Chef Adek: The Many Lives Of Datin Hamidah Abdul Hamid

Datin Hamidah, also known as Chef Adek, has lived many lives: designer, homemaker, entrepreneur, and, eventually, one of Malaysia’s most respected chroniclers of its culinary traditions. This is the story of how those lives came to shape one another.

Our lives are not one singular narrative, as we tend to view it, but rather a collection of different, smaller lives that coalesce into a whole only when viewed from a distance. Perhaps you used to be a dancer, before the tides of time gradually lapped at and eroded your bodily grace. Or maybe you were once an engineer who, one fine day, decided that you’d laid your eyes on a blueprint too many and then traded in your hard hat for an espresso machine and a portafilter. Such metamorphoses are common and are not to be viewed as a falling short, but rather as the natural conclusion of one season, making room for the next and lending the whole of a life greater depth for having moved on.

One of my favourite such reinventions is the one undergone by the subject of this article, Datin Hamidah Abdul Hamid, fondly known as Chef Adek. These days, she may be more known for her deeply insightful cookbooks that detail treasured heritage recipes from her hometown state of Johor as well as across Malaysia, but what many might not know is that she was, at one time, one of the brightest stars in Kuala Lumpur’s nascent fashion scene of the 1980s—a designer with an uncommon touch whose creations were greatly sought after.

When I first caught wind of her story, I was immediately intrigued—after all, how could I not be? I’ve witnessed my share of reinventions, but rarely have I encountered someone who has excelled so fully in two distinct lives. That sense of intrigue stayed with me as I travelled to her residence, quietly sequestered in a peaceful pocket of Bukit Jelutong, for an afternoon chat.

I arrive outside her home, a low-slung house layered with terracotta roofs, screened behind palms and overreaching greenery. I ring the doorbell, and the automatic gates whirr to life before sliding away with a lazy mechanical chatter. Datin Hamidah greets me at the door and ushers me in with the easy warmth of a grandmother receiving company. We sit on her sofa and she offers me a drink. Introductions made, she settles comfortably into her seat. “So…” she says at last. “What would you like to know?”

She clutches a notebook with an assemblage of scrawls, spanning one page and then halfway down the next. She’d come prepared, evidently, but I tell her that I’d much rather hear it from her off the cuff. It’s an approach that’s led to not just many a great interview for me, but full-blown conversations too. And so we agree to take it from the top.

Our story begins many years ago, when Datin Hamidah, then a bright, starry-eyed young girl of 20, was all set to move to the UK to further her education and her own becoming. It was while staying at her cousin’s house there, in the midst of preparing for her move, that she would come face to face with the man who would remain by her side for the years to come. He was, at the time, a friend of her father’s and well known to the family. Datin Hamidah’s mother, in particular, was a big fan of the young man. Over the next few days, the man’s mother visited the house with a proposal: she’d like Datin Hamidah and her son to be wed. “This was 54 years ago and they were still matchmaking,” she explained.

She ended up saying yes, but of course, it came at a cost. Accepting the proposal meant that all the dreams she’d dreamed, all the exciting turns she’d envisioned her life taking, would now all come to nought.

“That was why I…” she begins slowly, before trailing off. She takes a moment to collect herself and continues. “Life just brought me to this, and I just followed, do you know what I mean? But I felt very restless, very useless, because I felt that had I furthered my studies, I knew I could’ve been somebody.”

What she couldn’t have foreseen at the time, though, is that she would eventually go on to leave her mark on this world and become the somebody she’d always aspired to—just perhaps not quite in the ways she’d intended. It was shortly after getting married that Datin Hamidah settled into the role of housewife and found herself with quite a bit of time on her hands.

She’d always been someone precociously creative, stretching back to her youth, and so she took to designing clothes as an outlet. It wasn’t long before those around her took notice of her latent talent for it. “I used to design my own clothes and every time I would go out, somebody would give me a good word for it. Then sometimes they asked me to design theirs too. Some of them encouraged me to start doing it from home, and so I did. And then it just caught on, you know? So aggressively. My friends kept saying, ‘Why don’t you open a proper shop?’”

Datin Hamidah then began to actively consider the possibility, and after much work to dispel the clouds of hesitation and self-doubt, she began her foray into the world of fashion. “So I opened in 1985. 1985 or 86, I’m not sure,” she recalls hazily. “I joined the first Fashion Aid. All the other designers in the show were long-time and established, and here I was, this unknown woman coming in.”

Despite being a newcomer contending against a sea of heavyweights, her talent shone through, and that show proved to be her big break in the industry. “After that show, one of the other designers, this man named Alvin, came to my shop in Yow Chuan Plaza just to show his appreciation for me. He said, ‘You know, I took 10 years to bring up my name, but you’re already up.’ I said, ‘Tak ada lah, just suka suka,’ but he said, ‘No, you take it seriously.’ And that was how I got involved in the fashion world. After that show, people got to know me. Alhamdulillah, it lasted quite some time,” she says, a tinge of wistfulness in her voice.

It was a heady time, with fashion opening countless new avenues for her. Even now, decades later, many of her clients still have and wear the pieces they’d bought from her. Things were going well, to say the least, and Datin Hamidah was riding the winds of an unprecedented rise. She hit her stride and was thriving in just about all the ways she could. But as it’s said, all good things must come to an end, and so it proved to be the case here.

“At 41, I had two babies to take care of. I was blessed with two,” she shares. “Then I was living in Shah Alam and my shop was in Yow Chuan, so I couldn’t be going every day. That’s where I started losing the staff. So in my mind, you know, it was painful, and I gave up.”

Time resumed its inexorable march, and eventually her children grew up and were now busying themselves with the preoccupations of emerging adulthood, like college and navigating their burgeoning social lives. Again, Datin Hamidah found herself with time on her hands. This time, she decided to exercise her creative inclinations through a wedding business. This too went swimmingly, before the demands of the practice began to take their toll. “I just tried it for a while, then it became too taxing,” she recalls. “Sometimes you do weddings until two, three in the morning—four o’clock even.”

And thus began a return to a life of domesticity, one more relaxed altogether and largely absolved of external demands. Little could she have known that fate was working quietly in the background to set the stage for her third great reinvention, this time as a chef.

It all started with a visit from her cousin, Datin Kalsom, her partner in crime and someone for whom her admiration is palpable when she speaks of her, as she often does throughout the course of our interview. Datin Kalsom, among the many hats she wears, also happens to be an author.

Datin Hamidah tells me the story of this encounter that would eventually go on to result in two nationally acclaimed cookbooks. “Again, I had nothing to do. One day I was talking to my cousin. In the family, I’m known as a good cook. So we just… something just clicked, and she said, ‘Don’t you want to do a cookbook?’ I said that I’d had it in mind, but that I wasn’t a journalist or a writer or anything. She said, ‘Never mind, we’ll do it together.’ And that’s how it got started.”

A project that started out with much enthusiasm quickly gave way to frustration when the realities of putting together a cookbook from scratch began to bubble up. The central issue was that, like most gifted home cooks, her dishes were the product of instinct and muscle memory.

“I didn’t like how much hard work it was because, as always, I had no written recipes,” Datin Hamidah says. “What I do, I’m so used to campak campak, because that’s the old phrase—they call it campak campak. But to do a book, I have to be very specific.” That meant that what had come to her so naturally before, something she did without a thought, she now had to pause and go over with a fine-toothed comb. “I had to weigh the ingredients. Some of the dishes I had to cook twice, three times, just to get that taste.” Indeed, it was a painstaking process of trial and error. She powered through, though, and the book eventually found form. It was an instant hit, finding fans near and far and even necessitating reprints.

It was on the back of this success that Yayasan Warisan Negara took notice and reached out to Datin Hamidah and her cousin for what was to be a monumental undertaking. They wanted this plucky pair to venture across the country, documenting a list of heritage recipes known only up to that point by word of mouth or perhaps a few scraps of weathered paper sitting on someone’s kitchen counter somewhere. These recipes—the building blocks of Malaysia’s rich culinary tradition—were in danger of being lost with the last generation of hands that still knew how to cook them.

And so it was that Datin Hamidah and Datin Kalsom set off on a sweeping journey across Malaysia, where their task was to get on the ground and track down locals who knew how to cook the dishes on their list. As if it wasn’t already an endeavour of immense difficulty, many of those they found didn’t have any kind of recorded recipes from which to draw, as they, much like Datin Hamidah, cooked more by feel than any sort of definable method.

This meant that she had to observe every step of their process, from the ingredients they used to the techniques they employed, note them down, and then return to her own kitchen to replicate it. Many batches came and went before she managed to capture the very same taste. It helps, though, that she has something of a gift in this regard—an instinctual understanding that allows her to simply observe how someone cooks and then reconstruct it on her own. And so it was that, after an extensive voyage down the length and breadth of the country, thanks to the efforts of Datin Hamidah and Datin Kalsom, these recipes were set down for posterity.

Datin Hamidah counts a multitude of high-profile admirers of her cooking, not least Robert Kuok, who, in addition to being the main sponsor of her second book, commissioned her to cook for an intimate gathering celebrating his 95th birthday at his exclusive Mariner’s Club in Hong Kong.

That’s just one of the many highlights her culinary career can count, and she combs the banks of her memory to share another with me. “Another unforgettable stint was at JW Marriott in Frankfurt, Germany, where I introduced Laksa Johor to the guests. I cooked it singlehandedly for 200 people, and the compliments from them were overwhelming. A German guest even came to my table and said to me, ‘I can’t stop dreaming of enjoying this dish by the beachside.’”

Trip down memory lane complete, Datin Hamidah then suggests adjourning for lunch. She tells me that she’s cooked for me, which is a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t managed to have lunch before coming over, and so was especially looking forward to it. I dig into the big plate of bihun she’d fried up and, as grandmothers do, she insists I go back for seconds and then thirds.

As I eat, my eyes wander over to the wall of photos overlooking the dining table. It’s filled with pictures of her children. She goes over each of them, one at a time, telling me about what they’re like, what they’re up to now, and, most of all, how proud of all of them she is.

They’re coming by later, she tells me—all of them together for dinner. “Oh, what’s the occasion?” I ask. Turns out there’s none in particular. They just pretty much come by on a weekly basis to have dinner as a family. She’s very lucky, I offer. She nods quietly in agreement. Looking off into the distance, Datin Hamidah reflects on her blessings. She tells me that there isn’t a thing more she could’ve asked from this life, about how it’s truly been an extraordinary journey from the beginning till now.

Datin Hamidah continues to muse on the life she has lived, and midway through, it occurs to me that I should turn my recording back on. But something in me tells me not to. Some conversations—some sentiments—feel as though they come from a place where recording them would somehow intrude upon their purity. I slide my phone away and return to my meal. Yes, aunty—tell me more. I’m listening.

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