Hi, everyone in our Baba-Nyonya blog!

With passion in Baba-Nyonya culture and cuisine, we’ll be here to introduce about this slowly but surely disappearing-but exceedingly beautiful culture and cuisine to the world.

The origin of Baba-Nyonya could be traced all the way to the Chinese Admiral explorer, Cheng Ho, who sailed the Indian Ocean more than 400 years ago to Melaka, a busy and prosperous port in the early 15^th century.

Baba-Nyonya in Malaysia and Singapore also known as the peranakan or the Straits Chinese, these groups of people are descendants of the very early Chinese immigrants to the Nanyang or 南洋 in Mandarin which literally means the “South Sea” region that refers to Malaysia Peninsular and the islands of Java. To assimilate to the culture. These early days Chinese immigrants retain some practices of Chinese but ai the same time adapted local Malay traditions in order to minimize the culture shock, where the men are called Babas, and the women are called Nyonyas.

Nyonya cuisine is generally referred to the result of inter-marriage between Chinese immigrants and the local Malays, which produced a unique cuisine where local ingredients such as chilies, belacan ( Malaysian shrimp paste), lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, etc. are used. Regardless of the history and origins of Nyonya food, preparing Nyonya food is no affair. The unique and highly flavor cuisine requires abundant amount of time, patience and skills. A true Nyonya would need to spends hours and hours to pounding her spices with batu giling (a flat slab of stone to grind the spices) to cook up authentic Nyonya dishes such as Chap Chai, Ayam Buah Keluak, Udang Masak Santan.

If you are a fans of the series “Little Nyonya”, you have come to the right place! You will be able to delve more into the Baba-Nyonya culture and learn more about Nyonya cusine here, too

If you are our fellow Malaysians, especially you are from Melaka or Penang and a Baba-Nyonya descent, we hope this blog reignite your love, passion and bygone memories.

We hope to win your support and readership here. Please subscribe the feeds, leave us comments, and don’t forget to tell your friends and family about this new blog.