Rendang is not supposed to be crispy, but who owns it?

LETTERS: A chef and a lawyer on lost recipes, and how to keep them alive. One of us cooks. The other argues in court. Different trades, same concern: what we inherit, and what we pass on.

Start with the chef, and with a grievance. In 2018, a British television judge criticised a Malaysian contestant's chicken rendang, saying its skin was not crispy.

She was eliminated later in the episode, and Malaysia erupted. I made my view clear at the time: a slow-braised chicken rendang is not meant to have crisp skin.

Rendang is slow. It is patience in a pot. Asking for crispy rendang is like asking for crunchy teh tarik.

For one glorious moment, the whole country agreed with itself, even rival politicians, which tells you how serious the matter was.

But here is what I have learned since, travelling this country and studying our traditional food. The real threat to Malaysian cooking was never a British television judge.

While developing a book on Pahang's traditional recipes, I came across around five hundred recipes that are no longer being cooked today. Not stolen. Not insulted. Simply stopped.

Recipes disappear for many reasons. A method may take more time than modern life readily gives. An ingredient may become difficult to find.

An elder may die before a younger pair of hands has learned the technique. A dish can be lost without ceremony. One day, a kitchen simply stops making it.

So the question Malaysians love to argue about - who owns rendang? - is the wrong place to start. The lawyer will explain why.

Here the lawyer obliges. The law gives no chef, company or country a general monopoly over rendang as a traditional dish.

Copyright may protect the original words and photographs used to present a recipe. It does not protect the underlying idea, procedure or method of cooking.

A restaurant in London may therefore cook its own version badly tomorrow without infringing copyright, although copying somebody else's words or photographs is another matter. Perhaps there ought to be a law against that, says the chef.

Still, the law is not useless; it simply protects different things than people assume.

A distinctive brand name or logo can be protected. Trademark law does not ordinarily allow a trader to monopolise "rendang" merely as the common name of the dish.

A geographical indication can protect a qualifying food name whose reputation or characteristics are essentially tied to a place.

For instance, MyIPO, Malaysia's intellectual property office, lists Klang Bak Kut Teh as a registered geographical indication.

And in December 2024, Unesco inscribed Malaysia's breakfast culture, including nasi lemak, roti canai and teh tarik, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

None of these makes one person the owner of the dish itself. They perform different functions: trademarks protect source-identifying signs; geographical indications protect qualifying place-linked names against misuse; and Unesco recognition raises the visibility and awareness of living heritage and encourages efforts to safeguard it.

Together, they can tell us who stands behind a product, when a name is genuinely tied to a place, and what a food means to the communities that keep it alive.

And a recipe is more than what a page can hold. A page lists ingredients and timings. It cannot capture the pressure of a hand folding dough, the sound of a rempah when it is ready, the smell that tells a cook to lower the fire, or why a dish belongs at a wedding rather than an ordinary meal. Save only the list of ingredients, and we keep the skeleton but lose the life.

So here is our humble proposal: a Living Culinary Archive for Malaysia.

Record our dishes with the families who keep them, not from them, the names, variants, stories and techniques, on video and audio, with the cooks themselves. Let each family decide what is shared and what stays in the kitchen.

Then make sure every recorded dish finds a next pair of hands, because a recipe stored but never cooked is not saved. It is embalmed.

Start small: one state, fifty dishes. Pahang suggests itself, since the groundwork has already begun. Success is not measured in files. It is measured in a young cook who can now make the dish.

So, who owns rendang?

The law gives no one a general monopoly over the dish; everyone who grew up with it has a stake in its future. Stewardship of a dish is practised at the stove, not declared in court.

What the law can usefully do is protect source-identifying names and place-linked indications, and provide a framework for records, permissions and agreements, so that consent and credit can travel with the knowledge. Pride and paperwork, together.

And for the record, once and for all. Rendang is not supposed to be crispy.

DATUK DR REDZUAWAN ISMAIL (Chef Wan)

Food Ambassador

Tourism Malaysia

JJ CHAN

Barrister-at-Law

Honourable Society

Gray's Inn, London

United Kingdom

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times