Your suspicion is correct - Hakka cooking seemed to be very family-based, and is usually passed down by the older members of the family to their immediate family members from the next generation. I’ve been looking out for a proper Hakka cookbook for decades, and the only specialised one in English that I’ve found is Linda Lau Anusasananan’s The Hakka Cookbook:
More about Linda Lau here:
One of my sisters is married to a Hakka, and I got her a copy of this book, which she said had recipes that varied somewhat from those taught to her by her Hakka mother-in-law. An example is their family’s abacus beads, which is almost soupy, compared to the stir-fried version which seemed to be de rigeur in most commercial Hakka eateries.
You can see my sister’s family version of the abacus beads dish in their Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner spread here, which was wholly Hakka - I’d gate-crashed their last one as I’d always wanted to try a “different” Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner spread from our own (which is Hokkien-Nyonya).
For comparison’s sake, this is how my own family’s Hokkien-Nyonya Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner spread look like:
I can’t speak Hakka at all, but can recognise the sound of their language - I’ll keep an ear out for what you said when I visit Taiwan next time. Like Taiwan, the second-largest Chinese dialect group in Malaysia, after the Hokkiens/Fujianese, are the Hakkas. Majority of the Hakkas in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Singapore are from Dabu County in Guangdong. Many towns in Malaysia, e.g. Kajang and Seremban, near KL, have almost wholly-Hakka Chinese populace, so that’s the dialect you hear all the time there.
On Penang island, where I stay, Hokkien/Fujianese is the overwhelming majority, but in the town of Balik Pulau which was established by the British East India Company in1794, the Hakkas are the majority. It’s only a half-hour’s drive from George Town, so we’d go there for Hakka meals.
If you travel across the South China Sea to East Malaysia on the island of Borneo, the Chinese there are almost 80% Hakka. The city you should visit there, if you’re ever in this neighbourhood, is Kuching, where you’ll find great Hakka cuisine a-plenty.
