malay food and, by extension, the hybridity of Malay

identity. Their acknowledgement of Chinese and Indian influence in Malay food was an

important perception by these women that all three ethnic groups belonged to or were part of the

same community in Malaysia. Their conception of Malay food practices as a hybrid amongst

Malay, Chinese, Indian, and colonial food practices also put into form an early illustration of what Malaysian cuisine could be like.

17 Harper, The End of Empire 314.

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Community Beyond Malays—Finding Commonalities, Making Comparisons

While the writers covered so far were concerned with the origins of Malay food practices,

other writers in Berita Harian were simply eager to learn and reproduce dishes from other ethnic

communities. These writers’ recipe articles illustrated interactions, connections, and

commonalities between different ethnic food practices, which made up the network of Malaysian

food practices. The hybrid depiction of the recipes that came from other ethnic communities

indicated the codification of food unique only to Malaysia.

Berita Harian published a recipe called “Minced Beef Chinese Style,” which claimed

that the dish was Chinese. This dish was infused with local ingredients not used in mainland

China, making it a distinct Chinese diasporic creation.18 In this recipe, beef was sliced thinly,

and then mixed with cassava starch (tepong kanji). Cassava was a Portuguese and Dutch import

from South America to Southeast Asia. The beef was then mixed with soy sauce, a popular

source of salt and seasoning used by Chinese since the Han dynasty, a marker for the dish’s

“Chinese-ness,” from the perspective of the Malay author.19 Chopped white onions were then

fried with oil in a wok (kuali), a South Chinese cooking vessel prominent in Guangdong which

then spread to Southeast Asia.20 Water spinach, another vegetable staple in China and Southeast

Asia, was then added, stir-fried, and seasoned with salt.21

The introduction of cassava starch, an ingredient popular in Southeast Asia, could have

reflected the Malay author’s own preference or a result of the Chinese community having learned

to use ingredients found in Malaysia. It either implied a way in which the author modified the

18 “Masak tumis champor Daging sa-chara China,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), May 18, 1959. 19 Joseph Needham and Ling Wang. Science and Civilisation in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 346. 20 Grace Young, "Wok Hay: The Breath of a Wok," Gastronomica 4, no. 3 (2004): 4, 14, 34, 36–40, doi:10.1525/gfc.2004.4.3.26. 21 “Ipomoea Aquatica,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed April 15, 2018, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/168908/0.

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contents of a recipe learned from other ethnic communities, and/or illuminated the Chinese

community’s incorporation of ingredients found locally to their recipes; either of these hybrid

processes made the recipe different from Chinese food in the mainland. This was emblematic of the ways in which Chinese food practices were different than mainland Chinese food, thus making a Chinese diasporic cuisine. The mention of the wok also highlighted an important inclusion of a Guangdong cooking vessel that became popular in Southeast Asia. In particular, the word kuali was created to refer to the wok in Malay, showing the incorporation of the utensil in everyday usage by Malays too.22

In talking about reproducing dishes from other food practices, and referring to other

ethnic communities, the authors’ inclusive language was evident, which contributed to a

conception of these communities as belonging together. In “Sweet and Sour Dish Chinese Style,”

which was published after the establishment of Malaysia, the writer suggested that this Chinese

dish was popular not only amongst the Chinese, but also “other communities in tanah ayer

kita.23 “Tanah ayer,” which means “homeland”, is a term that Malays used to refer to

Malaysia.24 But when paired with “kita”, the Malay all-inclusive we pronoun, alongside the

“other communities,” it suggested an acknowledgement of collective belonging of the ethnic

groups in the shared homeland of Malaysia. That this article was published in 1964, the year

after the federation of Malaysia was formed, further reinforced this meaning of “tanah ayer

kita,” as a concept of a multiethnic nation was established. In this light, the shared consumption

and production of this dish connected the different ethnic communities together. It also became a

22 The word kuali would be used in over 1,400 articles in Berita Harian alone. Many of the articles included preparing recipes using it, and ways to take care of it. 23 “Lauk Masam-Manis Chara China,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), June 30, 1964. 24 Transliterated, tanah ayer would mean water land. It could be referring to conceptions of the sea and land being parts of the world.

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way for the Malay writers to imagine the different communities as part of a larger whole. In the

same article, the author mentioned that “to the women who were once guests of Chinese friends,

you probably had tried this delicious dish.” That the author addressed some of the readers in such

a way suggested that a significant portion of the readers had Chinese friends and had interacted

with them through gatherings and the consumption of food. Thus, this article again showed how

food became a significant bridge between members of different communities in Malaysia.25

The dish’s combination of sweet and sour profiles, not common in mainland Chinese dishes, and local ingredients, like sago, evinced hybridity in Chinese diasporic food. The author’s would first mix cucumbers with ginger, large onions, sugar, vinegar, water, and a tea

chamcha (which literally means “spoon” in Hindi) of salt, which imbued sweet and sour flavors

in the dish. Fish would then be fried till crispy golden with oil in a wok. White onions were then

fried, the juice of the cucumber was extracted and mixed with sago powder and soy sauce.26

Sago, found in Southeast Asia, in particular Malaysia and Indonesia, seeped into the cooking of

Chinese communities as they settled in Malaysia.27

Ratnamala, a prominent writer of Berita Harian’s “Dewan Wanita” (which literally

translates to Women’s Hall) column—which discussed general women’s issues, centered upon

domestic roles and responsibilities and relationships—also eagerly talked about reproductions of

other ethnic dishes, but particularly talked about rarer ones, arguing that these dishes should be

cooked for special occasions.28 One such dish was the Chinese po’pia, “beloved by many

25 “Lauk Masam-Manis.” 26 “Lauk Masam-Manis.” 27 "Taxon: Metroxylon Sagu Rottb.," Taxonomy - GRIN-Global Web v 1.10.2.8, accessed April 15, 2018, https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxonomydetail.aspx?id=103025. 28 While many articles in Berita Harian had anonymous authors, the publication also had a long-running periodical section called “Dewan Wanita” penned by Azah Aziz, who was under the pseudonym Ratnamala at that time. “Dewan Wanita” was a column to discuss generally Malay women’s issues, which at that time centered upon general domesticity and relationships, such as cooking. As pointed out earlier and by authors in cookbooks, a Malay

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Malays” according Ratnamala.29 The dish was said to be very delicious and should considered if

one planned to serve guests or cook something “extraordinary.”30 This indicated a form of

exoticism of the other ethnic community’s meals by Ratnamala, particularly with her emphasis

on the dishes’ specialty. The exoticism of food from other communities compelled women like

Ratnamala to learn about, cook, and eat such food.

Hybridities in Chinese cooking were especially apparent in the po’pia recipe. The recipe

required ingredients like live prawn, beef, bean sprouts, tofu skin, white and red onions, red

peppers, salt, and oil, but also notably tauchu, beaten with a mortar and pestle until it was ground

up with onions. Tauchu was a “cousin” of douchi, the fermented black bean paste that originated from and was popular in China. A fermented soybean paste, tauchu was a result of the introduction of soybeans to Southeast Asia by Chinese immigrants, specifically Indonesia in the

13th century, and became a popular ingredient in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.31 Tauchu

was a primarily Southeast Asian Chinese ingredient, thus giving this particular po’pia recipe a

more regional, Southeast Asian identity.32 A variety of vegetables and plants, like bean sprouts,

yam beans (bengkuang), bean curds (puchok), bamboo shoots, and fried tofu were seasoned and

fried together. These vegetables were not only eaten by Chinese mainlanders but also Malay

communities and other regions in Southeast Asia, which pointed to the dish’s appeal to

Ratnamala as well as shared tastes between Chinese and Malay communities.

woman was expected to be able to cook and prepare meals for the family. Through this section, Ratnamala engaged her readers with a variety of recipes pulled from Malaysia, and tended to explore more special dishes. 29 Ratnamala, “Po' Pia hidangan Yg Di-gemari Kerana Rasa-nya Enak Sekali,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), September 5, 1960. 30 Extraordinary is translated from luar biasa. 31 William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Miso, Soybean Jiang (China), Jang (Korea) and Tauco / Taotjo (Indonesia) (200 B.C. - 2009): Extensively Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook. (Lafayette, CA: Soyinfo Center., 2009), 888. 32 Ratnamala, “Po' Pia hidangan.”

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Similarly, in the “Ceylonese Curry that is Easy to Make but Delicious,” Ratnamala talked

about a Ceylonese curry dish she learned from her Ceylonese friend.33 She mentioned that,

according to her friend, Ceylonese loved the dish because it was tasty, and that “making it did

not require precision.” In this recipe, however, she started with a note of caution by saying:

Would you want to make this dish? If you plan to do it, you have to buy an extraordinary ingredient, which is essential for this dish: “wood fish.”

That the recipe ingredient was so unfamiliar to Ratnamala only spurred her eagerness to teach it to her readers.34 She went on to describe the ingredient: “As it can be understood, the wood fish

is a dried fish that is hard like wood—it also looks like wood!” Part of her enthusiasm for the

“wood fish,” (either dried mackerel tuna or skipjack tuna) could also be from the ways in which

she was trying to make the recipe articles appealing to her readers;35 she was performing her

enthusiasm so get readers to try an ingredient they would not otherwise try.36

Ratnamala also casually implied the close proximity of Chinese and Indian stores in the

po’pia and Ceylonese curry articles, as she pointed out that these places sold her recipes’

essential ingredients like the po’pia skin and “wood fish.” This suggested that these stores were commonplace, not rarities in urban cities in Malaya/Malaysia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Her comment also gave us a glimpse of the hybrid geographical landscape of the area Ratnamala and her readers lived in, and allowed Malay readers to imagine the existence of Tamil and

Chinese sites not only in the physical space that they themselves inhabited, but also in the discursive space that they participated in that was Berita Harian. Ratnamala also transliterated

33 “Kari Celyon mudah di-buat tetapi enak,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), October 3, 1960. 34 “Kari Celyon mudah.” 35 There seemed to be sometimes a conflation between ikan kayu and ikan tongkol. Both terms are connected to mackerel tuna and skipjack tuna. 36 As to how the curry was made: the curry required a kati of onion leaves (spring onions), a quarter kati of fresh/live prawns, 4 tea chamcha of pounded “wood fish,” 6 green peppers, 3 red peppers, 2 or 3 tea chamcha of dried pepper powder, a little lime juice and dried turmeric.

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Chinese (more specifically, Chaoshan) and Tamil words and suggested that her Malay audience

use them to better communicate at the diasporic stores, expanding the vocabulary of her Malay

readers to ease their engagement with the different ethnic communities. Ratnamala transliterated

and Romanized 薄餅 into po’pia, and taught her readers how to pronounce the “wood fish” in

Tamil by transliterating and Romanizing the Tamil term into “mar-si” (although since the Tamil script for the term was not provided, it was unclear as to whether the Tamil transliteration was correct).37 Ratnamala’s transliteration of terms from other languages also reflected an eagerness

of people like her to engage with other ethnic food practices, such that they were willing to

develop a vocabulary to be able to talk about them.

Some articles also grouped dishes from different food practices according to shared

ingredients and cooking styles, which placed these dishes in conversation with each other and

allowed a cross-examination of the similarities and differences between them. An article about

water spinach (kangkong) evinced the shared associations between food practices of Malay,

Chinese, and Indonesian communities. In “Two Kangkong Dishes, One with Egg,” the writer

acknowledged the diversity of dishes stemming from one ingredient.38 While the writer assumed

that the readers were familiar with the Malay kangkong dish—which was cooked with dried

prawns, red and white onions, and belachan, a Malay variety of fermented shrimp paste, the

writer then introduced two other ways—Chinese and Indonesian/Javanese—of cooking the same

dish, mainly because they were delicious and easy to make.39

37 In the Chaoshan dialect, popiah is pronounced as /poʔ˩piã�/(薄餅). which means “thin wafer”. “Namanya dalam bahasa Tamil ia-lah ‘mar-si’.” 38 “Dua sajian kangkong satu di-masokkan telur,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), May 18, 1959. 39 Not to be confused with Indians, Indonesian referred to Indonesia, the nation that was founded in August 1945. The Javanese food practices, the largest ethnic minority in Indonesia, was probably what the recipe author was describing when talking about the Indonesian dish, as Javanese communities could be found in Malaysia and Singapore as well.

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The dishes from the different ethnic communities were placed in conversation which each other as their recipes were examined. The Indonesian kangkong dish seemed to use similar ingredients as the Malay version, as it also included white and red onions, ginger, and galangal, though it also incorporated egg into the recipe. The Chinese kangkong dish, though not described in detail, was called Chinese-style kangkong with sliced beef, and thus was the only dish out of the three that had meat. Because the Malay dish was assumed to be familiar to the readers, the

Indonesian dish was paid more attention in the articles. The framing of this article placed the dishes as counterparts of each other, instead of claiming that one dish was better than another. It became a way in which Malaysian writers grouped together similar dishes from different ethnic food practices. That it brought dishes from different food practices together showed commonalities between them, which pointed to the collective appreciation for certain kinds of food, was important to foster social relationships between different ethnic communities. That it made comparisons between dishes also allowed provided readers with greater access to learn these dishes’ differences and perhaps even provided a greater potential to blend between different cooking styles and ingredients.

An interesting corollary of such a framework of grouping dishes was articles that featured unique, distinctive commonalities between Malay and other ethnic food practices that would bring them together under a proto-Malaysian network of food practices by setting them apart from other food practices that did not share this commonality. Ingredients with particularly strong flavor profiles, such as the bitter gourd, which was not conventionally expected to be appreciated due to its bitterness, was a flavor profile mutually appreciated by Malays and

Chinese in Malaysia. As described in “Even Though It Tastes Bitter Many Love It,” the writer stated that the bitter gourd (peria) was loved by many and a popular ingredient for Malays and

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Chinese, even though its taste was bitter.40 The phrase “even though” evinced a love of the

ingredient despite the taste by the two communities, and thus suggested a shared distinctive

predilection for certain kinds of food.

The writer then talked about Malay and Chinese processes of cooking the delicious and

nutritious bitter gourds while suggesting even other ways to cook the vegetable, bringing to surface the different food practices in Malaysia. Bitter gourds in Malay dishes, according to the article, were fried with a mix of peppers, turmeric, onions, and coconut milk. The author then

explained that the Chinese counterpart was cooked vegetable with an egg; when the fried bitter

gourd was nearly done, an egg would be cracked and added to the fried mixture, stirred until a

fried egg dish was made. The author also mentioned a few other ways the bitter gourd could be

used, like being added to curries, Malay or Indian versions, being pickled and being used for a

mix (sarak), which involved hollowing out the gourd and stuffing it with prawns or meat mixed

with onions.41 The author did also suggest ways to reduce the bitterness (like pressing the bitter

gourd into salt), implying an understanding that not everyone could enjoy the bitter gourd as it

was, and suggesting an inclusive mindset. The effort towards making the bitter gourd palatable

indicated a desire to make bitter gourd more accessible to the reader and an awareness that not

every community was used to eating bitter foods. By extension, this effort reinforced the ways in

which the writer wanted to provide avenue for people to learn and try different food cultures in

Malaysia.

40 “Walau Pun Rasa-nya Pahit tetapi Banyak Yg Menggemari-nya,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), October 19, 1959. 41 It was unclear if the author meant Malay or Indian curries, but since other Malay authors would have made distinctions if they had to refer to one or the other, it could be easily assumed that the author meant both. Such ambiguity further alluded to the hybridity of curries in Malaysia. ‘Sarak’ means mixed ingredients.

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The varied approaches in which the author detailed the use of the bitter gourd thus

evinced the writer’s desire to put the different food practices in Malaysia into conversation with each other. Indeed, Berita Harian writers commonly discussed the relationship between an ingredient and a food practice while also referring to food practices of other ethnic communities in Malaysia. It became common for these writers to, when talking about a recipe, make comparisons with dishes from different ethnic communities, suggesting their understanding that the varied food practices in Malaya/Malaysia were connected in this vocabulary of a proto-

Malaysian cuisine.

Framing through Food—Narrative of Interethnic Harmony between Malays, Chinese, and

Indians in Berita Harian

While Berita Harian mainly provided us a look at the opinions and thoughts of Malay writers, sometimes the publication also presented responses by and interactions with Chinese and

Indian women in its articles. Since Malaysia’s independence was a narrative of the unity of

Malays, Chinese, and Indians, it is important to look at the ways in which Berita Harian framed

Chinese and Indian women together with Malay women in the following articles as such a framing was integral to the imagination of a cohesive Malaysian national community in public media. Through its articles that covered positive conversations and interactions between women from the three ethnic communities, Berita Harian helped to consolidate and perpetuate this frame of multiethnic Malaysian unity.

In the section called “Hal Masak-Memasak” (“Cooking Issues”), a Tionghoa (Indonesian word for Chinese) woman called Puan Helen Ng wrote a letter to Ratnamala around the end of

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1959 or early 1960; this correspondence revealed in turn an interest by Chinese women like her

to learn Malay food practices as well, suggesting a reciprocity in interests.42 She said:

I am a non-Malay who is actively learning our national language. Every day I read Berita Harian, and, as a woman, I follow “Dewan Wanita.”43

The woman identified herself as a non-Malay rather than simply calling herself Chinese, which implied that the “Dewan Wanita” section was an important Malay space, that the general readers were Malay, and that Ng recognized herself as an “other” in that space. She then continued that she was “actively learning our national language,” which was Malay. That her letter was received and published three years after the founding of independent Malaya on August 31, 1957 reflected the ways in which she was participating her participation in the nation-state project by learning Malay, the declared national language in the constitution of Malaya, as well as calling

Malay “our national language.” Ng used “kita,” the Malay “we/our” pronoun that included herself and Ratnamala to suggest that Malay was both their national language, unlike the more exclusive first person plural pronoun “kami,” which would have excluded the person

(Ratnamala) that the writer (Ng) was talking to.44 Thus, as shown in the diction of the letter

addressed to Ratnamala, the fan seemed to feel a collective sense of belonging from the shared

usage of the national language. In this letter, she expressed an interest towards Malay dishes, and

hoped that Ratnamala would teach her to cook Malay fish curry. The Malay writers’ fondness of

other ethnic dishes was reciprocated in this article, a Chinese woman personally requested to

learn Malay fish curry from Ratnamala. Ratnamala responded favorably with “Madame, please

42 The written letter was published in the article “Wanita China ini Ingin Belajar Masak2an Kari Ikan.” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), February 22, 1960. 43 Translated from: “Saya ada-lah sa-orang bukan Melayu yang sedang bergiat belajar bahasa kebangsaan kita. Sa- tiap hari saya membacha Berita Harian, dan sa-bagai sa-orang wanita, ruangan Dewan Wanita ini menjadi ikutan saya sa-terus-nya.” 44 “Kita” and “kami” are the two first-person plural pronouns that are used in Malay.

34

follow [this recipe], and I hope that Madame would succeed in making this delicious dish” and

dedicated this section to the fish curry recipe in “Chinese Woman Wants to Learn Fish Curry” on

February 22, 1960. 45 Ratnamala’s use of the word “sila-lah” for “please” actually suggested a

polite fondness and warmth on her part. Thus the mutual appreciation between the fan and the

writer was visible, and was an example of more interethnic interactions that happened when

talking about food.46

Ratnamala finely detailed the recipe to help guide Ng, who was assumed to be not

familiar with Malay dishes. Ratnamala included fish (dried or wet), coconut, fresh chilies, red

onions, white onions, and ginger. Tamarind (asam Jawa), a plant in Southeast Asia and a popular ingredient in Malay dishes, was also used to add a tangy and sour taste. A varied array of spices

was used: coriander (ketumbar), cumin (jintan puteh), anise (jintan manis), 10 or 15 dried

peppers, black peppers, and dried turmeric, and all of this was mixed with hot water. The paste was to be tossed and ground until fine. Onions and ginger were then ground until fine as well.

The coconut was husked to get grated coconut, which was then pressed with the tamarind. The onion paste was fried in a pot, and then the spice paste added till fragrant. Coconut milk and grated coconut were poured into the pot and mixed. The mixture was boiled before the fish was added in along with salt. Ratnamala then also introduced even more vegetables to vary the dish,

like star fruits, Averrhoa bilimbi (belimbing buluh), young tomatoes, and young mangoes

(mempelam muda) to increase the sourness. That she was trying to make her recipe more accessible to a Chinese reader was indicative of her active engagement and openness with the different ethnic communities on food.47

45 Translated from: “Sila-lah Puan Helen ikuti, dan saya berharap puan akan berjaya membuat lauk yang sedap ini.” 46 “Wanita China ini Ingin Belajar Masak2an Kari Ikan,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), February 22, 1960. 47 “Wanita China ini.”

35

Conversations with Indian women were then described in “Merry Christmas: Jolly!” by

Kak Timah, published on January 3, 1965. Whereas the previous articles were about recipes, this

one was an interview by Timah of her friends’ Indian Christian families. The interview

highlighted the consumption habits of the family, and also the feast that they cooked for

Christmas.48 This article conveyed a narrative of Malays, Chinese, and Indian people as

integrating successfully in the country.

In her article, Timah discussed a visit to the Indian Christian family of one of her friends,

which illustrated families of different ethnicities and religions getting along. Here the celebration

by the family was pretty modest, and the family did not have a particular feast to prepare. Her

friend said: “For lunch we usually prefer Malay foods, but at night we prefer Western food

because they are lighter in taste.”49 This quote highlighted a Malaysian’s ready access and

predilection to try different kinds of food in the country. The friend proceeded to describe how

she had Malay genealogy in her extended family, as her Christian Indian aunt married a Malay

man, and thus there was an interesting example of a community that represented hybridities of

ethnicities and religion (most, if not all, Malays were Muslims). She exclaimed that relationships

were not strained even though the family members were of different ethnicities and religions.

“We kept visiting each other for celebrations like this [Christmas].” Thus, celebrations, feasting, and the consumption of foods became a way for an extended family consisting of different communities to bond and interact with each other. Her Muslim relatives made concessions with fasting just to be able to have both families convene during Christmas: they refrained from eating meat for a day, but continued to have dinner with the Christian family. A sense of inter-ethnic

48 Kak Timah, “Sambutan Kristmas: meriah!” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), January 3, 1965. 49 Timah, “Sambutan Kristmas.”

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harmony portrayed in this article contributed to the framing of the interethnic Malaysian

community.

Within the same article, Timah then talked about her previous visit to the home of another friend, who was also an Indian Christian woman and worked in the federal office in

Kuala Lumpur. Timah’s friend also explained how she usually invited her Malay, Chinese, and

Indian friends to join her for a Christmas feast, which again framed the narrative of the three

ethnic groups constituting parts of the same cohesive community. That her friend’s mother was

willing to share her cooking with members of the other communities, like Kak Timah, who was

Malay, evinced the family’s openness in sharing their food with other communities, and was

another indication of the fluidity of food practices in Malaya.50

This section in particular also explored complicated relations between nationality,

ethnicity, and colonial legacy. Timah was treated to a variety of “Indian kueh [treats]” during her

visit.51 According to the friend’s mom, in the past, “we always made their kueh kebangsaan

[national/community treats]...Christmas. These are our kueh kebangsaan.”52 The Malay word

“kebangsaan,” a conjugated version of the more ambiguous “bangsa,” evinced a more national version of community and usually referred to nations.53 Since Kak Timah referred to these treats as Indian, kebangsaan according to the Indian woman referred to India. Thus, despite the Indian woman being a Malaysian citizen, she still felt national ties to India. There was also a juxtaposition between “us,” which referred to the woman’s family, and “their treats” which was assumed to be the West, from the reference to Christmas, suggesting the tension between making

50 Timah, “Sambutan Kristmas.” 51 Timah, “Sambutan Kristmas.” 52 This is the literal translation with no words omitted. The word Christmas might have been a typo, or just a way to associate them to the West. 53 Public schools in Malaysia are called sekolah kebangsaan.

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Indian and Western food that she had to navigate around as an Indian Christian.54 Since it was

posited against the Western other, “us” could also refer to the Malaysian community, especially

since this article was published two years after the Malaysian independence of 1963, and thus the

mother could refer to the “kueh kebangsaan” as not only “Indian kueh” but also “Malaysian

kueh” as well. Such a loaded use of Malay represented the complexities of identities that the

woman had to untangle, between being a citizen of Malaysia, Indian, and a Christian who had to

navigate around tensions between Indian and Western influences. These complexities were not

uncommon for people living in the new nation-state to deal with, and the food that they made

became a noticeable way to see them.

The mother continued with “there are many different types of kueh kebangsaan, but we

could only make these,” evincing a sense of frustration with either not having the resources and

ingredients to make other dishes or on not knowing different Indian cuisines. The three treats

made were later described to be muruku, a Tamil snack, kala-kala, an Anglo-Indian hybrid dessert made during Christmas, and Maisor pagh, a Mysorean dessert, which represented a range of different regional Indian cuisines as well as hybrid influences with English and Christian traditions that this family practiced, echoing remnants of colonial India and the interconnectedness of colonial identity between India and Malaysia.55 The article did not explore

dialect-based or regional genealogies of the Indian family, as the mother had knowledge of different subdialect and regional (Tamil, Mysorean) treats. Thus, the “Indian” ethnic category in

Malaysia once again blurred the food practices of the different regional and sub-dialect groups

54 Later on, she even described that, in Malay, “while we are Christians, our cooking is Indian.” 55 It is easier to find information on Muruku (“When We Eat What We Eat: Classifying Crispy Foods in Malaysian Tamil Cuisine” by Theresa W. Devasahayam), and Maisor pagh, a.k.a. Mysore pak (The Times of India’s “Mysore's own pak, a Piece of Royalty that Melts”). A few Youtube videos depict kala-kala (or kulkul): “Kalakala(கலகலா)Sivakasi Samayal / Recipe - 308” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdCONamWWwA; “Kalakala | Kul Kuls | Christmas Special Recipe” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deziu9Ninmg

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from India. She also added “if I don’t make them, my child would not know their kueh

kebangsaan,” further showing an intent by the mother to pass down knowledge to the next

generation of the family and reaffirm their Indian heritage.

The article not only suggested the friendly coexistence of the different communities, but also a narrative that Berita Harian was trying to construct of Malays, Chinese, and Indians integrating socially in the country. That Kak Timah pointed out that her friend had Malay,

Chinese, and Indian friends was a deliberate attempt to suggest a picture of a thriving multiethnic community. Such a narrative became more common after the independence of Malaya in 1957 and the formation of Malaysia in 1963. Also, that Berita Harian focused the story this time on the Christian Indian family, rather than the usual Malay Muslim narratives, suggested a growing inclusivity by Berita Harian, perhaps to recognize that Indians were another group central to the community of Malaysia. This showcase to a primarily Malay and Malay-speaking audience then informed the readers of the growing multiculturalism of Malaysia, such that the diasporas had a more significant part in the narrative of the Malaysian peoples, compared to five years ago when

Chinese and Indians were only talked about because of their dishes, instead of being direct subjects in the articles.56 The featured Indian Christian woman’s navigation of the complexities

of her varied identities through food was also an important issue of identification that many

citizens of a postcolonial state like Malaysia had to deal with.

Chapter Conclusion

In talking about the Malay food practices in newsprint, in describing distinct Malay

dishes and the hybrid origins of these dishes, the authors of the Berita Harian helped to make

56 Timah, “Sambutan Kristmas.”

39 visible the relations between Malay and other ethnic food practices found in Malaya/Malaysia during the 1950s and 1960s. The articles explored dishes from other ethnic groups, like the

Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, and Ceylonese dishes, and tried to group these dishes together under similar themes, further evincing a sense of a Malaysian cuisine, a network of food practices that all these dishes were part of. Since when one talked about the recipe of one dish, one tended to make references to the other food practices as well, they suggested a sense of interconnectedness between the foods, and also implied an internal system of symbolic references that were familiar to people living in Malaysia. Reading these articles also promoted learning about dishes from other ethnic groups, and broadened the readers’ access to the different ethnic food practices, which consequently developed more hybridities of food practices between the different communities that lived in Malaya/Malaysia.

Later in the chapter, we also examined more articles that discussed food between Malay writers and non-Malay figures, further showing the many fluid and accessible interactions that happened between members of the different communities in Malaya/Malaysia, from the Chinese fan writing to Ratnamala to Kak Timah visiting her Indian friend’s family. In particular, this section illustrated the ways in which Berita Harian framed Malays, Chinese, and Indians as being part of the same community, especially since the three ethnic communities were central to the narrative of Malaysian independence. Kak Timah’s article about Christmas celebrations particularly evinced feasting that featured food consumption and more explicit conceptions of a

Malaysian community. Thus, food was an anchor that helped to bring people together in

Malaysia as, shown throughout the chapter, it facilitated interactions between members of the different ethnic communities who were eager to learn about all the food practices in Malaysia and happy to share such knowledge that they obtained in newsprint.

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Finally, looking at the interview with the Christian Indian family helped to better frame an understanding of Malaysian food practices as a union of local, Malay, Chinese, and Indian food practices against the Western (North American, European) and colonial other. These people displayed the very complexities of colonial/Western influence and tensions that they experienced with regards to their food practices. While they continued to prepare colonial and Western inspired foods, they still displayed conscious ways of separating themselves, the Eastern, the locals, from the Western, and the foreign. And navigating this tension, yet acknowledging the existence of colonial influence on Malaysian food practices, was something that Malaysians would continue to do.

Food became an instigator not only of Malays’ constitution and reflection of their ethnicity, but also the development of relations between different ethnic communities. Malay women’s eagerness in unpacking and finding connections with all kinds of ethnic food practices reflected the ways in which the different ethnic communities were intertwined with each other.

Food also became points of commonalities that brought women of different ethnicities together, from sharing the same tastes to participating in social feasts, like Kak Timah’s visits. Such laid the seeds of not only an incipient understanding of Malaysian cuisine, but also the consolidation of an interethnic Malaysian identity.

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Chapter 2

Food Nationalism in late 1960s and early 1970s

In the late 1960s, Malay women began to adopt a more modern attitude towards food, using it to develop national economic strength and health. While they had taken responsibility towards ameliorating social issues like children’s and women’s welfare since the 1940s, grappling with larger national economic goals sketched out by government policies, like eradicating poverty, was new to them; in addition, issues of poverty and malnutrition began to be framed as not only a socioeconomic but also a national problem. Through food practices, they were able to express their nationalism by taking on these national issues and work towards bettering the nation.1

As Malay women showed more modern attitudes toward food practices, they

disseminated them to improve Malay communities and, by extension, the nation. Ratnamala

published articles in Berita Harian that encouraged thrifty attitudes towards meal preparation

and cautioned against wasteful excess in cooking. Malay women in the United Malays National

Organization (UMNO), the dominant third of the three-party Alliance Front, which led the

incumbent government, swiftly mobilized by organizing food events to inculcate in their

members understandings of economic frugality and nutrition. In particular, a series of

economical cooking competitions organized by UMNO Mothers (Kaum Ibu UMNO), the

women’s chapter of UMNO, in the late 1960s were aimed at challenging and encouraging Malay

women to cook inexpensive, delicious, and nutritious meals for their families. Malay women also

authored cookbooks that incorporated a perspective more conscious of nutrition and frugality, to

help women with carrying out domestic tasks in a more efficient manner. These responses

1 Malaysia launched three plans in between 1960-1970: the First Five Year Plan in 1956-1960, the Second Five Year Plan in 1960-1965, and the First Malaysia Plan in 1966-1970.

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expressed women’s perspectives towards nationalism, as Malay women, through their own food

practices, thought of meeting national economic goals and participated in tackling the national

issues of poverty and socioeconomic inequality; they began to conceive of themselves as

members of this nation-state with new responsibilities of helping the nation-state.

Aside from building national economic strength with the government, Malay women, in

raising their families, were also developing strong and healthy bodies for a stronger nation-state.

Nutritious food became more than ever seen by writers like Ratnamala and I. Lokhfiah, a

cookbook writer, as important sustenance for strong, healthy bodies and families, which were the

building blocks of a strong and formidable nation-state, evincing a relationship between one’s

body and the nation-state.2 As a consequence, UMNO Mothers, Berita Harian articles and

women’s cookbooks became not only concerned with picking out inexpensive ingredients as a

measure to alleviate poverty, but also ones filled with nutrients and would create balanced diets

and well-fed children.

As Malay women inculcated amongst themselves an economic and health-based consciousness towards food to deal with widespread poverty and malnutrition, the Malaysian government developed another approach to bettering the nation. It was sowing the seeds of a domestic economy from promoting the sales of the nation’s produce. Once Malaysia was no longer its colony, the British decided to roll back its economic commitments in 1968, leaving

Malaysia to create its own local and independent economy.3 To compensate for British retraction of economic investments, the government collaborated with groups such as women’s

2 The Meiji government introduced meat to the Japanese populace to strengthen their military. In this manner, the government was literally strengthening Japanese bodies. For more information about the relationships between food and nationalism in the Meiji government and postmodern Japan, take a look at Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta’s Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics. 3 John H. Drabble, An Economic History of Malaysia: c. 1800-1990: the Transition to Modern Economic Growth. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 185.

43 organizations and political parties to launch campaigns that encouraged the consumption of local food and produce. These campaigns involved producing new recipes and re-promoting and reinventing old ones that incorporated local fruits, aimed at enticing Malaysians to support their own domestic economy.

The fruit campaign also became a platform for the articulation of a Malaysian national cuisine on a formal level endorsed by the government and sites of culinary innovation. In the campaigns, the Western and colonial recipes used also revealed colonial hybridities in Malaysian food practices. Evidently, rather than rejecting or shying away from it, Malaysian food practices incorporated colonial influence into them.

Roots of Modernity in the 1900s

Modern attitudes towards food could be traced back to first decade of the 1900s, when education reforms and colonial education introduced by the British Empire exposed a small minority of Malays to Western conceptions of modernity.4 In time, they became the modern and

Western-enlightened Malay intellectuals who sought to modernize and liberate Malays from

British colonial rule, and brought about Malayan/Malaysian independence in 1957 and 1963. The newly-formed Malaysian government, as a way to disseminate further ideas of modernity in the belief that they would better the nation, launched Dewan Masharakat (which, literally translated, means The People’s Hall), a monthly Malay cultural and intellectual magazine. Published by the government’s Institute of Language and Literature since September 1963, the magazine was an important platform of Malay intellectuals, specialists, and technocrats who discussed applications of academic fields like economics, psychology, physics, and agricultural sciences to

4 T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21.

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modernizing Malays. Writers of this magazine were adamant about the importance of inculcating

rational and scientific thought amongst Malays, particularly the rural communities, whom they

perceived to be backwards. According to Ahmad Mahdzan Yub in “A Few Reasons Why Our

Farmers are Backward,” Malay farmers lacked farming management knowledge, farming

technology, and the most cutting-edge farming techniques, amongst other shortcomings.5

Mahdzan Yub also suggested that farmers conceive of more exact ways to measure and quantify their use of land to maximize crop production.6 According to Ilias Zaidi, writer of “Malays’ Cold

Attitude towards Science Should be Eliminated,” Malay writers, poets and reporters had long

encouraged Malay society to be so involved in “the realm of literature until many became drunk

with its illusions.”7 Be it rural or intellectual, these writers claimed that scientific thought was

lacking amongst the general Malay populace, and that needed to be fixed.

Evoking the brimming optimism towards scientific progress of the magazine, Mohd.

Mansor bin Haji Salleh, in his article “Why is Science Needed for Malays?,” clearly showed his

fascination with the benefits of science by illustrating the rapid pace of British scientific

progress:

James Watt was able to use steam power to run vehicles. George Stephenson in turn...developed a steam-powered engine (locomotive). The new invention was able to be used to pull train wagons which were before pulled by a few strong horses. Transportation costs were decreased; business improved tremendously; profits were higher than before. As a benefit, Britain’s Industrial Revolution could move faster than before.8

5 Ahmad Mahdzan Yub, “Beberapa sebab petani kita mundur,” Dewan Masharakat, March 15, 1966, 23-24. 6 Mahdzan Yub, “Beberapa sebab petani,” 26. 7 Ilias Zaidi, “Sikap Dingin Masharakat Melayu Terhadap Sains Patut Di-hapuskan,” Dewan Masharakat, March 15, 1966, 27. 8 Mohd. Mansor bin Haji Salleh, “Kenapa Sains Perlu Untok Masharakat Melayu?” Dewan Masharakat, December 15, 1966, 23.

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Salleh’s own narrative of British progress showed that he was enamored by Britain’s rapid

development into a modern society, and saw scientists like James Watt and George Stephenson

and their inventions as the catalysts to such progress. Closer to home, Salleh was also inspired by

the Japanese embrace of modernization during the prewar and postwar periods and how it

brought on unprecedented economic and scientific Japanese progress that made Japan a

technological and modern powerhouse during and after the two world wars.9 He saw Japan as an

exemplary Asian nation that capitalized on its exposure to Western scientific thought to

accelerate its own progress. Indeed, according to Salleh, “the problem of the origins of such

technology and science, whether it is from the West or the East, is not important.”10 Salleh had

no qualms about embracing Western scientific ideas, as long as they brought progress for

Malays. Other writers in the magazine tried to reconcile Western ideas of science and rationality

with their own Malay-Muslim identities by suggesting that Islamic principles were compatible with the path towards modernization.11 Regardless of how they dealt with anxieties of Western

encroachment, the writers reached a consensus: Malays needed to be on the path to progress, and

science was their vehicle.

These ideas of modernity took hold in the greater Malay populace during the 1960s, particularly among Malay women, who adopted a more frugal and health-conscious approach

towards making food. These ideas began to be seen as a way to solve the national socio

economic problems that Malays faced right after the inception of Malaysia.

9 Haji Salleh, “Kenapa Sains Perlu,” 23. 10 Haji Salleh, “Kenapa Sains Perlu,” 23. 11 Raja Mohd. Affandi, “Peranan Islam Dalam Pembangunan Ekonomi,” Dewan Masharakat, December 15, 1966, 12-18.

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As Told by Ratnamala—Early Understandings on Food Frugality and Nutrition

In 1965, Ratnamala, Berita Harian columnist, caught wind of conceptions of Malay

modernity, and disseminated modern understandings of food practices. Two of her articles

published early that year, “Be Frugal in the Kitchen” and “Be Frugal with Dishes,” marked the inception of her thrifty and nutrition-based attitudes towards food.12 In the first article, “Be

Frugal in the Kitchen,” Ratnamala exhorted readers to not waste food by following these steps:

firstly, when buying ingredients to prepare meals, one had to not buy in excess and leave

leftovers to waste; secondly, one needed to store food properly and consume the stored food to

not let it expire.13 In detailing the steps above, Ratnamala pushed forth a more conscious understanding of food-related waste, and how to reduce it through basic home economics. The

article’s intentions coincided with the goals of the government’s Second Five Year Plan of 1960-

1965, which was developed with the general purpose of improving the economic and social

wellbeing of the rural population and other low income groups. Ratnamala’s suggestions in the

article offered a way in which Malay women with families could cope with poverty and lack of

resources through better management of the household economy.

Ratnamala’s second article “Be Frugal with Dishes,” published just weeks after the

previous article, more directly attempted to influence the cooking and eating practices of Malay

households with a modern economic rationale. On cooking, Ratnamala suggested using

alternative, cheaper ingredients to replace more commonly used ones to save on costs and yet

retain the comparable amounts of nutrients when preparing meals. In particular, Ratnamala

advocated more frequent use of vegetables, as, in addition to their low costs, they contained

12 Ratnamala, “Berchemat dengan Hidangan,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), March 2, 1965; Ratnamala, “Berchemat Di-Dapor” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), Feb. 23, 1965. 13 Ratnamala, “Berchemat Di-Dapor.”

47 various essential nutrients like vitamins. On eating, Ratnamala suggested that, when cooking vegetables in broth, which would cause the “nutrients of the vegetables to seep into the broth itself,” people eating the dish should finish the broth to benefit from all of the nutrients in it. Not drinking all of the broth would waste the rest of the nutrients. As a way to resolve this problem,

Ratnamala even recommended a different way of serving vegetable broth. Rather than pouring all the broth into a large bowl, from which people would only take spoonfuls (to mix with rice) but ultimately leave the leftovers to waste, the vegetable broth should be served in small bowls evenly distributed between people so that it could be drunk and finished completely. The punctilious remarks on drinking broth again indicated Ratnamala’s concern with maximizing consumption of nutrients and minimizing waste. In instances of cooking and eating, food became seen as an economic transaction that incurred a cost to provide nutrients to the consumer. And, to

Ratnamala, making the best food decisions involved minimizing waste, that is, to consume as much nutrients required while spending as little as possible. This modern attitude of quantifying food was not unlike that developed towards agriculture by Dewan Masharakat writers such as

Mahdzan Yub, and could be adopted by poor Malay families so that they could spend frugally while receiving adequate sustenance. Ratnamala then even mentioned that drinking broths was a popular practice amongst the Chinese and the Japanese to further legitimate her suggestions, which perhaps hinted at her assumption that these ethnicities’ food practices also had an economic rationale. Ratnamala’s exacting suggestions in this article thus conveyed her thoughts and belief that Malay food practices could be more efficient to help Malay families exert greater control over their socioeconomic circumstances.14

14 Ratnamala, “Berchemat dengan Hidangan.”

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In the same article, Ratnamala suggested ingredients that were locally sourced and easily

found, as they were inexpensive and plentiful. To guide readers, Ratnamala listed vegetables like

“puchok ubi, star gooseberry, spinach, watercress,” which were easily found in rural landscapes

and thus affordable to poorer Malay communities.15 She even pointed out ingredients of other

diasporas, particularly beans that were used by the Chinese and Indian communities: dhal beans,

green beans, soybeans. Her inclusion of these ingredients thus displayed eating habits that

included the tastes of other diasporas.16 Ratnamala also cautioned against eating meat and large fish as sources of protein which were more expensive and advocated cheaper, locally sourced alternatives. She suggested that “to get protein and calcium we can serve inexpensive ingredients like small fish, dried fish, eggs, and others.” She then encouraged the use of belachan, a fermented shrimp paste popular in Southeast Asia, and chenchaluk, a Malaccan variant of fermented shrimp, both of which were inexpensive local proteins made by Malays.17 Thus, as a corollary to Ratnamala’s desire to inculcate thriftiness, she encouraged her readers to veer towards eating more prepared ethnic foods like chenchaluk.18

That Ratnamala pointed out that Malay cooking and eating habits were wasteful at a time

when a significant number of them were poor was perplexing; one would wonder what resources

they had to waste in the first place if they were poor? Her thoughts could have been informed by

the sense of anxiety and urgency towards Malays’ perceived backwardness, as talked about by

Malay intellectuals in Dewan Masharakat. To these intellectuals, being backward meant not being modern, and not catching up to the advanced technologies and fields of knowledge that the

15 Ratnamala, “Berchemat dengan Hidangan.” 16 Ratnamala, “Berchemat dengan Hidangan.” 17 R. J. Wilkinson, Papers on Malay Subjects, (Malaya: FMS Government Press, 1923), 62. 18 Ratnamala, “Berchemat dengan Hidangan.”

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West had created and used to expand and colonize other places like Malaysia.19 That the rural

Malay communities were far removed from such developments did not bode well in the opinion of the intellectuals, as it translated to weakness in Malays and the nation and an inability for them to advance to become a modern society. In this case, Ratnamala could have encouraged rural Malay communities to have austere attitudes towards food because she felt that the issues of rural poverty were partly rooted in their un-modern habits towards life, such as cooking and eating. Ratnamala could have also been addressing the urban Malays who had more expensive spending habits than their rural counterparts. Her intended audience for these two articles was vague, implied only when she suggested some inexpensive ingredients that were easily found in the rural landscape; she could have very well seen urban Malays as wasteful, and sympathized with the poorer rural Malays.

Ratnamala’s articles were the start of Malay women’s use of food practices in ameliorating not only social but economic predicaments that struck Malaysia and helping to achieve the milestones set out by the Malaysian government in its economic policies. As Malay women navigated through new understandings of making and eating food, they also sought to apply their perspectives to bettering their nascent nation-state in a way they knew how: challenging each other to cook in a more frugal and nutritious manner.

Economical Cooking Competitions—UMNO Mothers Mobilizing for Malaysia

Through UMNO Mothers, the women’s chapter of the United Malays National

Organization, Malay women participated politically at historically greater rates during the 1960s.

In particular, they came to organize regional economical cooking competitions after 1966 that

19 Mahdzan Yub, “Beberapa sebab petani,” 23-24.

50

expanded and later culminated in a national counterpart, in an effort to gain membership as well

as meet national economic goals.

The growing political agency of these women was unprecedented. Since the founding of

the UMNO in 1946, men were predominately at the helm of the party. Women members’

political responsibilities in the party, according to the men, resided in the domestic sphere.20

These women were expected to support their families, such as maintaining their households, and

preparing food for the family and thus nourish a strong, healthy community. Despite facing

hostilities from men and a lack of access to traditional leadership roles in the party, Malay

women created more opportunities for their own political participation forming UMNO Mothers

in 1947, which grew to establish chapters throughout the country.

While UMNO Mothers’ duties were primarily supporting UMNO’s political activities

and reinforcing Malay-Muslim ideals of women’s roles in the family, the emergence of women

like Aishah Ghai and Sakinah Junid as leaders of UMNO Mothers in the 1950s “transformed the

[UMNO Mothers] from a support group of wives of the political elite into a powerful grass-roots

organization for Malay-educated women,” training these women to speak confidently in public,

become leaders of their communities, and mobilize votes of Malay women for UMNO.21 Ghai and Junid were educated in Indonesia and learned the political techniques of the Indonesian

Revolution of 1945-1949, which honed their skills as political leaders and recruiters.

During the 1960s, the UMNO Mothers directed their active involvement in organizing and recruiting to national developments through food-based practices. Through holding cooking- related events, women mobilized to support the government’s efforts in tackling prevailing economic issues at that time. As the government created the First Malaysia Plan, a national

20 Harper, The End of Empire, 314. 21 Harper, The End of Empire, 324-325.

51

economic policy which spanned 1966-1970 that aimed to launch infrastructural projects to improve the welfare of all citizens, particularly the rural and low-income groups, Malay women

wanted encourage a nutritious and economic diet for Malays.22 While each UMNO Mothers’

chapter held cooking classes and competitions at their own discretion, some of the most

elaborate events were collectively organized by all the branches, like the May 11th Movement

Day (Gerakan 11 Mei), the anniversary of UMNO’s establishment. The day was celebrated by

UMNO Mothers during the 1960s through organizing competitions that included flower

decoration and economical cooking, which were open to all UMNO women.

Berita Harian provided close coverage of the different celebrations of the May 11th

Movement Day throughout the years. Ratnamala, in her “Dewan Wanita” column, wrote a full- page piece on May 16 1967 that covered one such instance of an UMNO Mothers-led cooking

competition for that year’s May 11th celebration. Under the headline “UMNO Mothers’ Cooking

Competition,” she called the event a “progressive step,” perhaps towards modernity, which was

indicative once again of a fixation with scientific and rational progress. Ratnamala also broke

down the motivations and details of the competitions for interested readers. Addressing insults

by “fathers” (adult men, who could also be members of UMNO) who claimed that women

always liked to organize cooking competitions, which was a not so veiled attack at women’s

usefulness in UMNO, she said that:

The cooking competitions organized by UMNO Mothers are not just competitions that allow one to cook anything. And they aren’t also cooking competitions that have themes of weird, strange and extraordinary kueh or expensive dishes...from its name “Choose and Cook Nutritious Dishes,” one can understand that this competition’s goals are productive: to encourage our women to pay more attention to the question of food nutrients, which is tied to the duty of building a healthy bangsa.23

22 The First Malaysia Plan focused on land development schemes, agricultural diversification and infrastructure projects. Drabble, An Economic History, 196. 23 Ratnamala, “Peraduan memasak Kaum Ibu Berita Harian,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), May 16, 1967.

52

The passage was indicative of the pushback and belittling that UMNO women tended to face

from their male counterparts as they created their own forms of political participation. As men

had conventionally used the idealization of women’s domestic roles to justify limiting their

participation, this time women were able to utilize their domestic roles as a form of political

participation, using these competitions to not only encourage nutritious cooking but recruit more

members into UMNO Mothers. Thus, some men could do nothing but only criticize these

competitions. Importantly, Ratnamala was able to reinforce the notion that UMNO women’s

roles to prepare nutritious meals were seen as crucial to fostering a strong Malay community

(bangsa), through the building of healthy bodies; bangsa in this context could also be interpreted as the historically sought after Malay nation by Malay nationalists, which suggested the implication that the cooking competitions were not only benefiting Malays, but also the nation.24

Ratnamala continued by stressing that raising and taking care of the family, through even

providing meals, was important as a woman’s family members were citizens of the country,

tying family, ethnicity, and nation together. Thus, the act of cooking was framed as an important

national act of contribution by women to the nation.

Ratnamala also seemed to push back a little on the tendency of UMNO Mothers to learn

how to make dishes they were not familiar with even when they did not need to. In the same

article, she acknowledged that some of the members did indeed like to organize cooking

competitions or classes on strange dishes, and that critics’ claim that such acts were wasteful and

unfruitful to the building of the nation-state was valid. In addition to feeding the family, cooking

meals now had an important, collective purpose, which was to build the nation, and learning

24 Leo Suryadinata, Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), 82.

53

some new, interesting dishes was counterproductive as, aside from catering to one’s epicurean

tastes, they had no additional nutritional or economic benefits for people.25

The described criteria of the cooking competitions were also indicative of the

expectations of Malay women’s domestic roles. Participants had to prepare food for a family of

six, consisting of a mother, father, two kids in school, an infant (less than a year old), and an

elderly relative. The specificity of this rather loaded condition evinced a family ideal and

expectation for the UMNO women; large, tight-knit families were the baseline Malay household.

The served food had to contain a balanced variety of nutrients for the whole family. The spending costs for the food, cooking fire and other needs must not exceed $2.50 (about the same as 3 US dollars in 2017), which set a certain standard for acceptable cooking costs. Attention also had to be paid to cleanliness, method of preparation, look, and taste of the meal, denoting other domestic expectations of Malay women. Lastly, each participant was given 15 minutes to prepare the ingredients and an hour to cook and serve it. These criteria set a certain regimented standard for cooking, one that took into account the meals’ costs, serving size, and preparation

time, that would be inculcated amongst the participants, as well as in women who read the

article. As such, these cooking competitions and Berita Harian’s coverage of them helped to

encourage a consciousness of domestic and economic management amongst UMNO Mothers

members and Malay communities.

In this article, Ratnamala also described the ingredients that were used by participants

during the 1967 competition, giving a sense of ingredients deemed nutritious and economical by

the cooking veterans to readers. She elaborated:

25 Ratnamala, “Peraduan memasak Kaum Ibu.”

54

Among the ingredients used are: anchovies, chub mackerels [known as the “poor man’s fish”], live small prawns, tofu, groundnuts, eggs, tempeh, and vegetables such as water spinach, bean sprouts, and others. The listed ingredients are cheap but high in nutrients.26

The participants clearly prepared for the competition, showing deft skill in selecting the

ingredients that would fit the competition’s criteria. This list also offered a guide to those who

wanted to change their diet to fit economic and health demands. That the tempeh, an Indonesian fermented soybean, and tofu, introduced by the Chinese diaspora, were used by participants indicated hybrid incorporations of ingredients in the making of dishes for the competition. She then pointed out a few notable dishes, like a fried dish of groundnuts and anchovies, and tofu and fish soup, which showed that such competitions were also sites of culinary innovation.

As an aside, Ratnamala further fleshed out her idea about avoiding food waste by punctiliously describing things that participants should not have done when making their dishes.

She pointed out that some women made too many dishes (10 different varieties within an hour), and noted that while such an act displayed the participants’ formidable culinary abilities, making so many dishes veered away from the goals of the competition, which was to develop a nutritious and inexpensive diet. She even noted that cooking so many dishes not only required significant time and effort, but also involved the use of many more cooking utensils, which would have needed to be washed once they were used, overall putting a great burden on the cook. Perhaps most startlingly, she commented that the UMNO Mothers’ tendency to make many dishes was a

“disease that needs to be rid of,” coloring excessive cooking as “pathologically” unhealthy to the

Malay community.27 Pathologizing Malay women’s habits, such that they were an ailment that

needed to be cured so that Malays as a community could live healthy livelihoods, indicated

26 Ratnamala, “Peraduan memasak Kaum Ibu.” 27 Ratnamala, “Peraduan memasak Kaum Ibu.”

55

Ratnamala’s modern and medical framing of the problem. Ratnamala and the UMNO Mothers

were the doctors that provided the corrective measure to contain and kill this disease, which

seemed to place the habit as something out of the afflicted’s control. Phrasing the excessive

cooking as a disease thus relieved women of the culpability of Malays’ wasteful habits, as one

could not be blamed for contracting a disease and being subject to the disease’s symptoms; the

disease was just something that needed to be rid of by the UMNO Mothers. Thus, this comment

was indicative of Ratnamala’s careful, non-confrontational framing of critiques towards Malay habits, such that she would probably not have drawn flak from readers.

The 1968 celebration of the May 11th Movement Day was even more ambitious, as it

began as a series of state-level economical cooking competitions, spanning several months, that

culminated in a national competition and an assembly on the eponymous date, which provided

great publicity and traction for UMNO Mothers. In the article “A Mother of Nine Children Won

an Economical Cooking Competition in Penang,” Zainal A. reported on one of the state-level

competitions and interviewed its winner, Che Zainab binti Abdul Rahman.28 Held in

Butterworth, a city in Penang, the competition was organized by the UMNO Mothers’ Penang charter. Zainal A. stated that “with the expenditure of $2.10 cents only the two of them (Che

Zainab and Che Lalbee, who was also a winner) served food for a family of six including a baby.

The time for the competition was an hour but the both of them finished much earlier.”29 Zainal

A.’s coverage of the winners’ remarkable results showed that it was indeed possible to prepare

meals within the stipulated conditions, and set a model of a good housewife, according to the

28 Zainal A., “Ibu sembilan anak johan perpaduan memasak murah di-Pulau Pinang,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), April 18, 1967. 29 A., “Ibu sembilan anak johan.”

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UMNO Mothers. The two winners were to represent Penang in the national cooking competition that was to be held on May 11, about a month after the publication of this article.

Zainal A. also provided more exposure to the participants in the headlines and interviews, presenting them as confident people and active agents taking ownership of their roles as housewives and mothers. As interviewed by Zainal A., the winner Che Zainab stated that “food that is nutritious, delicious, but cheap can be accomplished as long as we desire it to be so.”30

This interview revealed that Zainab internalized the economic and nutrition-based attitudes towards cooking, and that it was now her desire to provide the best nutrition from food in the cheapest way possible to her family as a good mother and citizen. That these participants were constantly framed as mothers of children in the headlines further evoked people’s expectations of the responsibilities of Malay women as caretakers of their children.

These competitions culminated in a national cooking competition and assembly on May

11 1968, a coming together of the most economical housewives in the region, which cemented a form of a larger national identity through the lens of economical food preparation. Using this national gathering, held in Malaysia’s National Stadium in Kuala Lumpur, UMNO Mothers garnered a nation-wide presence for themselves. The 1968 celebration cemented the importance of all the chapters of UMNO Mothers which united Malay women from every state in the country, imbuing them with a national identity through the domestic roles that they all shared, including the preparation of food for the family. Their numbers in 1968, as mentioned in a speech during the assembly, exceeded 130,000.31 Through their constant competitions and the coverage of these events, UMNO Mothers tried to influence the eating and cooking habits of

Malay women, which was not only an effort to reduce the drastic rates of poverty that struck

30 A., “Ibu sembilan anak johan.” 31 A.R. Hadzrami, “Kaum Ibu UMNO Baharui Ikrar,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), May 12, 1968.

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Malay communities, but also an attempt to impose a more national and homogeneous set of

cooking and eating habits, which consisted of being frugal and nutritious.

Through cooking competitions, Malay women gained political traction from increased

membership and accomplished national economic goals set by the government. They remained

popular events organized by UMNO Mothers to assist in meeting the country’s economic goals

and develop better habits of cooking and eating for Malay women.32 Perhaps taking inspiration

from these women, in the immediate months after the national assembly of UMNO Mothers in

1968, the government collaborated with women’s organizations to launch a fruit campaign

dedicated towards strengthening the local economy.

A National Fruit Campaign—Culinary Innovation and National Identity Formulation

Cooking competitions were so well-received that they were also suggested to help

develop Malaysia’s domestic fruit economy. Just months after UMNO Mothers’ national

celebration of the May 11th Movement Day, Ratnamala wrote “Local Fruit Cooking

Competitions Should Be Organized” which was published in Berita Harian on July 2, 1968.

From this point, Ratnamala also shed her pseudonym and referred to herself with her real name,

Azah Aziz (though for unspecified reasons). In the article, Aziz advocated the organization of

more cooking competitions which would this time use local fruits, in conjunction with the

Malaysian Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority’s (FAMA) campaign to encourage more

consumption of local fruits.33 One of the reasons behind the campaign was to “save the foreign

exchange rate currency,” which meant strengthening the Malaysian dollar against the US dollar

32 Hadzrami, “Kaum Ibu UMNO.” 33 Azah Aziz, “Patut Adakan Peraduan Masakan Buah2an Tempatan,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), July 2, 1968.

58 by cutting import costs while bolstering domestic sales of fruits. In 1962, Malaysia imported as much as $26.6 million worth of fruits from foreign countries while in 1966, the number rose to

$31.6 million.

In addition to cutting economic import costs, this campaign came at a time when

Malaysia was trying to diversify its economic production, particularly agricultural production when rubber, its main export, was not as profitable; the diversification was important to create an economy that was not too dependent on certain sectors, thus making a more stable economy for

Malaysia. Thus, in addition to reducing socioeconomic inequality and eradicating poverty, improving Malaysia’s local economy through growing demand of its local products was an important priority for the Malaysian state. Aziz also stated that these competitions would

“encourage people to treasure the produce of our own motherland,” continuing to inculcate national sentiment in cooking and eating, just like how UMNO women internalized the desire to cook frugally as responsible citizens of the country.34

Moving on from her suggestion of more cooking competitions, Aziz then dedicated much of the article to the government-led fruit campaign itself. She wrote about Enche Aziz Yassin,

Vice President of FAMA, who appealed to women to buy local fruits. According to Yassin, “if half of our women bought local fruits in this state alone, we could save as much as $16 million in import costs.”35 Bluntly, Yassin then pointed out that the campaign’s success depended on the support and cooperation of women.

34 Aziz, “Patut Adakan Peraduan.” 35 Aziz, “Patut Adakan Peraduan.”

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Aziz also made a clear distinction between the consumption habits of the rural and urban

people. She explained that:

Actually, many who live in villages already eat local fruits, because foreign fruits like apples, lemons, grapes, and others are not sold in these villages...prices are high...people who love foreign fruits are from cities, particularly those who have a high income.36

Aziz’s comment was a critique that, unlike her other previous comments, targeted the urban

class, since they seemed to not be conscious of supporting the nation-state through the

consumption of local fruits. Aziz thus expressed a tension between the urban class and national

identity, a tension that could also be seen through food, especially since the more affluent urban

class had developed a predilection for foreign food. But it could be said that the rural peasantry’s

consumption of local fruits was also not likely to have stemmed from a conscious support of

Malaysia, but from subsistence farming traditions and rural economic management. Whether or

not she knew whether rural peasants were supporting the nation state, she stated that it was the

collective responsibility of everyone to participate in the campaign. She thus imbued the

consumption of local fruits with a form of meaning: buying, cooking, and eating local fruits was

an act of participating in the campaign and, by extension, supporting the Malaysian nation-state, and that thus the person doing so would be considered loyal to the state. Readers would also then internalize this and would be more conscious of eating local fruits as a personal act of contributing to the nation. The act of consuming goods locally produced by the state was thus a way that a person would have, in the eyes of Aziz, developed a national identity and a relationship to the nation-state.

Aziz also suggested that readers shed local superstitions about fruit, such as grouping

them into the categories of “cold” or “hot.” Some categories were traditionally not allowed to be

36 Aziz, “Patut Adakan Peraduan.”

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eaten under certain conditions—like when sick or pregnant, a woman was not allowed to eat

“cold” fruits such as pineapples. To counter these superstitions, she brought in nutrition facts, like talking about how “food nutritionists stated that fruits like papaya, pineapple, and bananas

are rich in nutrients that are good for health and should be served for the whole family.”37

Through applying the lens of scientific expertise and rationality to her rhetoric, Aziz encouraged

the Malay community to adopt a more modern sense of consumption, in contrast to the old belief

systems that the community practiced. Thus, the nation-state was also associated with a more rational and economic modernity that was in tension with the Malay community’s cultural practices. Readers were then being pressured to shed their own cultural norms and traditions if they were to be modern, responsible housewives and mothers.

In the last section of this article, Aziz recommended ways to incorporate local fruits as key ingredients in dishes to further incentivize their use in people’s cooking. Pineapples and papayas could be turned into jams to be eaten with bread or glutinous rice (pulut) or turned into tarts and rolls. Durian and soursop could be used to make ice cream. Most fruits could also be turned into syrup. She then also suggested incorporating bananas and young pineapples into dalcha (Hyderabadi Indian stew) or curry.

Aside from the curries and the glutinous rice, however, dessert dishes that Aziz suggested, like jam, ice cream, and syrup, evinced pervading colonial influence on Malaysians’ tastes. The recommendation of these dishes showed the ways in which British colonial food culture left influenced the tastes of Malaysians. Using such colonial recipes was also indicative of the economic pragmatism that Aziz employed to encourage eating more local fruits to meet national economic goals. A straightforward reason to use these dessert recipes was to appeal to

37 Aziz, “Patut Adakan Peraduan.”

61 the more urban consumers, who were the majority of the consumers of foreign fruits. By showing how local fruits could be used in similar recipes, and suggesting how these recipes could be delicious as well, urbanites could possibly be persuaded to eat more local fruits instead.

One result of attempting to strengthen the national economy then was that Malaysian food practices became even more influenced by colonial/Western recipes; a mix of local and foreign by using local fruits as the major ingredients for the colonial/Western recipes.

The government’s fruit campaign, called the “Eat Malaysian Fruits” campaign, importantly became a public showcase of many foods in Malaysia, and an early depiction of

Malaysian cuisine; it was held at the Merlin Hotel a few months after Ratnamala’s thought-piece on fruit cooking competitions. Hamidah Hassan covered the event in her article “Our State’s

Fruits Can Become Many Different Kinds of Dishes” on September 11 1968. The campaign was a site of culinary innovation by various clubs and organizations and was also a government-led effort to collect and compile fruit-based recipes and formalize Malaysian cuisine.38 The campaign was officiated by Puan Sharifah Rodziah, wife of Prime Minister Tunku Abdul

Rahman, which lent it national weight. During the event, participants could witness and taste a variety of dishes concocted specially by many local women’s organizations, among which were the Women Teachers’ Organization, UMNO Mothers, Young Women’s Christian Association

(YWCA), Lai Chee Organization, Malaysian Chinese Assembly (MCA), and the Pan-Pacific and

Southeast Asian Women’s Organization (PPSEAWA). The event was a result of the cooperation between FAMA and Majlis Pertubohan Wanita Malaysia, a group of at least 12 women’s

38 Hamdah Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita dapat di-jadikan bermacham2 makanan,” Berita Harian, September 11, 1968.

62

organizations, to prepare “food recipes that use ingredients sourced from our own state,” and was

thus another national effort to promote domestically produced goods.39

The scene of the event illustrated the use of symbols to represent Malaysian nationalism

through food:

A giant pineapple made from cardboard wrapped in green and yellow paper stood in the middle of the hall, perhaps a symbol of the Malaysian fruit...a large cake that looked like the Malaysian flag filled a long table.40

The combinations of symbols, like the pineapple (one of Malaysia’s main exports) and the

Malaysian flag, evinced the relationship between local fruits and nationalism:41 the consumption,

production and showcase of local fruits was thus not just an act of sustenance or personal

enjoyment, but also a representation of Malaysian nationalism. That the present cake, a Western

dessert, looked like a Malaysian flag further reflected the colonial hybridity of the Malaysian

cuisine and statehood.

The event was a mosaic of culinary innovation and hybridity: featuring local, colonial,

and Western food and recipes old and new, it was Malaysian cuisine put on display. According

to Che Sufiah Zainab binti Dato Yop Osman, the Work Secretary of Majlis Pertubohan Wanita

Malaysia: “part of the recipes are entirely new. There are also old recipes, but altered to fit in the

local ingredients.”42 The foods described were a hybrid mix of local and foreign, and things in

between. The UMNO Mothers prepared traditional Malay dishes whilst incorporating fruits:

Jackfruit bingka (a soft kueh usually cooked with tapioca), durian wajik (a glutinous rice sweet),

39 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.”; Makmor Tumin, "NGO Wanita Di Malaysia," Utusan Online, accessed April 16, 2018, http://ww1.utusan.com.my/utusan/info.asp?y=1998&dt=0504&sec=Rencana&pg=ot_03.htm. 40 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.” 41 Zazali Musa, "Pining for Pineapples," The Star Online, September 19, 2012, accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.thestar.com.my/news/community/2012/09/20/pining-for-pineapples/. 42 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.”

63

steamed durian and serikaya (sweet coconut spread).43 According to Puan Hajah, the leader of

the UMNO Mothers stall, these snacks, called kueh, had long incorporated local ingredients;

thus, they did not have to experiment hard to include local fruits. The Young Women’s Christian

Association, on the other hand, served light snacks that looked like fruit cocktail, a Western

method of fruit preparation indicative of the YWCA’s international and Western origins. W1

Tanah Melayu then served a platter of dishes, ranging from Malaysian, like the bingka Nyonya

(bingka mixed with durian), to Western fusion, such as the banana cake, tarts, jackfruit jam and

sponge cake which was layered with rambutan jam. The Malaysian Chinese Association

prepared banana kerepek, a dried crispy banana snack, durian cake and apong mok quah (said to

be a fusion of serabai and serawa sauce).44 That the apong mok quah was described as a fusion of two other local dishes (serabai and serawa) suggested that it was a newly conceived dish.45

The many organizations thus collectively presented the rich plurality of the many food practices that could be found in Malaysia, which was encapsulated in a national event that presented these dishes as part of Malaysian cuisine.

FAMA mentioned that it would collect the recipes and compile them into a book as a guide for housewives. The book, which would be officially endorsed and printed by the

Malaysian government, could be seen as a formal compendium of Malaysian cuisine; the book was a recognition that all the different recipes described above were part and parcel of Malaysian

43 “As Malaysian as Kuih Bingka,” Malay Mail Online, February 05, 2017, accessed April 16, 2018, http://www.themalaymailonline.com/features/article/as-malaysian-as-kuih-bingka.; Anita, “Wajik - Sticky Rice in Palm Sugar and Pandan Leaves,” Daily Cooking Quest, January 03, 2014, , accessed April 16, 2018, http://dailycookingquest.com/by-cuisine/indonesian/wajik-sticky-rice-in-palm-sugar-and-pandan-leaves.; Julie Wong, “Kaya: A Rich Spread,” The Star Online, August 02, 2014, accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/food/features/2014/08/03/kaya-a-rich-spread/. 44 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.” 45 Wikipedia, Ensiklopedia bebas, s.v. "Kuih serabai," (accessed April 14, 2018), https://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuih_serabai; Che' Nom, “Serawa Durian Dan Pulut Kukus,” iResipi.com, accessed April 16, 2018, http://iresipi.com/resepi/serawa-durian-dan-pulut-kukus/show.

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food practices. It was also a way to preserve old food traditions (like the wajik, bingka and

serikaya) in written form while capturing new dishes (like the apong mok quah). 46

The campaign notably used English to describe the showcased recipes and dishes. The reason, according to Che Zainab, was to encourage the owner of the Merlin hotel to use local fruits to prepare the hotel’s food.47 Tourists and visitors from overseas could familiarize

themselves with the dishes that they loved in the event, that they would not normally remember

if the dishes were described using the national language. The adoption of English as the language

of the event also did reflect Malaysia’s postcolonial condition as a former colony of the British

Empire. But it, along with the inclusion of international organizations like YWCA and

PPSWEA, also evinced a desire for the Malaysian government to be seen as a modern nation-

state, capable of being a member of the international community of nations.

Sure enough, in the month after the fruit campaign, FAMA compiled the fruit recipe

book. Berita Harian covered the book in “The Many Flavors of the Malaysian Fruit,” and wrote

about three of the recipes contained within.48 While the recipe book was meant to be

disseminated to Malay-educated women, the recipes that were showcased in this article were

colonial hybrid dishes: Marquis à la Pineapple, jackfruit cake, and papaya and pineapple jam.

The presentation of such recipes could, again, be just a further attempt to incentivize urban

consumers to use local fruits by appealing to their taste for Western desserts. In this article, a

change in the structure of the recipes usually shown in Berita Harian could also be discerned.

The recipe now adopted more common Western measurements like pounds (spelled paun in

Malay), ounces, and cups. Also, chamcha was replaced with sudu (the Malay term for a generic

46 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.” 47 Hassan, “Buah2an negeri kita.” 48 “Aneka Rasa dari Buah Malaysia,” Berita Harian (Singapore, Singapore), October 27, 1968.

65

spoon). Long continuous prose was replaced by bullet-point instructions. And now the preparation methods of the recipe were headlined by peraturan, which meant rules or instructions, encapsulating a more rigid and exacting Western structure of a recipe. These changes, adopting and translating colonial recipes into Malay, also illustrated a slow change in

Malay recipes towards a more modern way of approaching problems, as promulgated by Dewan

Masharakat. The more punctilious Western measurements were also indicative of the emphasis on greater efficiency and less wastage as suggested by Aziz in 1965. Thus, FAMA and the

Malaysian government endorsed this new form of the recipe through the publication and the dissemination of the recipe book, perhaps as an example of how a modern recipe should look.

Cookbooks—the Varied Responses by Malay Women towards Economic Food Nationalism

UMNO Mothers’ activities, Berita Harian coverage, and the government’s involvement

left their mark on Malay women, as some published cookbooks in the late 1960s that reflected

the authors’ newly developed economic and nutrition-based consciousness. Malay women in

these cookbooks had applied, in their own ways, the more modern perspectives of frugality and

nutrition towards their roles as housewives and mothers as espoused by Ratnamala and UMNO

Mothers.

In 1968, Puan I. Lokhfiah wrote Love Cooking for Loved Ones (Buku Masakan Asmara:

bagi mereka yang tercinta), which offered recipes for women in many stages of their lives,

including food for family, loved ones, and children and a meal regimen when one was pregnant.

The book illustrated the ways in which Lokhfiah applied her new understandings of food

nutrition to best fulfilling Malay women’s roles as mothers. The editor claimed that the book was

meant to:

66

Guide one in the realm of health, as the editors picked many [recipes] that included ingredients such as mutton, beef, and eggs, all of which help to increase blood content and strengthen the body, which when collected within us, gives us extraordinary physical strength.49

The book perceived food to be providers of health, focusing on food’s ability to improve the

physical characteristics of a person such as strengthening the body and bodily fluids like blood,

which echoed the fixation with strong, healthy bodies that Berita Harian articles had advocated.

Lokhfiah grouped ingredients according to their nutritional contents as a guide to families. While the four food groups were not named, a closer look at the ingredients that comprised them suggested that they were based on the food pyramid: carbohydrates such as rice, sweet potatoes, potatoes, noodles, rice vermicelli, and roti; proteins such as fish, meats, nuts, beancurd, bean sprouts, soy, and taucho; vegetables like spinach, cabbage, eggplant, and tomatoes, and fruits such as mangoes, durians, and pineapples; fats like palm, coconut, and fish oils, coconut milk, butter, cheese, margarine, and eggs. A brief survey of these ingredients once again evinced influences from the Chinese (tauchu and rice vermicelli) and Indian (roti) diasporas; the inclusion of European ingredients such as spaghetti also pointed to colonial influence on her own tastes in food.

Lokhfiah’s emphasis on health and growth could be further discerned from her dedicated food sections for pregnant women and later their newborn infants. Lokhfiah carefully detailed a regimented eating schedule that pregnant mothers should follow. According to her, they should:

Eat three times a day, two of the times in large quantities. Each of the two times must have at least one food from each food group. In particular, below is food that must be eaten the most: fish, green vegetables, eggs, and nut-based food...the mother should also drink available powdered milk sold in stores, and drink at least three full cups a day,

49 I. Lokhfiah, Buku Masakan Asmara: bagi mereka yang tercinta (Marang: Haji Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman, 1968), 9.

67

better if four. She also needs to drink three glasses of water a day. Avoid alcohol and avoid thick coffee and tea.50

Her understanding of a healthy diet came from developing a well-balanced meal that included all the food groups, which would, if not followed, result in “unhealthy and unnourished infants.”51

To complement this section, Lokhfiah also dedicated a special section to food for babies at

various stages, and compiled a mix of regimented food habits for the babies’ proper growth. For

instance, babies should be fed with the mother’s milk until the sixth month. She also suggested

home remedies and practices, like highlighting that “wise mothers” fed their children either two

chamcha of fish or coconut oils a day, or slices of papaya mixed with a tea chamcha of water

twice a day for health; these methods revealed the ways in which Malay women responded to

modern understandings of health-awareness in one’s diet. Lokhfiah’s instructions for pregnant

mothers and infants were a result of her own attitudes towards food nutrition and its impact on

the human body, all in the effort to raise healthy children and families.52

Later on, in the early 1970s, another Malay woman named Zaleha Yaacub published the

more economically minded Dishes of the New Economic Policy: Containing 60 New Dishes

(Masakan Lauk Dasar Ekonomi Baru: Mengandungi 60 Jenis Masakan Ciptaan Baru) in 1973.53

The cookbook was meant to accompany the New Economic Policy, a policy launched by the

government aimed at “restructuring...the economy” and eradicating poverty irrespective of

50 Lokhfiah, Buku Masakan Asmara, 11. 51 Lokhfiah, Buku Masakan Asmara, 11. 52 Lokhfiah also adopted a slightly more economically conscious attitude towards food, which informed how she named dishes. She introduced a soup called the “economical soup for children,” which indicated her understanding of the need for inexpensive recipes. The dish proved how, apart from just being concerned with raising healthy children, she was also trying to be frugal. 53 Zaleha Yaacub, Masakan lauk Dasar Ekonomi Baru: Mengandungi 60 jenis masakan ciptaan baru (H.M.B.A., 1973).

68

ethnicity, that was adopted in 1971 by the Malaysian government, like a new standard of cooking

practice for Malay women to adhere to in this new economic age.54

The timeline of Yaacub’s growing frugality could be traced in the book’s foreword, in

which she talked about her previous publications. While the publication dates of the prior books

were not mentioned (they are now difficult to find), the changes in the titles were important: her

first cookbook was titled Malaysian Cooking (available in jawi script and Romanized Malay, the

latter version of which was reprinted twice) followed by A Guidebook to Economical Cooking.

The economical cookbook, according to the publisher H.C. Mohamad A. Rahman, was received

very well and prompted her to write this book. This book was an opportunity to pair the

popularity of the previous economic cookbook with the ambitious New Economic Policy

launched by the government. This pairing thus had imbued the cookbook with new meaning; the

cookbook could be seen a way to not only cook frugally, but also reduce the level of poverty in

the country via a growing economic consciousness amongst the readers.55 Appropriately, she

also introduced new fruit dishes at the encouragement of her friends, an effort also made by the

Malaysian government and Ratnamala to encourage the consumption of local fruits.56

A closer look at Yaacub’s recipes showed that they were inexpensive and nutritious, as,

similar to Ratnamala, Yaacub tended to utilize locally produced ingredients, such as onions,

ginger, spices like cumin, anise, and turmeric, and coconut.57 Coconut was notable in the 1960s

for having a higher rate of production than Malaysia’s main export crop (palm oil) while not being an export crop itself.58 This meant that domestic consumption of and demand for coconut

54 Drabble, An Economic History, 197. 55 Drabble, An Economic History, 197. 56 Yaacub, Masakan lauk Dasar Ekonomi, 1. 57 Yaacub, Masakan lauk Dasar Ekonomi, 10-17. 58 Drabble, An Economic History, 208.

69 was high in Malaysia and that Malaysians did not have to compete with foreign demand, which kept coconut prices low. The inclusion of a healthy diversity of vegetables such as onions, cucumbers, eggplants, and long beans as well as seafood and meat constituted a well-balanced diet.

While Yaacub’s cookbook, like that by Lokhfiah, reflected hybrid influences, it also included a few dishes labelled as Malaysian, which implied Yaacub’s early conception of and desire for a Malaysian national cuisine. That Yaacub labelled the serunding, a kind of dried pulled meat sometimes served with grated coconut, and acar, a Malay pickled dish, as Malaysian recipes (as they were respectively called serunding Malaysia and acar Malaysia) meant that she conceived of a national Malaysian cuisine that incorporated these two Malay dishes.59 This incorporation was not only Yaacub’s performance of everyday nationalism by imbuing food with national identity, it was also an understanding that being Malay was now tied to being

Malaysian. As the cookbook was meant to help supplement the New Economic Policy, the recipes also had an added national character in that they were recipes that were created partly to meet the New Economic Policy’s goals. That there were Malay dishes with Chinese and Indian diasporic influences displayed in this national cookbook once again emphasized the presence of

Chinese and Indian food practices in the national Malaysian cuisine.

Like Ratnamala, Lokhfiah and Yaacub were some of the Malay women writers who became conscious of modern attitudes of frugality and nutrition. They were the result of a more active participation by Malay women and the Malaysian government in growing economic and bodily strength in the building of the nation-state. And while both Lokhfiah and Yaacub continued to include a plethora of food practices from different communities, Yaacub in

59 Yaacub, Masakan lauk Dasar Ekonomi, 11-12, 16-17.

70 particular was developing a conception of a Malaysian national cuisine, an idea that FAMA and the Malaysian government also thought about during the fruit campaign of 1968.

Chapter Conclusion

As Malay women organized and participated in economical cooking competitions to promote frugality and health, the Malaysian government launched a national fruit campaign to spur a domestic fruit economy. These events were the ways in which nationalism was expressed by Malay women and government through food, as they were acts intent on contributing to the betterment of the nation-state. Through public food events, Malay women and the Malaysian government participated in developing national economic strength.

A consequence of these events was a growing economical and health consciousness in

Malay women’s food practices. As shown through interviews and through Malay cookbooks in the late 1960s, Malay women incorporated their understandings of frugality and health into the recipes in their books, shaping the ways in which they prepared food for their family. Aside from that, formalization of a plethora of recipes into a Malaysian cookbook by the government was also achieved, developing an early conception of Malaysian cuisine. As that happened, Malay authors like Yaacub labelled a few dishes as Malaysian in her cookbook, which reflected a performance of Malaysian nationalism in her recipes, as well as a conception of and desire to realize a Malaysian cuisine.

Important to note are the ways in which Malaysian food practices discussed thus far, in

Chapter Two, seem cosmopolitan; that is, food came from many cultures inside and outside of

Malaysia, especially since the FAMA and Lokhfiah compiled colonial and Western ingredients and recipes in their cookbooks. Thus, this chapter has also suggested the ways in which the

71

eating habits of Malaysians were still impacted by the British Empire. Yet, if Malay women

wrote about recipes not local to Malaysia (or even Southeast Asia), such instances were not too common.60

In the next chapter, we will explore the more colonially influenced and cosmopolitan

food community of English-speaking Chinese women. The more urban, English-literate, Chinese

diasporas looked beyond Malaysia to satisfy different kinds of food cravings: how does one

make Korean Barbecue steak, Russian shashlik, Japanese pork chop, and Arabic shak suka?

60 Sharifah Enson bt. Ali Amn’s cookbook, Taman Selera: Lauk Pauk Chara Timor dan Barat, included both local and foreign recipes, framed as Eastern and Western. That she offered a conception of Western dishes through a dichotomy between the East and West, and included a significant number of dishes that she considered Western, like beef steak, meat rose, and cheesecake into her cookbook also elucidated Western/colonial influence on and tensions with Malaysian food.

72

Chapter 3

The Makings of Malaysian Cosmopolitan Food Practices

Even before the 1950s, English-literate Chinese women, more affluent than Malay and

Indian women and settled in urban cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, developed cooking interests that extended beyond local food to cuisines in other parts of the world. Some even turned cooking into a career and became the earliest cooking celebrities in Malaysia who sold books, notably in English, that appealed not only to local readers but also to people abroad.

These cookbook authors, along with writers for the English Singaporean newspaper The Straits

Times and the local English women’s magazine Her World, conceived of domestic food practices in Malaysia in a cosmopolitan manner. Many recipes of the composed by these writers, many of whom were English-literate Chinese, would come from not only local ethnic food practices but also national cuisines all around the world. Accompanying the cosmopolitan food practices were the ways in which they became institutionalized as a form of culinary art, culinary art being a systemic form of knowledge about cooking practices taught through a formal curriculum: such a curriculum comprised paid cookbooks, courses, and classes, by institutes run by Chinese cooking celebrities. The demand to learn cooking through such methods was spurred by a growing aspiration among women in Malaysia to learn many different local and foreign food cultures.

And when the time came for the formation of the new nation-state that was Malaysia in

1963, English writers and media responded eagerly: Her World called itself the Malaysian women’s magazine and had a column called the Malaysian kitchen; the cooking celebrities began to incorporate Malaysian identity into the recipes they wrote, and both they and the Straits

Times thought about what Malaysian cuisine meant. Indeed, that the cooking celebrities had already developed more institutional and formal ways of educating housewives about food

73 practices further encouraged the conception and realization of Malaysian cuisine amongst these

more affluent Chinese women. This chapter thus explores cosmopolitan food practices in

Malaysia and the makings of a Malaysian cuisine as evinced by urban, English-speaking Chinese women during the 1960s and early 1970s.

As different Chinese English-literate writers talked about food practices in their works

during the 1960s and 1970s, they also developed a diction that showed their growing awareness

of hybridity and culinary innovation. In particular, the language of hybridity that was not present

in Malay newspapers and cookbooks was apparent in the English-literate audiences’ cookbooks

and newspapers. Linda Quo, prominent culinary celebrity, called Malaysia a “melting pot” of

different cuisines in her cookbook.1 Chan Sow Lin, another famous cookbook author and

cooking teacher, mentioned that it was important for those who had mastered the fundamentals

of Chinese cooking to be imaginative and experimental.2 Aside from Chinese writers, even

Malays like Datuk (Dr) Arshad Ayub, a director of the MARA Institute of Technology, a public

university dedicated to rural Malays and bumiputera, pointed out in Quo’s cookbook the ways in

which cooking in Malaysia was about blending.3 Thus, an understanding existed amongst writers

that central to cooking in Malaysia was hybridities between cooking practices. The culinary

mixing that happened with local foods, that is, foods that originated in Malaysia as understood

by these writers, also happened between local foods and cuisines beyond Malaysia, which

informed the English writers’ conception of Malaysian cuisine as cosmopolitan.

As urban Chinese saw that food in Malaysia and Malaysian cuisine were a site for

cosmopolitan food practices, some also explored postcolonial identity and tensions. As some

1 Linda Quo, A Wide Selection of Local Recipes (Petaling Jaya: Linda Quo, 1974), 2. 2 Chan Sow Lin, Chinese Restaurant Dishes 3rd ed. (Kuala Lumpur: Chan Sow Lin, 1960), xv. 3 Quo, A Wide Selection, 4-5.

74 writers discussed Malaysian food (or any of the cuisines that constituted it) as a culinary art and a cuisine, they felt the need to explain the ways in which Malaysian cuisine could contend with food produced by the more traditional colonial spaces of Western fine dining, like gourmet restaurants and hotels.4 Aside from that, the presentation of Malaysia as a cosmopolitan food paradise was also created as an image geared towards foreigners abroad to entice them to visit and eat in a romanticized and exoticized Malaysia.5 English cookbook authors had also generously incorporated Western and colonial recipes.6 But most notably, the notion of local foods, foods that were considered to have origins in Malaysia or in any one of the main communities that settled in Malaysia, was introduced as an identity posited against the foreign other. Thus, there was a way in which writers considered Malaysian cuisine to have a colonial influence, but at the same time developed some anxiety from wanting to steer away from this colonial influence.7

A class divide was also evident between Malays and Chinese from their differing conceptions and purposes behind Malaysian food practices. Whereas Malay women developed a sense of economic frugality and health consciousness through domestic food practices in the

1960s, as a function of not only sustenance but also meeting the goals of the nation-state,

Chinese women pursued domestic cooking as a culinary art.8 The usage of English also provided

Chinese women an edge in running their cooking classes and selling cookbooks: they could reach out to foreign English readers and students in ways that non-English speaking Malay women could not. Amongst urban Chinese women writers, costs were not usually a concern and

4 John Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands Will Find Malaysia a ‘Paradise’,” The Straits Times, October 12, 1969. 5 “KL is a Cool Town, Say Charming Tourists,” The Straits Times, November 27, 1963. 6 Linda Quo, Recipes. 2nd ed. (Petaling Jaya: Linda Quo, 1973). 7 Kam, “Gourmets and gourmands.” 8 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, i.

75 nutrition was only examined when talking about personal beauty and fitness; in fact, lavish social

food activities were encouraged and promoted to urban readers. Conceptions of Malaysian food

practices differed according to socioeconomic background.

Urban Chinese women’s interests and affluence fostered conceptions of Malaysian food

practices which differed markedly from those of Malay women, but explored similar questions of

national identity and nationalism in the new nation-state.

Malaysia as a Cosmopolitan Paradise

John Kam illustrated a loaded understanding of Malaysia as a cosmopolitan community

through his article in The Straits Times, “Gourmets and Gourmands Will Find Malaysia a

‘Paradise’.”9 The article was representative of a conception of Malaysia developed by writers in

The Straits Times. Kam explained that:

The cosmopolitan nature of Malaysia could not be better reflected than in the vast range of food available in local restaurants. Most Malaysians hardly realise that they are in a midst of a paradise for gourmets and gourmands alike. You could “eat your way” through the countries of Asia and Europe without taking a step out of the country.10

In this passage, Kam’s claim was particularly loaded. The article conceived of Malaysia as a paradise for “gourmets and gourmands,” who were mostly likely foreign visitors, as Kam later mentioned the countless times that tourists had ranked Malaysian food as amongst the best in the world. Characterizing Malaysia as a paradise also reinforced the idea that Malaysia was an escapist fantasy for these tourists. Thus, Kam seemed eager to engage with foreign readers, in hopes that word would spread outside Malaysia and entice visitors to come to Malaysia. Kam mentioned that Malaysia’s food was “fit for a king,” further playing on fantasies of power and

9 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 10 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.”

76 luxury that these tourists could indulge in by visiting Malaysia. That Kam claimed that “most

Malaysians hardly realised” this fantasy implied the ways in which this perception of Malaysia

as a paradise was jarring to Malaysians as they saw this fantasy as the everyday.11

Kam also evinced engagement with a sort of international community. He depicted

Malaysia as a paradise in part because one could “eat [their] way through the countries of Asia

and Europe without taking a step out of the country.” Malaysia was thus a paradise because it

was a pan-Asian, pan-European food sphere, which suggested convenience, access, and excess.

The refined gourmands with a greater awareness of cuisines in the world would have, of course,

found this exciting as everything that they were interested in trying and tasting could be found

here. Kam then mentioned that tourists would rank Malaysian food as among the best in the

world, which further suggested Kam’s desire to make known the quality of Malaysian cuisine in

comparison with other cuisines in the world.

But at the same time, Kam quoted Malaysians who took pride in their own food. In an

interview with one (anonymous) roadside stall owner, the owner claimed that “although you can

enjoy your food in a luxurious atmosphere in the hotels, the dishes I serve are not in any way

inferior.”12 Kam thus presented the owner’s contention that quality food was not only in hotels,

but also “roadside eating stalls or coffee shop type eating houses,” and that the appearance of the

stalls belied the quality of the foods being served, which were also considered cheap.13 That the owner evinced a power dynamic between the two different kinds of food through using the word

“inferior” posited a contention that was beyond just taste; the documentation of such owners taking pride in the food that they served was a performance that was contesting the elite status of

11 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 12 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 13 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.”

77 food in colonial hotels and refined dining services as assumed by the roadside stall owner; here the owners were claiming that the food matched these fine dining counterparts in quality and were therefore just as refined, that street food should be considered a culinary art as well. Thus, this interview helped to show a sentiment that Malaysian street food as being equal in standards to colonial fine dining.

As a way of showing the uniqueness of Malaysian food, Kam talked about hybridity.

Kam conveyed the process of the development of Malaysian food: “as the people of Malaysia grow closer together, the chefs and cooks of the different cultures borrow, amalgamate, and adopt methods of food preparation from one another.” Kam was talking about the hybridities that were happening between the different ethnic food cultures existing in Malaysia. The use of the word “amalgamate” illustrated Kam’s understanding of hybridity; that Malaysian food was a fusion of different parts. When referencing a process of interethnic learning of the satay dish, like the Berita Harian writers, he still continued to trace the process of hybridity that was occurring using pure ethnic categories:

[Satay] is generally accepted as a Malay delicacy and is usually prepared from chicken or beef. But it is not uncommon to find a Chinese satay man who, using the traditional. Methods of cooking the sauces and spices, can prepare satay with other ingredients.14

He described a process in which a Chinese man began to cook the dish commercially (given the name “satay man”) and, while paying respect to the traditional methods of preparing the satay, incorporated other ingredients to put a spin on it. The mention of this adoption and amalgamation of methods was key to Kam’s notion of what the Malaysian process of culinary blending was like. When Kam mentioned that satay was “generally accepted as a Malay delicacy,” he also represented the ways in which collective social acceptance was also important to define a dish as

14 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.”

78 belonging to a certain group, much like how Berita Harian writers mentioned that the popularity of a certain ingredient or dish amongst Malays made said dish Malay. With the passive construction of the sentence (and an ambiguous subject), Kam probably meant that it was common understanding in Malaysia that satay was a Malay delicacy. One thing which was ambiguous in the statement was whether Kam or the satay man would find this a process of turning satay into a Chinese food, similar to how writers in Berita Harian incorporated dishes of other ethnic communities and turned them into Malay dishes.15

But more than that, Kam also extended this notion of hybridity to include food practices and cuisines beyond Malaysia, when he described the ways in which chefs and restaurateurs

“make trips abroad to discover dishes and new recipes and ideas and then introduce them into the local scene.”16 These restaurateurs were thus not only intermingling with Malay and other local ethnic food practices, but also with those abroad, such as Hong Kong cuisine. In contrast to

Malay Berita Harian writers and cookbook authors, who mostly engaged with cultures that were in Malaysia, these chefs and restaurateurs were looking beyond the borders of Malaysia.

Students who went abroad and foreign imported chefs introduced many dishes that were described as part of this continental Chinese cuisine: “shark’s fins, pigeon, suckling pig, lotus seeds, and ducks, steamed fish, steam boat, cold dish, and sweet and sour pork.”17 Kam then also brought up staples of Indian and Muslim (probably also Middle Eastern) food: Indian food had

Northern Indian, Southern Indian, Kashmiri, and Punjabi cuisines, while Muslim cuisine involved dishes like the Tandoori chicken, which required more than 20 varieties of spices and herbs imported from Kashmir, Egypt, and Spain and were cooked with yogurt, milk and butter.

15 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 16 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 17 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.”

79 The casual mention of Indian and Muslim cuisines again evinced the ways in which they were

part and parcel of the Malaysian food community, as thought of by Malaysians. As a way of cementing how Malaysia was a combination of the East and West, Kam then talked about varieties of Western cuisines available in hotel kitchens: shrimp cocktail, braised veal and a variety of wine. While these cuisines evinced a dizzying array of foods from different parts of the world, it was also important to note that these were cuisines as developed by restaurants and hotels established in the world: they were not foods cooked and prepared daily in Malaysian

households. Thus, rather than being part of the Malaysian every day, these cuisines, present

commercially in Malaysia, helped to shape the identity of Malaysia as a cosmopolitan place as

perceived by more affluent Malaysians and foreigners.18

Tensions of class and socioeconomic inequality were evident in this article. Firstly,

conceptions of Malaysia as a cosmopolitan food place were perceived and shaped not only by

locals but also by tourists and visitors from abroad, as well as chefs, gourmets, and restaurateurs,

considered to be experts of cuisines, and thus educated and bourgeois. These groups of people

were interested in engaging with food cuisines at the international level, in that they were

concerned with looking for the finest foods in the world, and comparing them with each other.

To many of the gourmets, Malaysia was not just a home but also this cosmopolitan hub of

diverse cuisines.19 Not only were they not as interested in seeing Malaysia as a nation-state, they

also importantly saw themselves as being part of a food community that transcended national

borders; going abroad to learn and discover dishes was not uncommon. This was in contrast with

many Malay women, who primarily interacted with the other ethnic communities in Malaysia

18 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.” 19 Kam, “Gourmets and Gourmands.”

80 and the government; engagement with Western and colonial food practices existed mostly indirectly and through adoption of recipes.

Kam’s article was useful for its broad coverage of urban and foreign perceptions of

Malaysia as a cosmopolitan food community, Malaysian cuisine as a craft, and for its survey of the commercial culinary landscape in Malaysia. While this article only focused on commercial cuisines, it still nevertheless brought out themes of luxury, refinement, and cosmopolitanism not evinced by Malay women in the previous chapters, who had different priorities in mind.

Backgrounds of Domestic Culinary Experts and Her World Magazine

Various media written by urban Chinese women in English such as cookbooks and women’s magazines offered an insight into their conceptions of Malaysian domestic food practices. The backgrounds of these sources and writers are important to show the embeddedness, authority, and popularity of these media as cooking guides to English-speaking communities in Malaysia.

In the mid-to late 1960s, there arose a few Chinese women, figures of cooking, who became more and more widely regarded as culinary experts, becoming involved in not only publishing cookbooks, but also performing cooking demonstrations in Malaysia and abroad, conducting cooking classes, and also being on television and radio shows. Simply put, they developed a nationwide and international presence with their work. These authors came to be regarded by the Berita Harian and the Straits Times, and by the urban populace, as authorities of cooking. Their knowledge of cuisines that went beyond food in Malaysia made them not only esteemed in Malaysia but also abroad. As a consequence, the ways in which they grouped, defined, and categorized dishes, particularly those in Malaysia, were heeded by readers and fans.

81 Chan Sow Lin was a domestic cooking teacher in the 1950s and 1960s who garnered a

reputation after teaching British servicemen’s housewives stationed in Singapore.20 As described

by Jenny Lee from The Straits Times, Chan Sow Lin turned into one of the top culinary experts

in Singapore and Malaysia.21 She became a prominent author of at least five cookbooks by 1968,

many of which were reprinted multiple times, and sold them to Malaysia and Singapore and also

countries beyond Southeast Asia like United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. A look

at the photos in some of her cookbooks further highlighted the cosmopolitan presence of her

classes, as many of the students were wives or women representatives from embassies of

countries such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand;

Malaysian students were fewer in number.22 Her first cookbook, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, for

instance, was a guide for readers to reproduce dishes seen and/or ordered in Chinese commercial

restaurants.23 Importantly, these restaurants were available to urbanites who wanted to eat

Chinese food but probably could not cook it themselves, namely British and Western expatriates

stationed to work in cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, as well as tourists mentioned in

Kam’s articles.

Linda Quo’s authority as a culinary expert was also well-regarded. Called a “versatile lady” in the preface of her cookbook, she worked as a secretary and translator (she was well-

versed in English, Malay, and Mandarin) in the Malaysian Police, then as a home economist in a

commercial organization before eventually becoming a managing director of her own institute,

the Linda Oriental Cooking Institute, founded in 1961.24 Over the years, the institute taught

20 John Kam, “Simple Recipes and Not Too Many Ingredients,” The Straits Times, July 5, 1981. 21 Kam, “Simple Recipes.” 22 Chan Sow Lin, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian and Nonya Dishes, including Hong-Kong, Shanghai and Peking Restaurant Dishes: Book 2. 3rd ed. (Kuala Lumpur: Chan Sow Lin, 1968), iii - xvii. 23 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, xv. 24 Quo, Recipes, 4.

82 thousands of graduates the “best cuisines of China, Hong Kong, Formosa, Indonesia, India, and

Malaysia.”25 Her popularity was such that she broadcasted over Radio Malaysia and Rediffusion

Broadcasting Kuala Lumpur on current popular cuisines, at 3:00 pm every Saturday during the

late 1960s.26 She also embarked on a world study tour in 1967 to Australia, Europe, North

America, Japan, Formosa, and Hong Kong, where she demonstrated her cooking and learned

more dishes to add to her repertoire.27 Her endeavors cemented her popularity amongst

Malaysians and people abroad as another authorial figure of food in Malaysia.

Like Chan Sow Lin, Quo’s cooking classes, broadcasting and culinary world tour were an

example of domestic cooking garnering public exposure and discussion in Malaysia. Even more

so than ever, her work helped bring domestic foods into public discussions. Datuk (Dr) Arshad

Ayub, the director of the MARA Institute of Technology, even claimed that, amongst Chinese

women, “during a dinner one does not engage in some clever talk on politics, religion or

philosophy but discuss [sic] openly and [unabashedly] on the flavor of the food and comment

[sic] most critically on its texture.”28 While this could seem like a misleading stereotype, it could

also point to the seriousness with which people were talking about food up till the early 1970s.

Her recipe books were a culmination of her many years of cooking demonstrations and lessons

and she, like Ratnamala, Chan Sow Lin, and the Malaysian government, helped to incorporate in

written form recipes and foods that were prepared domestically. Unlike Chan, who taught mostly

British housewives, Linda Quo’s classes in Malaysia were attended by people from the Malay,

Chinese, and Indian communities. The images in Quo’s cookbooks, for instance, illustrated

25 Quo, Recipes, 2. 26 “Linda Quo mengajar dua jenis masakan China: Wanita-wanita Melayu Turut Belajar,” Berita Harian, April 1, 1969. 27 Quo, Recipes, 2. 28 Linda Quo, A Wide Selection of Local Recipes (Petaling Jaya: Linda Quo, 1974), 4-5.

83 attendance by many Chinese and Indian housewives at her classes and public demonstrations.

Evidence of Malay women’s participation was featured in a Berita Harian article. In “Linda Quo

Teaches Two Chinese Dishes: Malay Women Learn,” the writer described the ways in which

Chinese foods were renowned in the world, which “thus was no surprise that we here love it

too.”29 Linda Quo was described as a local domestic economy member (which could refer to her

role as a housewife) and teacher, who was conducting cooking courses in her own home in

Petaling Jaya. Quo explained that “Malay women are not behind in following my courses.” That

Quo held her cooking classes every week in her own home further cemented her as an icon of the

domestic housewife able to cook a plethora of dishes.30 Housewives of the different communities

saw her as an important culinary figure in Malaysia.

In Her World magazine, an English-language publication, a different kind of understanding about Malaysia’s cosmopolitan cooking practices existed.31 First published in July

1960, and based in Singapore, Her World eagerly presented itself as the Malaysian/national

women’s magazine on its covers and began to include the Malaysian kitchen column when

Malaysia was formed in 1963. Unlike Chan and Quo, who sought to define food as a culinary art

and Malaysian food as cuisine, writers in Her World saw the Malaysian kitchen as a largely

cosmopolitan site of food-making and food consumption. There was little consciousness of the

local/foreign dichotomy that was hinted at by Quo and Chan, and less representation of local

foods, and it was taken for granted that Malaysian women should learn to cook and eat foreign

foods. Ironically, according to the magazine, the Malaysian kitchen was supposed to strive to

29 “Linda Quo mengajar.” 30 “Linda Quo mengajar.” 31 Dessy Kania and Helen Diana Vida, “Women Representation in Print Media – Case Study: Femina, Kartini, Cosmopolitan and Her World Magazines in Indonesia,” Jurnal Komunikologi 10, no. 1 (2013): 30-38, accessed April 15, 2018, http://ejurnal.esaunggul.ac.id/index.php/Kom/article/view/1020/9482015, Vol 10, No 1.

84 learn foreign cuisines instead. Food was also made for buffets and garden parties, events rooted

in British colonial influence that were historically displays of wealth and social status.32

Consequently, there was much less of a concern with developing a Malaysian cuisine: food in

Malaysia was just whatever delicious grub that you could get your hands on.

Her World was directed at a readership of professional, English-speaking, and mostly

Chinese women (the October 1966 issue’s cover featured Miss Malaysia in a graduation cap and

gown, looking out into the distance).33 What it offered were opinions and suggestions mainly

about beauty, home decor, lifestyle, fashion, fictions generally centered on romantic

relationships, and food. Simply put, the magazine resembled modern magazines for women.

Indeed, Her World portrayed a different kind of woman compared to that shown by Berita

Harian. These women, mostly Chinese and occasionally white, were modern, urban and

intrigued with cosmopolitan food practices for fun and pleasure. They were expected to dress up

and beautify themselves, and manage the household in a modern sense: they looked at interior

design, clothes, and even foods as various markers of socioeconomic status. The magazine

advertised various avenues of products for modern consumption, from new clothes and make-up to domestic kitchen appliances, most of which were produced by foreign companies. As a consequence, despite the magazine calling itself the national woman’s magazine, any notion of nationalism or national identity was eclipsed by modern domesticity.

Surprising to me was the way in which the women represented in the magazine, on the front cover, in advertisements, in the articles, during the 1960s were either Chinese or white women. Malay and Indian women (the other two largest minority groups considered citizens in

32 For more information on the social and political use of garden parties in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century British politics, check out “The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895-1914” by Andrew S. Thompson. 33 Her World, October 1966.

85 Malaysia) were included only sparingly, which could point to two things. Firstly, that Malaysian readers looked to the British, white modern lifestyle as ideal, that whatever white people wore or ate, they should follow suit to be modern. Secondly, it could mean that a large number of the readers were white, and these advertisements could have been catered to them. Thirdly, many of the advertisements were also products from foreign companies, which spoke to the many ways in which the economy was still in foreign control.

Examining Food Categories by Chan, Quo, and Her World

When Malaysia was formed in 1963, Chan, Quo, Her World, and written materials played a significant part in shaping understanding and categories of Malaysian domestic cooking practices amongst English-speaking urban Chinese communities in Malaysia. Importantly, they also played a part in revealing the dazzling complexities and varying strands of Malaysian food practices, showing a cuisine that was far from centralized and steeped in interethnic and colonial hybridities.

Chan and Quo used the term cuisine to describe their food categories, named according to ethnic groups and nationalities, and, to a certain extent, organized their cookbooks around these categories. Beyond that, Chan and Quo offered different interpretations of categories of food, despite the vastly similar dishes that they described. Chan grouped food according to the familiar ethnic categories of Chinese, Indian, and Malay. Quo, while adopting similar categories, also developed an understanding of local food as Malaysian food as a way to encapsulate food practices that were not foreign. Even the dishes that both shared were named differently, which marked a lack of consensus in naming food among these writers. Chan and Quo, and other authors, like Malay economic cookbook author Zaleha Yaacub in Chapter 2, also began to label

86 dishes as Malaysian, formulating a distinct Malaysian food category in contrast to the other categories.

When writing about Chinese cuisine, Chan included many different strands, like food from mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diasporic community unique to Malaysia.

These different strands were conceived by Chan as Chinese restaurant cooking and could be described as a hodgepodge of Chinese and continental Chinese cuisines. As a result, hybridities present in her recipes were also masked by this unitary Chinese category. One perplexing example was the hybrid “Hong Kong beef curry.”34 The recipe required three dessert spoonfuls of curry paste or one dessertspoonful of curry and chili powder, which were colonial Indian ingredients. While not much was said about the origins of this dish, one could think of this as a curry dish that Hong Kong cooks learned and brought to Malaysia. This could be why it was also incorporated into Chinese restaurants in Malaysia, given that various curry recipes were popular in Malaysia. This recipe also involved the use of the wok as a cooking vessel, although it was called the kuali in the recipe’s instructions, hinting at the Malay name’s popularity in Malaysia.

The very hybridity of the origins of this dish was concealed by the category in which dish was embedded in. At the same time, Chan also talked about dishes such as Shanghai fried rice, and

Tientsin cabbage and quail’s eggs soup, which seemed to evince a more traditional, regional

Chinese makeup in the cookbook.35 Thus, it was easy for Chan to simply group all these dishes into one ethnic category called “Chinese food.”

The masking of the hybrid and different origins of the dishes listed above was a result not only of racial imprinting but also of the tendency of cosmopolitan food practices to use generalizing national food categories; in cosmopolitan cooking, concern for food origins of a

34 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 85. 35 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, 85-86.

87 particular cuisine seemed to not be paid as much attention as the diversity of the collection of

recipes in Chan’s books. Many of the dishes did not have immediately clear origins, apart from

the ones with regional, city labels like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tianjin. Thus, to Chan,

Chinese Malaysian or Chinese cooking was not exceptionally different or unique such that it

warranted its own unique identity in the book. One reason for this conception was that Chan’s

cookbooks and classes were catered towards white, British housewife expatriates, as well as the

Chinese restaurants that served them (as she was also making these restaurants more accessible

by essentially printing recipes in English).36 Alternatively, Chan could also represent the ways in which the Chinese community in the 1960s identified with mainland China, and how, to them,

Chinese and mainland Chinese cuisines were synonymous.

Such generalization also masked unique Chinese diasporic food in Malaysia. Char kuey teow, a transliteration of Chinese characters that meant stir-fried rice cake strips, and phonetically had Teochew and Minnan origins, was one such invention.37 This dish was

conceived of in Malaysia, and was a result of frying flat rice noodles with eggs, Chinese sausage,

cockles, prawns, onions, garlic, oil, and a thick black sauce. Paper-wrapped chicken was another

dish popular in Malaysia and Singapore, which was prepared by wrapping a marinated chicken

in greaseproof paper and then deep-frying the chicken, steaming and frying the chicken in the

process.38 The cut chicken meat was mixed with oyster sauce, sesame oil, pepper, and Chinese

rice wine.39 The dish was related to beggar’s chicken, a Chinese dish which originated in

36 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes. 37 Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Char Kway Teow,” (accessed April 14, 2018), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_kway_teow 38http://www.themalaymailonline.com/eat-drink/article/our-3-favourite-places-for-paper-wrapped-chicken-in-kl- seri-kembangan#MbF98ocWy72LmQfs.97 39 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, 11.

88 Hangzhou, although the latter dish was wrapped in clay and baked instead.40 In Chinese

Restaurant Dishes, Buffet and Home-Made Dishes, a compilation of Chinese restaurant dishes and also home cooking, she also talked about the chili crab recipe (which was a controversial

national dish contested between Malaysia and Singapore in the 2000s).41 The recipe included

tamarind, widely used in Southeast Asian foods; ketchup; chicken stock from Maggi, a popular

Swiss company in Malaysia and Singapore; vinegar; corn flour or tapioca flour; garlic; ginger;

and ground chilies. Onions, garlic or ginger were stir-fried together in a kuali before the rest

were mixed together.42 The inclusion of these recipes further reinforced that Chan did not find a

need to create different categories for mainland Chinese and Chinese cuisine. Thus, the blur of

foods within the category of “Chinese food” made more permeable the learning of the dishes

from the mainland and also the diaspora by readers.

In their cookbooks, Chan and Quo also developed categories for other ethnic communities in Malaysia, like Malays and Indians, and also for according to Malaysian states, like Kelantan and Penang, showing not only the powerful mental image of the three ethnic groups together in Malaysia but also the spatial and regional mapping of food to Malaysian states. In Chan’s Chinese Restaurant Dishes Malayan and Penang Nonya Dishes, while there

was a conflation between Malay and Malaya (as when she wrote about Malay dishes she referred

to them as Malaya), ingredients showed that the recipes were Malay.43 The prawn and fish

sambal, for instance, had belachan, tamarind, onions, chilies, and even anchovies. A Kelantan

40 Barbara Basler, “Fare of the Country; Hong Kong's Mystery Chicken,” The New York Times, April 08, 1990, accessed April 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/08/travel/fare-of-the-country-hong-kong-s-mystery- chicken.html. 41 Teh Eng Hock, "Laksa and Nasi Lemak among Our Pride, Says Yen Yen," The Star Online, September 17, 2009, accessed April 15, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20130116025136/http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/9/17/nation/4734354 &sec=nation. 42 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Buffet, 63. 43 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 69, 80-81.

89 rendition of a Malay dish, the Kelantan fish curry required colonial ingredients like curry paste,

curry powder, and popular Malay and local ingredients like coconut milk, kurau fish, and also

okra, further implying a colonial influence on Malay food.44 Linda Quo also talked about similar

staples like beef rendang, a Malay gravy-like dish, Penang assam fish and even dry Indian curry chicken.45 The curry chicken included a variety of spices like coriander, fennel seeds, cumin

seeds, turmeric, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and chili powder, and grated coconut and coconut

milk. That both cooks decided to include Indian and Malay dishes into their cookbooks, in

addition to the other food categories that made up their cosmopolitan cooking practice, thus

showed the ways in which they conceived of these categories as belonging to their cooking

narratives, a framing of the Malaysian community. That both authors published Malay and

Indian dish recipes also helped to bring them to the readership of English-speaking audiences,

further showing the flow of culinary information between the different ethnic communities.

Apart from that, Chan also put into written form the Nyonya cuisine, a food culture of a

Malaysian creole community, which showed her recognition of ethnic food and communities

beyond Malays, Chinese, and Indians in Malaysia.46 The Baba-Nyonya, called the Peranakan in

Malay, were a community formed from the intermarriage and intersection of Chinese immigrants with Malay or bumiputera locals in Malaysia since the early centuries of Chinese migration. The result was the creolization of community and language (a creole of Hokkien and Malay called

“Baba-Malay”) and an intermingling of Chinese and Malay food cultures, the fusion of which was known as Nyonya cuisine.47 Peranakan food was characterized as highly spiced by the very

44 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 69. 45 Quo, Recipes, 100, 111, 114-115. 46 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 85. 47 David Y. H. Wu, and Chee-beng Tan. Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia (Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. Press, 2001), 171-176.

90 heavy use of chilies, and other Southeast Asian ingredients. The Nyonya recipes in Chan Sow

Lin’s cookbook evinced this hybridity. “Fried-pork Strips (Penang Style)” combined pork, a

Chinese meat staple not eaten by Malays (as they were mostly Muslims), with belachan, many pounds of chilies, and tamarind, popular Malay ingredients.48 Nyonya-style fried noodles similarly included pork and hefty amounts of ground chilies, chives, prawns, and belachan.

These recipes evinced combinations of Chinese and Malay ingredients, in ways different than both the Malay communities (who did not consume pork) and the Chinese communities (who did not use belachan and tamarind for Chinese dishes). That Chan codified Nyonya cuisine in her book showed a formalization of another ethnic food category in Malaysia, and a recognition of the ethnic community’s place in the country.

Aside from developing ethnic categories to group different food practices in Malaysia, both Chan and Quo labelled some of their dishes as Malayan or Malaysian, which evinced growing conceptions of Malaysian cuisine during the 1960s. Chan talked about the Malayan beef curry, which included coconut milk, curry powder, curry paste, and belachan.49 While this curry seemed to use Malay staple ingredients, the dish was labelled as Malayan, which was a reference to region of Peninsular Malaya or the Federation of Malaya (before Malaysia was established).

Thus this recipe marked a shift of an ethnic identity of a dish to a national or regional one. Quo did similar work by introducing the Malaysia satay, also generally considered a Malay food, according to John Kam. The dish, which involved marinating meat in a diverse mix of spices, like fennel seeds, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, belachan, galangal, turmeric, and others, and then roasting it on a fire pit, seemed to be recognized as national as well.50 Importantly, a

48 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 89. 49 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Malaysian, 82.

50 Quo, Recipes, 108-109.

91 consequence was that a Malaysian cuisine developed in contrast to the other food categories through such labelling of dishes. This conception of Malaysian cuisine was a food practice that

Malaysian citizens could identify themselves with.

It is important to note that while Quo and Chan described the different categories of dishes, their categories were not consistent. In terms of naming conventions, these authors would label some dishes as Nyonya in parentheses (to point out that these dishes are Nyonya) and then add “Malaysian” or “Malayan,” or even Malaysian states like Kelantan, to the names of the dishes. The inconsistencies in naming conventions suggested the dizzying hybridities and complexities of the intersection and intermingling of the many different food practices.

Even more significant were the conflation and ambiguity of Malayan and Malaysian identities on the part of the writers. While Chan wrote about Malayan cuisine in her cookbook, the discrepancy of titles between the front cover and the first page of her cookbook pointed to some confusion: while the front cover’s title mentioned “Malayan dishes,” the first page’s title replaced that term with “Malaysian dishes.” This seeming misprint importantly suggested the publication’s conflation between Malaya and Malaysia, such that Chan might have possibly referred to Malaysia instead of Malaya when talking about these dishes, and also implying that she conceived of Malaya as a nation instead of a region. Quo also tended to conflate Malay and

Malaysian together, which again pointed to an ethno-national understanding of Malaysia, that

Malaysia meant primarily the nation of Malays. These instances of ambiguity and conflation again reflected the complicated process of grappling with Malayan and Malaysian identity.

Malaysian food practices were still inconsistent or not formalized in this decade, and the authority of these women in their recipes did not necessarily mean that they had total control or consensus over the categories of food.

92 A more fleshed out conception of developing Malaysian cuisine through difference from

the other cuisines was done by other cookbooks. The Catholic Women’s League of Malaya

(CWLM), in its ambitious fund-raising program in 1968, drew up a cookbook called 17

International Menus. These different menus were from nations such as Great Britain, China,

Brazil, Cuba, France, India, USA, and, of course, Malaysia. Each section had recipes that included entrées and then desserts, taking on the shape of the Western menu. To follow the

standardized sections of national menus in the recipe book, the Malaysian menu was thus

conceived, and included rice, masak lemak cabbage, chicken curry and fried fish for entrées.

While this menu was definitely specific and failed to capture the breadth and depth of Malaysian

food, so was the rest of the menus involved. More importantly, this cookbook was an indication

of how Malaysian and foreign women in CWLM recognized Malaysian food as an equal

counterpart to the other national food categories in the book.

Chan and Quo also developed a desserts section which included new local desserts to match conventional Western ones, again evincing colonial and Western influence on Malaysian food practices. They incorporated kueh, sweet Malay pastries, into the desserts section. They

listed almond pudding, the Malaysian top hat kueh, mixed lychees and loquats, sweet bird’s nests

with longan and beancurd, amongst many others.51 Similarly, the CWLM in their cookbook

included gula Melaka and fresh fruits in season with ice cream as desserts, again showing a

Malaysian cuisine constructed through following Western meal forms.

Her World, the Malaysian women’s magazine, was not as concerned with defining a

Malaysian cuisine. Issues of Her World magazine had a monthly column called the “Malaysian

Kitchen,” which detailed recipes that were provided by different women. While being called a

51 Quo, A Wide Selection, 138.

93 Malaysian kitchen, this column embraced many different kinds of recipes, ranging from supposed cuisines from cities and nations such as Hong Kong and Thailand to colonial and

Western dishes. The August 1966 Malaysian kitchen was a cooking guide by Mrs. Y. Kony, who taught readers “How to Make those Japanese Delights.”52 The stereotyped Asian font evinced an embrace of the orientalism and exoticism of Asian cultures. The first recipe, for zensai, was also called hors d’oeuvres (which means appetizers in French), which further reinforced the ways in which women who wrote recipes in the magazine were looking at Western cuisine as a model of dining in Malaysia. What was evident was that Malaysian cooking seemed to be the process and expectation of looking beyond the country and learning from as many food cultures as possible.

Unless the themes of the food column were a specific national or city-state cuisine that the magazine was exploring, like the cuisine of Thailand, Hong Kong, or Japan, there were little to no naming conventions that framed the foods. This often led to a mixing of recipes: local recipes like kueh lapis and cendol would be set in between pineapple tarts and “crunchy lanterns.” Publications of recipes in Her World, unlike those in the cookbooks of Chan and Quo, were driven more by how different or tasty they might be rather than a pursuit of culinary art.

The selection of recipes was also driven by foreign companies’ influence, which evidently resulted in infrequent appearance of local foods and the inclusion of these companies’ ingredients in the foods in the recipe column. One of the recipe sections included Mrs. Teoh Teik

Lee, the Home Economist of Nestle’s Products (M) Ltd., a Swiss company that was popular in

Malaysia and Singapore.53 The recipes that she wrote ranged from cheese puffs, prawn cocktail, and chicken with mushroom to kueh lapis, shortbread, and coffee velvet cream pie. Nestle, a

52 Mrs. Y. Kony, “How To Make Those Japanese Delights,” Her World, August 1966, 46, 49. 53 Mrs. Teoh Teik Lee, “8 Recipes for You to Try,” Her World, August 1967, 45.

94 producer of powdered dairy, confectionary, and many other products, definitely benefited from

this arrangement.54 Other companies even included recipes in their advertisements.

The self-proclaimed Malaysian magazine was not so concerned with identifying what was Malaysian cuisine, even though it did include a significant number of them. Unlike Berita

Harian’s recipe articles, which discussed possible dish origins, and the cookbook authors, who tried to establish (albeit inconsistently) categories of Malaysian food, Her World was just focused on providing delicious, festive, and fun recipes for readers to try, which evinced the ways in which the magazine was catered more towards living a modern, cosmopolitan lifestyle than treating food as a culinary art. Even more different was Her World’s greater inclusion of cuisines of other nationalities and Western foods, which reflected the cosmopolitan aspirations and modern Malaysian conception of professional, urban, Chinese women readers. Notably, lavish feasts and parties were emphasized in these magazines, suggesting the ways in which the readers were unconcerned with frugality and waste, compared to UMNO Mothers.

All the food categories and dishes, the processes of naming these dishes, and writing in these cookbooks reflected and shaped conceptions of modern, cosmopolitan, Malaysian food practices. The diverse, inconsistent, and disorderly nature of these cookbooks was the characteristic of this kind of food practice. Embedded within this deluge of recipes were also more explicit articulations of Malaysian dishes; they could be treated as reflections of the food producers’ identities and desires to conceive of Malaysian cuisine. Thus, culinary experts like

Chan and Quo were important in developing in various ways the Malaysian food practice and cuisine as a network of different kinds of ethnic cuisines, which mix with each other. Quo, with a strong awareness of the makeup and hybridity of Malaysian cuisine, called her cookbook “local

54 Mrs. Teoh Teik Lee, “8 Recipes for You to Try,” Her World, August 1967, 45, 47-48.

95 recipes,” as if all the recipes contained within, of many different cuisines, were Malaysian.

Importantly, the structures of these cookbooks, like the introduction of the desserts sections, also

evinced that cosmopolitan Malaysian cuisine had also incorporated colonial identity into their

food practices.

These cooking celebrities’ treatment of food as culinary art and production of

cosmopolitan cookbooks helped to develop a perception of Malaysian cuisine in contrast to the

usual ethnic categories in the books. One thing that also needs to be said is that local, Chinese,

Malay and Indian foods still represented many of the recipes in these cookbooks. But when we

look at Her World, we can see the starker ramifications of colonial influence on cosmopolitan

Malaysia. The magazine was barely interested in looking at local recipes for their recipe sections, instead pressing to constantly look beyond Malaysia, particularly at foreign and Western cultures, in search of culinary inspiration. The magazine’s “Malaysian Kitchen” column framed this search to learn local and foreign dishes as a kind of Malaysian domestic food practice for

urban Chinese women. Modernity, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism became entwined with

each other in a trip through the magazine’s issues.

Socioeconomic Disparities between Malay and Chinese Women’s Food Practices

The culinary experts’ cookbooks and Her World offered images of domestic cooking

practices which were markedly different than the ways in which Malay women practiced

domestic cooking. As the culinary arts came to be developed by the culinary experts as a

business, the magazine evinced and encouraged lavishness, social fun, pleasure, and personal

beauty in the practice of domestic cooking. These developed to be expectations that urban

Chinese women had to adhere to as Malaysians.

96 The renown of the two cooking celebrities lent them a lot of weight in shaping the narrative of urban, modern, and cosmopolitan domestic practices of food. Like Kam, both Chan and Quo espoused views of cooking as cuisine: that is, a set of food practices that were

“articulated and formalized, and entered the public domain.”55 Beyond that, through their classes and cookbooks, they perpetuated the idea of domestic cooking as a culinary art, a formal discipline requiring skills that can be taught just like any other course in the school.

Chan in particular articulated to her readers a language of mastery of the art to frame readers’ cooking experience. Aside from easing new people into familiarizing themselves with dishes, in her introduction to the third edition of Chinese Restaurant Dishes, Chan Sow Lin wished that her:

Third book...will be of interest to those people who are making their first attempt at the art of “Chinese Cookery”, to encourage those people who have mastered the fundamental methods in the preparation of delicious Chinese Dishes, to the experienced, to use their own inventive ideas and imagination in the arrangement of the dishes.56

Like Kam, Chan conceived of cooking as an art, suggesting a growing understanding of cooking as a formal craft that could be taught and honed. Aside from just teaching people new to the art of Chinese cooking, she also wanted to encourage those who have “mastered” the cuisine and methods to further develop their culinary imagination. Thus, Chan’s cookbook introduced people into Chinese restaurant cooking and also acknowledged the role of culinary innovation and experimentation in cooking, and encourage them. Chan’s books were thus not just a guide, but a hallmark of diverse culinary achievement a person could attain by mastering the cuisine, and an exhortation to her readers to pursue cooking as an art.

55 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: the Triumph of French cuisine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19. 56 Chan, Chinese Restaurant Dishes, xv.

97 Understandings of cooking as a culinary art and a formal discipline of knowledge, as well as their self-conception as culinary artists, led women cooking celebrities to aspire to hone cooking in a cosmopolitan sense; that is, to add to their knowledge of culinary arts, they wanted to gather and learn many dishes from a wealth of different cultures not only found in Malaysia but also abroad, a result of being influenced by Malaysia’s colonial and multicultural food community. Not only that, they pursued their culinary art to such lengths that they scoured the world to learn more about food. Linda Quo conducted a world tour teaching her cuisines in at least seven nations, while learning about foods from each and every one of them. Another local restaurateur, called Ho Chuen Chuen had “rounded the world for six delectable months in search for the finest foods,” collecting as many as 200 recipes during her trip.57 To Ho, “new dishes are best found, not in the pages of cookbooks, but by a stubborn interest in ferreting out what goes on behind the dining table.”58

Fun and feasting were emphasized in food consumption in the woman’s magazine, cementing lavish eating events as modern social activities for its readers. The July 1964 column began with: “Once again it is the time of year to plan your outdoor evening meals—be it a family meal or one with some of your more intimate friends—as the hot season has truly arrived.”59

Meals were seen as pretty lavish social events, as even suitable classical background music was discussed, where one did not “choose dramatic orchestration or operatic pieces.” A section on

“buffet food that can wait,” about foods that could be prepared earlier for a later event, followed and implied that the meal to be prepared was going to be a feast. Although the buffet itself did not necessarily imply lavishness, the sprawl of exquisite Western recipes the buffet suggested

57 Shen Swee Yong, “A World Quest for New Dishes,” The Straits Times, January 28, 1969. 58 Shen, “A World Quest.” 59 Elizabeth Jay, “Cool Ideas,” Her World, July 1964, 45.

98 did, from Lobster Américaine, and “mikado salads” to entrées like deviled grilled chicken,

hamburger steak, broiled lamb grill, and even desserts like coconut ice cream sherbet and sherry

cloberu (clobber in Welsh).60 Recipes were also dedicated to “impress...friends,” according to

the “Four Star Cooking At Home” article of October 1965.61 Many Malaysian Kitchen subtitles

also included “festive,” “feast,” and “fun,” and dedicated the recipes to the planning of larger

events, like Christmas. As the section aptly put it in August 1967, to these women “variety is the

spice of life.”62 Luxury, pleasure, fun, and feasting were all the women readers of the magazine

were very concerned about.

Ironically, the food columns that encouraged feasting and gourmet food were also

juxtaposed with health articles were concerned with nutrition and dieting. Health, however, was

related to the woman’s personal health and, more specifically, physical appearance ideals. The

February 1967 issue featured “Slim with Sherbet” by Virginia Mayo, who detailed her

“nutritious” dieting regimen to readers, consisting of exact proportions of food like “½ broiled chicken, 2 slices of calf or beef liver” for lunch. Her measure of nutrition was concerned with how much weight could be lost from a diet without making one feeling hungry.63 Her concerns

of health were thus different from the ways in which health-consciousness, according to Malay

women, focused more on nutrition for the development of healthy, strong bodies, to deal with

malnutrition faced by poor, rural Malays. Indeed, Her World’s idea of health was concerned with

appearance and beauty, which contrasted with Malay women’s focus on strength and

survivability.

60 Jay, “Cool Ideas,” 45-46. 61 “Four Star Cooking At Home,” Her World, October 1965, 47. 62 Mrs. Teoh Teik Lee, “8 Recipes for You to Try,” Her World, August 1967, 45. 63 Virginia Mayo, “Slim With Sherbet,” Her World, February 1967, 76.

99 But unlike the writers like Ratnamala in Berita Harian and women in UMNO, who

developed a concern with frugality, urban English-literate Chinese communities were more

lavish. But some Chinese women also had to negotiate the paradox between desires of feasting

and budget constraints. The many authors, in their pursuit of the culinary arts, were concerned

with collecting as many diverse recipes as possible. Yet one wonders about the extent to which

non lower-class housewives could realistically or practically learn so many recipes, or even

getting ingredients from foreign food cultures, like Japan, Russia and Australia, not to mention

their desire to pursuing cooking as an art for lavish feasts and parties, like those encouraged by

Her World magazine. This paradoxical sentiment, of feasting despite budget constraints, came up

especially during Chinese New Year, as Jenny Lee, a writer in The Straits Times, aptly put it:

Cooking and eating are part of the festive mood. For every family celebrating the forthcoming Chinese New Year, feasting is a tradition and a must. Undoubtedly, food is an important factor of the celebrations, although the style and manner of welcoming the new year depends largely on one’s budget. But we can be sure that however tight the budget may be there will be plenty to eat and enjoy.64

Note that Lee’s concern for budget was still secondary to the feast, which was a privilege that

Malay communities and women were most likely not able to afford. Aside from buying recipe

books and magazines, cosmopolitan food practices were developed primarily through paid

classes held by Chan and Quo, which again evinced the ways in which substantial spending was

required to learn this cosmopolitan food practice in the first place. Thus, the ways in which and

reasons why Malaysian cosmopolitan food practices as practiced by urban Chinese women were

so different and jarring from the more locally-centered, frugal Malay communities were evident from their differing socioeconomic backgrounds.

64 Jenny Lee, “New Recipes to Surprise Your Guests This Year,” The Straits Times, January 11, 1968.

100 Cookbooks and magazines dedicated to English readers reflected a different kind of

cooking and eating habits compared to those practiced by Malay women. As Malay women

became more concerned with food frugality and nutrition for the family and, by extension, the

nation-state, urban Chinese women became more personally invested in honing cooking as a

culinary art and gearing food choices towards fun, lavishness and personal beauty. Chinese

women culinary experts were able to develop domestic cooking as an institutionalized skill and

craft, with the goals of learning as many unique and delicious recipes possible. Her World’s

issues in turn reflected not only the cosmopolitan food practices of urban Chinese women, but

also concerns of pleasure, lavishness, and beauty that characterized such women’s eating habits.

Notions of frugality were non-existent, compared to Malay women in Chapter 2, who tended to

stress on inexpensive recipes and eating habits, and even health-consciousness focused on

personal beauty and appearance rather family health and nutrition.65 The difference in food

habits thus showed the ways in which socioeconomic disparity between Malay and urban

Chinese women characterized differing conceptions of Malaysian food practices.

Chapter Conclusion

During the 1960s, a cosmopolitan Malaysian food community and cuisine were promoted and celebrated by the urban, English-literate, Chinese communities. Culinary experts garnered fame and fortune through the success of their multifarious endeavors like cookbooks, demonstrations, classes, and even cooking world tours. Food began to be treated as a culinary art, and, as that was happening, a cosmopolitan food practice was encouraged, due to the embeddedness of many different food cultures in urban Malaysian cities. As these women were

65 Elizabeth Jay, “Cool Ideas” Her World, July 1964, 45-46.

101 learning about the dizzying array of food cultures, they were also exposed to cosmopolitan food

categories and, in an effort to explain and impose order on foods existing in Malaysia, they also

developed categories for these foods. Thus emerged categories for Malaysian food and also a

conception of Malaysian food as a cuisine. Categories that characterized Malaysian food ranged

from a series of ethno-nationalist categories by authors, such as Malay, Chinese, Indian, and

Nyonya, to national categories like Malaysian/Malayan foods.

While the naming conventions and categorizing dishes remained inconsistent, that they

were happening at all showed an attempt to recognize and reify Malaysian cuisine. Such

inconsistencies also suggested the complexities of the hybrid Malaysian cuisine. Indeed,

different authors and writers, like Kam, Quo, and Dr. Arshad, also spoke about Malaysian food

in terms of blending, mixing, and interchanging, further evincing an understanding that

Malaysian foods were not just dishes or ingredients; they came to be understood as processes of

hybridity. The tensions between the pure ethnic categories that continued to be used when

talking about ethnicity in Malaysia and the new hybrid vocabulary that was being developed to

refer to Malaysian cuisines (i.e. Malaysian satay, Malaysian curry) also represented the nascency of the idea of hybridity in the 1960s and early 1970s. But that the vocabulary of hybridity existed in English sources could also stem from the accessibility of words like “mixing” and “blending” in English compared to in Malay. That Malaysian food became recognized by foreigners as well showed a way in which Malaysian cuisine and the Malaysian food community were engaged with and recognized by people outside of Malaysia.

This whole different conception of food also signaled a significant class and socioeconomic divide that existed between urban Chinese communities and rural Malay communities. The economic frugality that was inculcated by Berita Harian and UMNO Mothers

102 was non-existent in the language of Chinese women when talking about food. Even health was not focused on ensuring that families received proper nutrition, but rather on developing ideal personal bodies. Food was feasting and an important part of social activities and tended to be prepared luxuriously, which only this community was able to afford to do. Whereas UMNO

Mothers and Berita Harian and even Malay cookbook author Zaleha Yaacub developed a nationalist relationship with the Malaysian government through food, Chinese women were engaged with discussions and conversations with people local and abroad that shaped people’s perception of Malaysian food as a cuisine and made more people recognize the cosmopolitan characteristic of Malaysian food practices.

103

Conclusion

The 1950s to the 1970s were an important time for identity formulation and

reconstitution in Malaysia. During this period, various writers, primarily women, developed,

conceived, and thought about Malaysian food practices. Their writing on food reflected their

own thoughts about national and ethnic identities, and these identities’ relations with each other,

in the new country.

The first chapter’s analysis of Berita Harian’s recipe articles in the 1950s and 1960s

revealed important discussions of hybrid conceptions of food and, by extension, Malay identity.

Despite being restricted to the vocabulary of pure ethnic categories inculcated by British

colonialism, Malay writers managed to discuss the hybridities of Malay food practices, like the

ways in which other ethnic communities influenced Malay dishes. Importantly, Malay food

practices could be seen as a lynchpin that connected the different ethnic food practices together;

one might even suggest that the hybrid nature of Malay food reflected a proto-Malaysian cuisine.

Unlike the Malay women discussed in Chapter 2, whose engagement in political and national

issues was more explicitly documented in Berita Harian, the women who were the subject of

Chapter 1 still found a space for themselves to think about and express ethnic relations through

food, an important assessment of the place of the ethnic communities in the new nation-state.

These thoughts were indeed of political and national importance, as they considered and framed a shared sense of belonging of the different ethnic communities in the new nation, integral to the consolidation of a new national identity in the minds of Malaysian citizens.

In the second chapter, which covered the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Malay women participated more politically in national issues through writing Berita Harian articles and organizing economical cooking competitions. These were methods utilized by UMNO Mothers

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to recruit more members and develop the relationship between Malay communities and the nation-state. Modern economic and nutrition-based attitudes towards domestic cooking practices became a way for Malay women to think about and grapple with national socioeconomic problems, such as poverty, that struck rural Malay communities.

The third chapter moved away from Malay sources and communities and instead investigated English-language sources and English-literate Chinese women’s involvement with domestic cooking. It explored the cosmopolitan food practices exhibited by domestic culinary celebrities and women’s magazines during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This chapter suggested a different strand of Malaysian domestic food practices that contrasted with those practiced by Malay women, yet showed that Chinese women were doing similar work in creating relations between ethnic food practices as Malay women. The third chapter attempted to capture the complexities of the different facets of Chinese women’s food practices but also the messiness of their conceptions of domestic cooking practices. These issues reflected the nascency of the development of Malaysian cuisine, and also the hybridities of food categories in Malaysian cosmopolitan domestic cooking practices.

The thesis also to different extents touched on colonial and Western hybridity in food practices in Malaysia, which importantly reflected the various extents of its influence on different communities in Malaysia and, ultimately, on Malaysian identity and food practices.

Strands of colonial and Western influence were present in recipes endorsed by the government, showcased in some Berita Harian articles, and included in some Malay women’s cookbooks.

Amongst English-literate Chinese women’s food practices, colonial and Western influence was even more pervasive. Incorporating Bhabha’s cultural hybridity was thus important to write about Malaysian food and identity, by showing the ways in which women had the agency to

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include what they wanted or not in their cookbooks and materials, creating in Malaysian food practices “power and discourse” not “possessed entirely by the coloniser.”1 That is, women created through food a Malaysian identity not dominated by its colonial legacy.

Food practices are a significant lens to look at Malaysian identity, particularly in thinking about its complicated and multiethnic ties, and the tensions between such complexities and the neat simplicity of ethnic categories used to define it. Tracing the recipes and thoughts of the different ethnic communities allowed me to pick out hybridities and relations between the food practices of the ethnic communities; the relations were part of what it meant to be Malaysian.

This analysis also implied moments of a shared sense of belonging, like between women of different ethnic groups in Chapter 1, as well as of disparity, like the class difference between rural Malay women and urban Chinese women. These moments reflected the complicated and sometimes tenuous narrative of the unity of the three ethnic communities during Malaysian independence, constructed by the Alliance party. I have highlighted the ways in which women explored such relations every day through practices as ordinary as cooking and eating, which provided a more personal sense of identity and relational formulation. Looking at conceptions of domestic food practices thus becomes vital to investigate more nuanced and personal relations between the different coexisting ethnic groups, particularly in a country as shaped by food as

Malaysia.

In using sources about food, the thesis also constructs a narrative which placed women at the center of Malaysian history, a rarely written perspective. Often underrepresented in

Malaysia’s history of independence and the conception of the nation-state are the voices and involvement of women from the different ethnic communities in Malaysia. When women are

1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 200.

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part of the narrative, historians often talk about their membership in political parties, as well as

their domestic and supportive roles. Men, particularly those from UMNO, were described as

being toxic and impeding women’s more active political involvement, as men themselves

conceived of women’s roles as belonging to the family. This thesis shows how women found and

carved out a space for themselves, through Berita Harian and The Straits Times columns,

cookbooks, and magazines to develop political thoughts, understandings, and connections in

Malaysia. Importantly, these women, rather than creating ethnic and political tensions with each

other through these writings, instead produced thoughts of reconciliation, respect, cooperation,

and understanding with women from the other ethnic communities. I argue that they were crucial

in fostering co-existence in this multicultural nation in the 1950s to 1970s.

My thesis opens up multiple directions to delve further into the complexities of

Malaysian cuisine during this time period. Primary sources by Indian communities and Mandarin

sources by Chinese communities would be useful to incorporate their understandings of

Malaysian domestic cooking food practices and write about their relations with other ethnic

groups through food. At the same time, a look at East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) would help

expand on the conceptions of Malaysian cuisine and the tensions between Peninsular Malaysia

and East Malaysia. My work is a specific look at Malaysian domestic cooking practices by

particular groups of women. More work can be done to further unpack the richness and

complexities of multicultural, hybrid Malaysian cuisine in the past.

In the twenty-first century, while definitions and understandings of Malaysian food are

more stable than they were in the mid-twentieth century, through scholarly consensus and government endorsement, what is and what isn’t Malaysian food continues to be thought out and contested. In 2009, Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen, the Malaysian Tourism Minister at that time,

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claimed that “we cannot continue to let other countries hijack our food. Chili crab is Malaysian.

Hainanese chicken rice is Malaysian. We have to lay claim to our food.”2 While her concern could be seen in the context of laying claim to dishes acclaimed in Southeast Asia so as to boost

Malaysia’s tourism rates, her statement was clearly in defense of Malaysian national identity.

Her anxiety about dishes becoming “hijacked” by other countries reflected her concern with

Malaysian identity being attacked and chipped away as the country is robbed of its dishes. This anxiety alone reveals the integral relationship between Malaysian national identity and its food.

But more than that, it suggests that rather than embracing and encouraging hybridities between food practices, there is a way in which Ng was enforcing boundaries to exclude other nations from sharing dishes with Malaysia. Indeed, identifying and claiming dishes as Malaysian has become much more pertinent and rigorous and has encouraged more widespread action by the

Malaysian government in the 2000s, such that the government launched a “Fabulous Food

1Malaysia campaign,” which involved appreciating, identifying, and declaring “key dishes as

Malaysian.” This act of discovering and reclaiming Malaysian food heritage by the government thus goes back to the continued relevance of studying the origins of Malaysian cuisine, so that we can better understand roots of dishes and food practices in Malaysia, and bridge past questions with present ones.3

The richness and complexities of Malaysian cuisine cannot be understated, and are evident through a look into this past when the cuisine was conceived. Recipes and dishes hold a history in their names, ingredients and cooking styles that reflect the identity of the people who

2 Chili crab is considered to be a Singaporean dish. For information about its origins: “Our Founder,” Roland Restaurant PTE LTD, accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.rolandrestaurant.com.sg/about-us.html. 3 Teh Eng Hock, “Laksa and Nasi Lemak among Our Pride, Says Yen Yen,” The Star Online, September 17, 2009, accessed April 15, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20130116025136/http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/9/17/nation/4734354 &sec=nation.

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made them. And in multiethnic Malaysia, during a period of displacement and upheaval, documentation of and thoughts about food become a deeply layered resource that has embedded in it traces and marks of people from many different ethnic communities, and is vital to answering the question of how Malaysian identity came to be.

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