Once a stickler for cooking rules, Terry Tan relaxes his stance

SINGAPORE – There was a time when the proper way to make otak was to wrap the spiced fish paste in nipah palm leaves, cut in such a way that the stem and strips of leaf on either side form a sturdy pocket for the filling.

These days, if people want to wrap their otak in aluminium foil, cookbook author Terry Tan is not, he says, going to make a “hue and cry”.

The 85-year-old says: “It’s not the end of the world if somebody says, ‘Oh, I made the best otak with foil.’ Forty years ago, I would have said that this is just not done. It’s different now. Do whatever you want with the cuisine, and do it with confidence, knowing that it’s not going to be that different, frankly.”

The former advertising copywriter, journalist, restaurateur and cooking teacher has a new book out. Terry Tan’s Peranakan Classics, published by Epigram, updates his first cookbook, Terry Tan’s Straits Chinese Cookbook, published in 1981.

He will be taking part in a panel discussion on July 26 as part of the two-day Baba Nyonya Literary Festival 2026 organised by The Peranakan Association Singapore. The session, titled Peranakan Culinary Heritage: A Journey Through Taste And Tradition, will be held at the National Museum of Singapore. A standard ticket for the festival on July 26 costs $40.

He says about 90 per cent of the recipes in the original book are in the new one, and the recipes come with tips and suggestions on how to make cooking classic Peranakan dishes less time-consuming and daunting.

Rempah or spice pastes, the foundation of many Peranakan dishes, can be made in a mortar and pestle, or in a blender, and he suggests the kind to buy. Belacan or fermented shrimp paste can be toasted in the microwave.

In newspaper interviews in 1981, when the first book was published, he said he wrote it in part to save Peranakan food from dying out because of modernisation, and the fact that the cooking methods were laborious.

Today, he says, the cuisine is much more available to people who want to cook it.

“Every town centre in Singapore has wet markets and supermarkets that sell a proliferation of ingredients that were never that easy to find, unless you went to Tekka Market,” Tan says.

“Almost everybody I know has an electric grinder now. In that sense, the cuisine is far more available today to most people who cook, whether they are Peranakan or not.”

He learnt to cook at a young age, taught by his mother, his father’s second wife. He had two sisters and two brothers and lived in a large house in Oxford Road, near Farrer Park, with the extended family.

When he was 10, his father, who was in construction, died while inspecting a construction site. The family took in boarders, for whom they provided meals.

At Chinese New Year, the family would make love letters and achar or pickles, to pay for books and clothes for the whole year.

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, he was a food writer for the Sunday Nation newspaper. He left for London in 1983 to be a consultant and chef for the Rasa Sayang restaurant chain there. He later ran a restaurant, Butterfields, near the Oxford Circus station, serving Peranakan food and dishes such as mee goreng.

Because the restaurant was close to several television stations and was frequented by broadcast journalists, he soon appeared on TV programmes, explaining Singaporean food to Europeans.

He closed it in 1990, when the building was sold, and went back to writing. Among the 45 books he has written are ones on dim sum, cooking with Chinese herbs and China’s regional cuisines.

He moved back to Singapore 2½ years ago to be with family. The spry octogenarian, who says he has “a touch of arthritis”, keeps fit by going to the gym every day. In retirement, he hunts down good food with friends.

The book is something of a family project. His son Christopher Tan, himself a cooking teacher and cookbook author, shot the photos.

The dishes, which Tan senior cooked, are plated not on Peranakan crockery, but on white plates and bowls, to showcase the food.

Tan remembers running around borrowing crockery from antique and department stores for the first book. He says: “It was the trend at the time and it became very silly. If you look at my first book, there are some pictures where the food is so secondary to the background. So this is evolution.”

The book is meant to appeal to new and seasoned cooks in equal measure. In a section titled Basic Techniques, he gives instructions on rendering pork lard, making rempah and even how to knot pandan leaves. There is also an extensive ingredients glossary at the back of the book.

Recipes cover, as the title suggests, the classics. These include Babi Buah Keluak, Nasi Ulam, Nyonya Acar, Itek Tim and Kueh Pie Tee. But he does not shy away from including more challenging ones, for dishes such as Siput Lemak, made with sea snails, and Hati Babi Bungkus, pork and pig liver balls wrapped in caul fat.

He says: “Life has changed for people. Time is of the essence. And many people are living independently of their parents. Now, it’s husband, wife and children. Not so much with the in-laws and parents. Both husband and wife work. Some days, they have time and energy to cook, some days, they don’t.

“So this book becomes a handy guide to the culinary heritage. If you are going to cook from it, use it as a template, tweak the recipes. I have no objection to that. For first-time cooks who don’t know how to cook at all, the instructions and the narratives are very clear.”