Kalsom says one of the best things to happen after she won her second Gourmand Award is that the heritage recipes she published were utilised by a local hotel to give diners an opportunity to try the food themselves. — RECIPES ARE FOR SHARING
Cookbooks have been around in some form or another for centuries now. In fact, according to the Guinness World Records, the oldest printed cookbook, titled On Right Pleasure and Good Health, dates back to 1474!
From those tenuous early beginnings, cookbooks and books on food have soared in popularity over the years. In tandem with this, the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards has become pivotal in unearthing the best cookbooks in the world and consequently catapulting many authors to international popularity.
Founded in 1995 by Edward Cointreau, the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards honours the best food and wine books in printed or digital format as well as food television.
With thousands of food and wine books and online publications produced, being on the shortlist and winning a Gourmand Award is both a badge of honour as well as an opportunity for readers to identify the best annual food titles in the market.
Wong's debut cookbook took over two years to put together and she was so determined to pull it off that she published it herself and ended up winning a Gourmand Award in the street food category. — INSTAGRAM
Since its inception, the Gourmand Awards has seen many notable winners, including Alain Ducasse, Yotam Ottolenghi, Michel Roux and Thomas Keller, to name a few legendary culinary stalwarts.
In Malaysia, notable Gourmand Awards winners have included Chef Wan (who famously beat out Jamie Oliver for best television chef at the 2013 iteration of the awards) as well as cookbook authors like Mohana Gill and Dayana Wong.
For the 2023 iteration of the Gourmand Awards held recently, there were thousands of screened books and publications from some 230 countries and regions out of which 1,250 were shortlisted for the food culture and 183 for the drinks culture. All the selected books are chosen based on a guiding principle: appeal and importance on an international scale.
Recipes Are For Sharing was 10 years in the making and recently clinched victory in the easy and fast category at the Gourmand Award. — RECIPES ARE FOR SHARING
This year, The Star columnist Datin Kalsom Taib bagged an award for Best in the World in the Easy and Fast Recipes category for her most recent cookbook Recipes Are For Sharing. Kalsom had previously bagged Gourmand Awards for her debut cookbook Johor Palate: Tanjung Puteri Recipes and sophomore effort Malaysia’s Culinary Heritage: The Best of Authentic Traditional Recipes.
“Never in our wildest dreams did I imagine that this book would win a Gourmand Cookbook Award. Recipes are for Sharing started as a labour of love for my family. I have spent a lifetime compiling a collection of recipes from my family and friends. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the numerous lockdowns imposed by the Malaysian government in 2020-2021, I decided to spring-clean my home office. There, in one of the boxes, I unearthed the first recipe book I had compiled for my children.
“The book I had planned to do in 2011 was not completed much like Franz Shubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’. Since I had more time on my hands, I decided to do the book and roped in my two nieces Ungku Balkis and Ungku Shereen, both great cooks to assist me – to finalise and test the recipes.
“This cookbook is a compilation of 200 simple, everyday recipes prepared in Malaysian households. The recipes have been chosen to appeal to cooks of all levels, from amateurs, to experts as well as to non-Malaysians who may be tempted to embark on a Malaysian culinary adventure,” she says.
Mohana only started writing cookbooks when she was 70, but says that winning so many Gourmand Awards gave her the confidence to know that she was on the right path. — Filepic
Singapore author Khir Johari was also a huge winner at this year’s awards, scooping up the The Best of the Best Book in The World for his seminal tome on Malay food, The Food of Singapore Malays: Travels Through the Malay Archipelago. Incidentally, the award is the most coveted one in the entire competition.
The book also picked up awards in all the categories it was shortlisted for, including best book of the year, best Asian cuisine, best culinary history and best printer.
“It is my greatest honour to have received this award and to stand amongst some of the most meaningful books to have been written in history.
“This book was 11 years in the making, and the effort was truly for our community, for Singapore, and for humanity as a whole in understanding the cultures of our part of the world,” says Khir.
Getting due recognition
So what happens after you win a Gourmand Award? Does life change dramatically? According to past winners, the level of recognition they received after winning was near-instantaneous, especially internationally.
“Oh you definitely get more recognition, especially outside of Malaysia because Malaysians don’t really know much about the Gourmand Awards, but when you go to Europe and say that you won this award, they instantly recognise it.
“When I won the Gourmand Award in 2022 in the street food category, it really helped book sales in Europe and in securing events and doing book launches there, because people were like, ‘Oh, it’s an award-winning cookbook about Malaysian food!” says cookbook author and previous winner Dayana Wong, who won for her book Penang Makan, which focuses on Muslim-friendly Penang street food.
Wong says sales of her debut cookbook soared in Europe after she won the award. — PENANG MAKAN
Octogenarian Mohana Gill is the only author based in Malaysia who has won eight Best in the World Gourmand Awards, a winning feat which began when she started writing cookbooks like Fruitastic! and Myanmar Cuisine, Culture and Customs and Flowerlicious in her seventies (she is now 87).
“Internationally at conferences, people started to recognise me and my books got a lot of publicity overseas as well. In Malaysia, the press was very kind to me too,” she says.
For her feat, Mohana was also given national due when she was bestowed with the Anugerah Perdana at the Anugerah Buku Negara 2017.
Kalsom too says that after her first two wins, recognition poured in instantly, from invites to cook in countries like Hong Kong to a local hotel (Impiana KLCC) actually utilising recipes from her book Malaysia’s Culinary Heritage as part of a nearly year-long project to introduce heritage Malaysian food to more diners.
“I was so happy about this, because I feel like the recipes I have written have come alive. People can taste the food, so it has gone from the bookshelves to a restaurant,” says Kalsom.
But according to Mohana, for many cookbook authors, much of the satisfaction in terms of winning an award comes from an overall sense of pride in a job well done. After all, pulling off a cookbook is no mean feat, from putting together recipes, researching subject matter, recipe-testing, photographing and so much more.
“I wrote my first cookbook at 70 and I wrote it because I wanted to, but when I got the award, it made me feel that I had done something right. So I suppose that was a green flag to say that I was on the right path,” she says.
Wong believes that the fact that so many Malaysians have emerged victorious at the Gourmand Award shows that there is a burgeoning interest in Malaysian cuisine and cookbook authors. —PENANG MAKAN
Dayana also adds that the fact that so many Malaysians have clinched wins at the Gourmand Awards throughout the years points to the popularity and growing interest in Malaysian food as well as the overall strengths of cookbook authors and food writers in the country.
“I think it shows that Malaysian food is on par with globally popular cuisines like French or Italian cuisine. Although our representation internationally is quite low because we haven’t had the breakthrough that Thai cuisine or Chinese cuisine have had, these awards really help boost knowledge and confidence in Malaysian food and authors,” says Dayana.
