MANILA -- New year, new edition.

One of the country's best-selling and iconic cookbooks “Let's Cook with Nora” by the late Filipino culinary legend Nora Daza recently got an update. And it was updated by none other than Daza's daughter, editor Nina Daza Puyat.

“Anvil (the book's publisher) asked me just to edit the sponsors' names. The stocks were running low in 2016 but I was still working at Appetite (magazine) at that time. I started in 2018, the whole of 2018 and then the early parts of 2019, so more than a year,” she said during an interview with ABS-CBN News at The Maya Kitchen's event “To Mom with Love: Nina Daza Puyat's Loving Tribute to Nora Daza's Iconic Cookbook.”

But going through the book, she noticed that a lot needed to be updated. Originally published in 1965, the book has been one of the go-to cookbooks of Filipino home cooks for many decades, passed down through generations.

“I started re-testing [the recipes] on weekends. I said I want to fix the procedure, it needs to be rewritten clearly. I'm also the user of the book so if I find something wrong, of course I don't want people to get frustrated. There's nothing more frustrating than a recipe that doesn't work,” she explained.

She basically organized the whole book -- adding steps that are more specific, removing obsolete ingredients, changing the titles, refining recipes, and even removing some recipes.

For instance, she removed the drink section that contains old recipes like fruit punch, a somewhat outdated recipe. There were also errors in the cookbook such as the sukiyaki recipe that only asked for ½ cup of water although her mom's original recipe calls for 4 ½ cups of water.

“It's all the recipes of my mom except we removed the chapter for the drinks. And then there are a few recipes that I thought were obsolete. There's one recipe called 'Stuffed Pata' that you have to take out the skin, take out the meat, chop it up, brine it for two days, put it back, sew it up and braise it. Who's going to do that? So I took it out. And then there's some from the dessert section where there are three kinds of mocha cake, mocka cake, mocha roll, we made it just to one,” Puyat shared.

Priced at P695, the book now is much thicker and larger even with fewer recipes than the old edition. The new edition contains 260 recipes, down from the original 275 recipes.

The illustrations were replaced by beautiful high-definition photographs. The chapters have been organized and the procedures have been edited to be more specific. The new edition also replaced some of the ingredients and noted ingredient substitutes.

“During her time, they wanted the recipes to be simpler. But then in today's world, we have to be little more modern. Some of the recipes I kind of moved from chapter to chapter. For example, roast pork diner, it's simple pigue (leg or ham) with salt and pepper. I made it into a belly and rolled it up with tanglad (lemongrass) and peppers,” she explained.

Going through the recipe testing, Puyat said that there were a lot of firsts and she learned a lot from the process. Like it was her first time to cook pork kidneys and learned how to pickle. She even made a dedicated section just for pickles. The new edition also contains new recipes made by her.

And according to Puyat, she updated the book with the younger generation in mind. She would like young people to also use the book.

“That's why I'm a little nervous because people are used to this [old edition] and people might say, 'Ay it's not the same.' I'm worried that they might not like the new edition. I edited recipes that I think this generation would appreciate,” she said.