P. C. B. Newington’s cookbook brings together recipes recalled during civilian internment in Singapore during the Second World War. First published in 1947, this restored hardback edition includes Beryl Irving’s illustrations, a foreword by Adam Irving and contextual notes.
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P. C. B. Newington | illustrated by Beryl Irving | Irving Books restored edition
Good Food is a cookbook with an origin like no other. In February 1942, after the fall of Singapore, Philip Campbell Beatson Newington was interned by the Japanese at Changi and later Sime Road. As rations shrank, he began writing down every recipe he could remember. At Sime Road he formed a weekly Gourmets' Club: a broken sheet of asbestos became the table, boxes the chairs, and the men reconstructed imaginary dinners course by course.
First printed at Ipoh in 1947, the result is part cookbook, part survival document. There are breakfasts, cocktails, fish dishes, curries, chutnies, puddings, savouries, sandwiches and Malayan pantry terms beside English nursery comforts. Some recipes are skeletal; others are generous and exact. That unevenness is part of the record: these dishes were gathered from memory, hunger, and conversation, often without kitchens or ingredients.
Good Food is not only a cookbook. It is a table laid in the mind under conditions that should have made such imagining impossible: appetite as memory, fellowship, and defiance.
For readers of food history, family history, Malayan colonial history, and wartime civilian internment, this edition restores a strange, humane, and unexpectedly practical book to print.
What the editor says
“I wanted this edition to feel like a rescued family book: Beryl Irving's drawings restored, Newington's camp story given its frame, and the recipes left as close as possible to the hungry, imaginative conversations that made them. Good Food is not just a cookbook. It is a record of people refusing to let starvation take away memory, manners, humour, and the idea of a meal shared.”
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