What you need to know about: ‘The Food That Makes Us’

For a 176-page book, ‘The Food That Makes Us’ is bulky for a cookbook with just ten recipes – but then again, it’s not a cookbook. Rather, this self-published book by Foong Li Mei and Szetoo Weiwen is more of a collection of Malaysian stories and home recipes to show how cooking shapes our culture and identity.

It took a tragedy to inspire this book.
The idea for the project began in 2012 after Li Mei’s father-in-law passed away, and with him, his braised chicken feet and mushroom dish he was famed for. ‘At his funeral, one auntie casually mentioned how sad it is that we’ll never get to taste it again,’ said Li Mei. ‘I realised then that we don’t just lose a person when they pass away, but also what they create. It was also then that I had the idea to document these home recipes, because they can’t be found anywhere else.’

The project started as a monthly column.
Li Mei didn’t have a game plan in pursuing her passion project – she was willing to do it all by herself until she found a project partner in Szetoo. ‘Before it could become a book, I needed to show that the whole concept could work to Jason Tan, who was then the editor for an e-magazine called The B-Side,’ Li Mei said. ‘For the first essay, I interviewed Szetoo, who had a vegetarian food blog and took really good photos – and she wasn’t shy in letting me know how much work was needed! She swooped in to help become the photographer, and from that point on, it was just the two of us working on the project.’ In 2013, ‘The Food That Makes Us’ made its debut in The B-Side as a monthly column, lasting close to a year before the magazine closed down.

The book wasn’t appealing enough to publishers.
The end of the serialised column was the start of a bumpy two-year process to turn it into a book. ‘We spoke to different publishers, but they weren’t sure of what it was – is it a book about stories, or a recipe book? They all had different ideas of what the book should be, which wasn’t in tune with ours,’ Li Mei said. ‘The recipes are only part of the story, and we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just Malaysian or traditional food – this is a project to document recipes that interviewees wanted to preserve, along with their stories to show that when we make food, food makes us too. These are family recipes, which may or may not be the taste that everyone is used to, but we do advise on how you can tweak it,’ she added. The book was eventually self-published in December 2016 after they managed to pre-sell over 100 copies through Stickerrific, an arts supplies store run by Szetoo.

Not that it matters too much (in hindsight).
The pair continues to market their book through bazaars, craft stores and Kinokuniya through talks and pop-up stores. ‘We never came across questions from the public on whether this was a story book or recipe book – in fact they understand the book better than I understood it when it first began! Looking back, it’s true we don’t have a genre, but that only makes it more approachable to all walks of life,’ Li Mei said.

‘The Food That Makes Us’ retails for RM59.90 and is available on stickerrificstore.com. Find out more on fb.com/thefoodthatmakesus.