Dried Shrimp Paste
Before I met Karma, the older brother of my friend Tanya Alwi, Tanya gave me some advice. “Karma has the biggest heart in the world. But let me warn you—he’s very cerebral,” she said. “He’s what you in America call an eccentric.”
It was 1982, during my first trip to Indonesia, and we were in Tanya’s mint-green Land Cruiser stuck in Jakarta traffic. I stared out the window into the steamy afternoon. It started to pour, with raindrops the size of quarters. A sarong-clad jamu vendor (jamu is the name for Indonesian traditional medicine), her back weighted down with a rattan basket full of gnarled medicinal roots, ran for cover.
We turned off the main road onto a smaller, bumpier one that wound its way toward Karma’s home. A few minutes later we reached a modest one-story stucco house tucked away in a grove of old eucalyptus trees. We parked in the driveway and walked on the front porch. The rain had stopped. The chirping of crickets filled the air. Karma sat on the porch in half darkness, his head buried in a book. He was in his late 30s and had skin the color of tea with milk. He wore a pale-yellow tunic and, despite the intense heat of that afternoon, a beci, an oblong black-velvet hat that marks a devoutly Muslim man in Indonesia. As we approached, Tanya’s brother remained focused on his book, unmoved by our presence. Tanya sat down in a nearby chair and indicated, with a subtle arching of her eyebrows, that I should do the same. Karma continued to read his book, a small paperback called Dukun! that had a garishly illustrated grinning skull on the cover. I knew the word dukun—it means “witch doctor.” After a few more minutes of silence, Karma cleared his throat.
“Indonesia is a riddle that will never be solved,” he whispered in English. Then he turned to me and said, “My name is Karma. They say it’s no accident that my parents named me that.” He lit up a clove cigarette. Its fragrant smoke curled around his head like a halo.
In the next few months Karma and I got together regularly. I would stop by his home in the afternoon, eager to hear him talk about the world. In the dark quiet of his study, we would discuss topics as varied as the origins of language and U.S. imperialism. But a lot of our time together centered on another activity we both loved to do: eating. So every day at sunset, after we’d worked up an appetite from talking and talking and talking, we’d jump into his car and drive around Jakarta in search of the best street-food stalls, or warung-warung (the plural form of warung). “Jakarta is a melting pot, so there are cooks here from all over the country selling their favorite dishes,” Karma explained. “If you want to know what Indonesia tastes like, all you have to do is drive around this city and eat.”
On one of these snack treks we stopped at a small, tent-covered streetside warung specializing in Gado-Gado, the Javanese vegetable salad topped with peanut dressing. It was a comforting dish, with leafy green lettuce, mung bean sprouts, and thick slices of blanched carrots and fried potatoes in a dressing scented with coconut milk and freshly roasted ground peanuts. On another night a few days later, Karma and I decided to forgo a sit-down dinner and stopped instead at a street vendor near his home for a sweet snack of pisang goreng (bananas dipped in a tempura-like batter and deep-fried). They were crunchy and warm, a perfect meal in the Jakarta moonlight.
Another evening, just after magrib, the late-afternoon Islamic prayer, Karma told me he had an extra-special treat in store for dinner. “Tonight we’re going to try satay,” he said. I looked at him in surprise—we’d ended our snacking tour the night before with satay. “It’s not just any satay,” Karma clarified. “We’re trying satay in the style of Surabaya, the capital of East Java. It’s made of goat, usually. They say that a good satay Padang cook is like a magician, and her bumbu-bumbu (flavoring paste) is her incantation.”
We soon arrived at the satay place, a small tin hut next to a tangle of tall, green banana plants. In the dim afterglow of sunset, it looked like an exotic jungle ruin. Karma approached the cook, a short woman with muscular arms, and placed our order. She picked up a bowl full of meat already threaded onto bamboo skewers and marched outside without saying a word. She was sterner than most vendors, normally an always-smiling bunch of people. “Maybe something bad just happened to her?” I asked.
“No,” Karma said. “She’s always like this. She focuses on cooking, not friendliness.”
I peered through a small window that had been cut in the side of the stall and watched as the cook began to fan a small hibachi-like grill just a few feet away. The meat hit the grill with a sizzle, and she began to fan the fire vigorously, as though she were calling the flames to life. Plumes of sweet-smelling smoke rose up.
“The aroma is incredible. What kind of coals is she using?” I asked.
“Coconut shells,” said Karma. “They flavor the meat with the tropics.”
After a few minutes, the cook removed the goat-meat skewers from the grill and laid them atop a leaf she’d just torn from a nearby banana plant. She placed the satays in front of us. I inhaled deeply—they smelled lush and smoky. “Now,” Karma said in the whispery tone he reserved for very important topics, “I want you to really taste this satay. I want you to experience all its different levels of flavor.”
He offered me a skewer. I slid a piece of meat off with my teeth. It gave new meaning to tender. I closed my eyes and could taste smoke, pepper, fresh turmeric, tamarind, and galangal—the last two were flavorings I was just beginning to recognize. The satay was intensely complex, as though it had taken in the essence of an entire spice market. “Don’t use the sauces to dip the meat in,” Karma said, referring to the sambal kecap (a sauce made of sweet Indonesian soy sauce and chiles) and the saus kacang (peanut sauce) on the side. “They will camouflage the true taste.”
As we continued eating, I fell under the cook’s spell, each bite tasting more delicious than the one before. In the distance, a gamelan orchestra was tuning up, its chords rising up over the sound of nearby traffic. Karma smiled. It was the kind of only-in-Jakarta soundtrack that he loved. But it was the satay that really stirred my senses.
For a great Malaysian satay recipe, click here
