Recipe is a short film about the true story of Hubert Servaes, a Brigadier in the British Territorial Army in the Second World War.  Captured in the surrender of Singapore in 1942, he spent almost the entire war in Japanese prison camps in Taiwan, Korea and across East Asia, where he and his fellow P.O.W.s suffered beatings, torture, sickness and starvation.

The Japanese forces not only denied the prisoners the Red Cross boxes they were entitled, but denied them almost all food outside of “jungle stew”, consisting of warm broth, hard radishes, rice husks and leaves pulled from nearby trees (for vital fibre).  It was not long before Hubert himself became sick with malaria.

Prisoners would busy themselves in the camps with tasks such as gardening or crafts.  Hubert, however, chose a different path.  He, with a fellow soldier, chose to write a cook book containing all the food they could never eat. 

Though the use of writing materials was strictly prohibited by the guards, Servaes collated his “Recipe Book For Small Homes” with starters, main courses, desserts and even a glossary of terms. It was not unusual for P.O.W.s to dream of roast beef, cream pies and chocolate pudding, but Hubert chose to dedicate his free time to imagining and documenting these home comforts in painstaking detail.  Recipe is a tribute to the survival instinct of an extraordinary man.