Meet Ong Jin Teong, an electrical engineer turned Nyonya cookbook author

GEORGE TOWN, Sept 27 — Ong Jin Teong’s culinary journey started because he was homesick for Penang food while he was a student in London back in the 1960s.

“I couldn’t find any Penang food there so I had to cook my own,” he said.

He continued to cook Penang food based on his mother’s recipes when he started working in London and in the Caribbeans when he was posted there.

“I also cooked for friends who came over,” said the retired professor who was a trained electrical engineer with a PhD.

Ong moved to Singapore in 1984 when he was offered an Associate Professor position specialising in wireless communications and systems at the Nanyang Technological University.

After retiring, he started looking back on his childhood and doing research into his own family history.

This led to an extensive five-year research project where he compiled recipes and family history that culminated in the publication of his first book.

“I started collecting family recipes, assembling recipes from my mother and studied local cookbooks in the market before writing that first book,” he said at the recent launch of his third book, The Tastes of Home - Easy-to-Cook Dishes from Singapore and Malaysia at the Penang Institute in conjunction with the George Town Literary Festival.

His first book, Penang Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cook, was published in 2011.

“It is not just a recipe book but one with stories on the historical perspective of the dishes,” he said.

The 79-year-old also included old photographs of his family, relatives, and friends.

“The recipes were of food with Malay, Hokkien, Hainanese, Indian, Thai and Eurasian influences,” he said.

After the first book was published, he was approached to write a second one featuring the utensils and objects used in Nyonya cooking.

“I did research on the differences between Penang, Melaka and Singapore Nyonya food and this was included in the second book,” he said.

While the first book featured Nyonya dishes, he said the second book, Nonya Heritage Kitchen: Origins, Utensils and Recipes, contains more recipes for kuihs.

Ong decided to come up with the third book as a way to encourage young and busy people to cook local food.

“This new book is for people who don’t know how to cook but would like to learn so it has easy and simple recipes,” he said.

He said this is his way of encouraging the younger generation to continue with old traditions of cooking Penang local food.

“The Nyonya style of cooking is strict and labour intensive but now that we have so many modern devices, we can use those to cook simpler food faster,” he said.

He said using modern devices like the Thermomix will save time and be easier for those who don’t have time to spend hours in the kitchen.

There are over 40 recipes in his new book featuring local food that any beginner can do.

“These are the recipes I used when I was a student, simple and easy for anyone to follow,” he said.

He said the next generation should be encouraged to learn local recipes from their families such as gathering to cook during special occasions like Chinese New Year.

“These recipes will be lost if local families do not hand it down to their next generation, these are not taught in culinary schools,” he said.

He said Penang people should be proud of their own family’s home cooked food traditions and preserve it by ensuring the recipes are handed down and shared.

At the launch of his book in Penang Institute recently, Ong even demonstrated how he cooked some of the recipes in the book.

He demonstrated how to cook fu yong hai (stir fried eggs with vegetables and crab meat), aw aw eggs (eggs fried in dark soy sauce), aw bak chien (sliced beef cooked in dark soy sauce) and mee sua soup.

It took him only about 40 minutes to cook the four dishes while also simmering green bean soup in an electric rice cooker.

Both of Ong’s first two books won the Best Culinary History national award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and the Nonya Heritage Kitchen also won the Best in the World Award in the final round in May 2017 at Yantai, China.

The Tastes of Home is published by Landmark Books and is now available for sale online at Entrepôt Publishing.