Terry Tan's Peranakan Classics

This book began in 1981 as Terry Tan's Straits Chinese Cookbook. It now returns as Peranakan Classics, revised by an author still working, still refining, more than four decades later

Tan wrote the original book partly out of concern that Peranakan food was dying out, caught between modernization and cooking methods too laborious for most people to keep up. He now says the cuisine is far more accessible to home cooks than it once was, and this update reflects that shift: Tan writes in his introduction that the book "includes tips and suggestions to make many of these traditional recipes more achievable without sacrificing their essential character."

That's not a euphemism for simplification. The book still walks readers through rendering pork lard, making prawn stock from scratch, and steaming grated coconut desserts, the kind of foundational techniques that define Peranakan kitchens in Singapore. 

It also preserves dishes that have largely disappeared from restaurant menus, like lo kai yik, once sold by wandering hawkers and traditionally made with chicken wings, pork belly, pork skin, pig intestines, liver, and cuttlefish.

Tan remains one of the defining voices in Singaporean food writing, and this update is a key document, a refinement by someone who has spent a career getting it right.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.