[Oyk]

Firstly you look at what your geographical area is endowed with. Then, you cook whatever you have around you. These are determined by the climate, and the soil you have， and whatever animals you can find in your country.

A whole menu of food will be created as ancient man experimented using this conbined with that, boiled, fried, BBQ, steamed...all sorts of ways until he came up with a style or recipe that everybody said jin ho jiak.

That's heritage.

And that's before Man could travel far and wide, so in the case of Malaysia, there was no satay yet, no wantan mee, no meat kut teh, all of which are the foods of other countries which Malaysia has no right to claim are theirs, much less as heritage foods of Malaysia.

As an esteemed member wrote upthread, even chendol is not Malaysian. Rather, it's Indonesian.