Wartime Kitchen

Wartime Kitchen: Food And Eating In Singapore (1942-1950) examines the experience of people during the period following the fall of Singapore in 1942 up to 1950. The author presents an in-depth yet lively research comprising anecdotes, personal reminiscences on food and eating and a collection of recipes in wartime Singapore. How did people cope with the food regime of rationed goods, bureaucracy and unpredictable supply? How did they sustain themselves by exploiting opportunities in varied and imaginative ways? Atmospheric and nostalgic in retrospect, it examines how hunger and the need for food became an impetus for creativity.

With references made also from the Oral History Department of the National Archives of Singapore under the Japanese Occupation Project, this book is a miscellany of memories, valued for how they reveal the textures of everyday life, lend an immediacy and vividness to events and flesh out the details embedded in archived records. It focuses on the memories of the local population rather than that of officers and men of the British and Australian military forces and the European civilian internees.

In reconstructing a history of food and eating in wartime Singapore, the book has taken from personal accounts including Chin Kee Onn’s Malaya Upside Down (1947); one of the earliest and most detailed first-hand accounts of life under the Japanese occupation; as well as comprehensive studies that have drawn from both personal memoirs and archival records, statistics and newspapers.