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The Mrs Beeton of British Malaya who pioneered fusion cuisine
Unlike those modern domestic goddesses Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, you won’t know her name.
But long before they introduced British families to new types of cuisine, Mrs W.E Kinsey was the go-to resource for colonial housewives tasked with feeding hungry families in Malaya.
Her thrifty east-meets west recipes – an early version of fusion cuisine – were aimed at those on shoestring budgets who were struggling with a lack of familiar British ingredients.
Mrs Kinsey’s “Mems” Own Cookery Book: 420 Tried and Economical Recipes for Malaya was first published in 1920 (Mem being short for Memsahib, a European woman).
Little is known about Mrs Kinsey, except that she was famous for her jams made with Malayan fruits; even her given names are now forgotten.
She lived in Seremban, Malaya (now modern-day Malaysia) with her husband, William Edward Kinsey, who was originally from Liverpool. Mr Kinsey worked variously as a businessman, an inspector of mines, and a forestry officer.
Mrs Kinsey’s cooking methods were typically British: she favoured boiling; baking, and roasting over stir-frying, like the Straits Chinese, or grilling, like the Malays. Her book features old favourites such as bubble and squeak and roasts along with nursery puddings, such as jam roly-poly.
But, of necessity, she often substituted local ingredients into favourite recipes, as European ingredients were rarely available in Malaya.
Local spices such as ginger, cloves, and chili feature instead of herbs such as parsley or dill. She used local vegetables such as ladies fingers, and lentils. In the absence of cod and salmon, she relied on local fish such as ikan kurau (threadfish) and ikan merah (snapper).
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In Malaya, mems were generally the wives of British colonial officials, or of rubber planters. Many of them lived on isolated jungle outstations, and they often had to make ends meet on shoestring budgets.
Where Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, was an essential guide to running a home Victorian Britain, Mrs Kinsey aimed to do the same for housewives in the tropics of the Twenties. Her book, which is now on display as part of an exhibition at the National Library of Singapore, gives a fascinating insight into what life was like.
Besides recipes (which she tested using an oil-fired stove, on the back veranda of her home) “Mems” Own also includes advice on the market cost of the ingredients, and where to shop to get a good deal.
For example, the recipe for Bone Soup states: “Ten cents worth of good beef bones (about two katties) […] Cost about 16 cents [in total]. Enough for two or three persons.”
According to the preface, Mrs Kinsey hoped such information would “assist to combat the pernicious policy of the native cooks who not only overcharge for local commodities, but generally will not produce them, or attempt to raise non-existent difficulties”.
She even offered price comparisons between local markets and Cold Storage, the supermarket favoured by mems lucky enough to have access to a branch which offered imported “luxuries” such as canned fish and vegetables.
“Make do” and “waste not want not” seem to have been her maxims. For example, Henry VIII’s favourite teatime treat, Maids of Honour, are rich tartlets with mashed potato as an ingredient in the British version. But Mrs Kinsey’s recipe has “cocoanut” and sago. She also uses lime, ubiquitous in Malaya, instead of lemon.
She also added her own twist to popular Anglo-Indian dishes, such as kedgeree. Originally, in India, this was a mess of rice, and onions. Later, the British added fish. Mrs Kinsey’s version is made with an unspecified fowl – mems could presumably choose chicken, duck, goose or pigeon from the local market.
Leftover meat was recycled as soup; leftover fish could be steamed with a beaten egg; leftover chicken could be minced, and cooked with seaweed and milk to make a version of creamed chicken in aspic.
Perhaps because scales were in short supply in the jungle, Mrs Kinsey gave no weights in her recipes. She prefers to give measurements in “puddingspoons” tablespoons and teaspoons instead - which seems strange to those used to the detailed instructions of modern-day recipe books.
• From the Stacks, which features “Mems” Own, also includes more than 100 other books, photographs and documents giving a perspective on colonial history. It runs at the National Library of Singapore (nlb.gov.sg) until August 28 2016. Admission is free.