Ellice Handy's 'My Favourite Recipes'

Cackled when I unwrapped the gift and saw the title. Apparently this is like the de rigeur cookbook that all home cooks refer to in late 1950s to 1980s. First published in 1952, Ellice Handy's 'My Favorite Recipes' held many local recipes tweaked from her own kitchen experiments. The author is an accomplished home cook and wrote this book to raise funds for Methodist Girls School (MGS) where she was principal till 1957, and then teacher till 1964.

Obviously I don't know this book because neither grandmother referred to it, and neither of them were MGS girls nor did they have close friends who were, and the grandmothers had employed full-time cooks for their kitchens back then. Hahaha. They don't exactly cook these foods, and if they do, they used the recipes their grandmothers used, like a taimeshi or nasi bogana tegal. I ate lots of variations of pecel madiun too. Severe childhood allergies meant that my grandmothers had to be very creative with my meals; I also missed out on a lot of foods that Singapore kids of my generation know.

So these funny dear friends gifted me 'My Favourite Recipes' (2012 edition published by Landmark Books). I like books, but I'm not sure how well I'll utilize this book. I told them that we could share this book since one of them is into baking and they're all into desserts. Two thick sections of 50-over pages on 'Cakes, Pastries & Desserts' and 'Snacks' could be sliced out and filed into another book for someone else who could better use it. 😂 Bear in mind that someone who grew up in Singapore and the region would approach these recipes very differently from someone who didn't, but love the foods of the region.

In the 'European Dishes', the beef and chicken liver rolls and duck pot roast sound quite all right. The fried spaghetti and 'sauce and meat balls for spaghetti' are positively frightening. I do not eat pasta like that slathered with sauce. Even if you cook everything from scratch, I highly doubt it would taste very different from ketchup and canned sauce over meatballs and pasta. Think spaghetti bolognese done at shitty cafes. That is NOT the kind of pasta I favor.

The 'Chinese Dishes' are rather unimaginative, and when every recipe calls for corn flour and thick soy sauce, they're all going to taste the same. Soups and broth all suggested the use of 'seasoning powder'. What is that? Ajinomoto? Five-spice powder? *shrug The two recipes for pickles are pretty okay- pickled radish and carrot and pickled kwak chai. I was like, what is kwak chye? Then somewhere in those lines, it said 'salted preserved mustard greens'. Ohhh. Anyway, I'm skipping every recipe in this section. Hahahahaha.

'Malayan & Indonesian Dishes' didn't wow me. Okay I was hoping for sambar, sambal and fiery spices galore. But no. The palate is different. It slants towards lots of friendly coconut milk things and chutney, and rojak in Indian, Malay/Chinese style plus another categorized as 'easy-to-make rojak'. The recipe 'Sauces for Malayan salads' sent me into peals of laughter because I realized 'Malayan salads' referred to the rojak. 'Penang pickle' got me for five seconds before I realized that that's 'achar'. Okaaay, the recipe is sound, and could be tweaked for sweetness and heavier belachan and chilli flavors. I'm quite impressed with salted fish roe sambal. Hurhurhur. The recipe is exactly the way I would do it anyway, not as chunks but 'mashed', which I assume will be not be in the style of mashed potatoes, but more of broken-up pieces when I stir fry. The duck pot roast in 'Chinese Dishes' appeared again in this section; instead of rubbing the duck with brandy, this one requires ground ketumbar and pepper, salt and soya bean sauce.

The 'Indian Dishes' is extremely unhelpful to me. The spices used are insufficient and limited in imagination. When I gave it a whirl in my head, I didn't think these dishes, if I followed the recipes, would be palatable. The biryani and dhal would suck. The only thing vaguely do-able is the Indian kurmah, which actually would end up closer to Indonesian and Peranakan flavors. I'd go as far to say that the author doesn't understand that the dishes require and the final flavors that come out. The recipes are very mild, and lacking in many ingredients.

The cookbook is really what it says it is. It's page after page of recipes and concise instructions. There're no interesting tips, no funny lines, nothing. There're photos of the various food items, but there aren't any stories, no personal anecdotes, and not even humorous. They literally teach you how to do it. After a while, I decided that I'm going to see it from the author's eyes, as in how her generation perceives food and cooking, and just read it for information and background knowledge. Belachan in the book is spelt as 'blachan'. The fish of choice back then seems to be the threadfin; ikan kurau is used for every recipe that requires fish.

When I went through the various ingredients, cooking methods and timings, I realized that these are truly easy home-cooking staples. The dishes themselves aren't difficult to produce. It's the prep work that's a tad lengthy because of all the buying of produce, cleaning and such. Depending on how I tweak them, I suppose I could try out a dish from each section at some point, BUT never from the last two sections. Hahahah.