Jason Wee and Savita Apte invite home chefs as participants to excavate the ways in which they have maintained and modified this tradition of “making do”; each episode features a unique recipe/dish which reflects this frugal flexibility. Guided by a host, the episodes also seek to understand how these home chefs have used food/ingredients to reinforce their roots and how the food they cook is a rich expression of their diverse cultural identity. Through these episodes, key conversations will unveil the home chefs’ personal stories/histories and recipes will be recorded and archived as valuable oral histories of food culture and history in the region.

Episode 1 – Claypot Mee Tai Mak

Episode 2 – Salted Fish Curry and Chutney

Savita Apte and Jason Wee are the main facilitators for the cooking show and are in charge of the ideation behind it. They previously ran a research seminar in April 2020 as part of their ongoing conversations on food history, where they read and researched together with participants from the public. The programme explored the history of food as a decolonising methodology for rewriting the nation-state and other political economies, and the ways these entities produce their class partitions and racial demarcations. The information gathered from the programme and subsequent conversations between the two paved the way for the formation of this cooking show