Sama Sama: A One-of-a-Kind Guide to Honest, World-Class Cooking

It’s not often that a chef’s cookbook will tell you that the recipe is a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule, but in Sama Sama, chef Julie Lin fully acknowledges that her most well-loved kitchen space is, in fact, the one she has in her own home.

This cookbook is great for expanding your at-home cooking toolbelt. The selection of sauces Lin includes in the first chapter are adaptable to a variety of dishes in the book and beyond. Her tea-brined fried chicken offers a completely new perspective on marinades. Even in a simple pan-seared eggplant recipe, she’s slipped in a method for browning butter with Sichuan peppercorns that could be adapted to use a variety of spices, and elevate any number of sides and mains.

Lin has over a decade of experience as a restauranteur, including a 2014 run on Masterchef and co-ownership of Michelin star restaurant GaGa. Through these and her time leading teams in various kitchens, she holds the door open for women wanting to enter the restaurant industry. However, her cookbook Sama Sama is less an ode to her career, and more an acknowledgement of the two cultures that raised her, a fusion of Malaysian heritage and Scottish upbringing. 

Often, cookbooks from professional chefs receive a reputation of being high-brow and difficult to properly execute; Lin defies this expectation with a chapter devoted to cooking with leftovers and with estimated figures and substitutions throughout. Her recipe for brown crab, which has been featured on the BBC, is a great example. 3/4 of the prep is in the sauce. It’s so simple and affordable that crab could conceivably become a midweek dinner.

Split between the chapters are a series of essays from the cookbook’s author. In speaking on her Malaysian-Scottish heritage, she also dives into the dangers of trying to define food as one thing or the other, in trying to fit food into a specific ethnic box. It’s clear that there are distinctly Malaysian recipes in this book, and there are also distinctly Scottish recipes, but they all come with a fusion of the two that becomes something entirely new— a potato fritter with a green chili chutney, oyster mushrooms tempura fried and seasoned like a takeaway spice bag (which, by the way, deeply resembles calamari in flavor and texture). 

It’s tough to say if this format would work for anyone, but Julie Lin is unique, not just in her heritage or cooking style. As a result, this cookbook is easy to follow and truly original. Leave the guide to French cooking at the bookstore and take this one home instead- there won’t be another one like it any time soon.