Introduction

From Cradle of Flavor, 2006

By James Oseland

One rainy spring day in 1982 I was walking to catch the 30 Stockton bus home when I ran into Tanya Alwi, a classmate at the San Francisco Art Institute, the art college we were both attending. I was 19 years old, a second-year student in the film-studies program. All I really knew about Tanya at that point was that she was about the same age as I was and had the most contagious laugh I’d ever heard. It was big and comforting and seemed to make everyone warm up to her. I wanted to get to know Tanya better, so I asked her to join me for an espresso. As we sat down in a crowded North Beach café, one of those smoky tin-ceilinged places off Columbus Avenue, I asked her where she came from.

“Indonesia,” she answered in an accent that sounded almost British. “More or less.” Over the course of several espressos, Tanya told me about her life and home. She explained that her father, Des, was the descendant of an aristocratic Muslim nutmeg- and pearl-trading family from Banda, part of the Spice Islands, or Moluccas, a remote chain of islands in eastern Indonesia that have lured the world’s spice seekers for centuries. The Alwi bloodline, Tanya said, was evidence of the people who’d come to Banda over the last 500 years—she was part Malay (an ethnic group that migrated to Southeast Asia from Central Asia 10,000 years ago), part Arab, part Indian, part Chinese, part Portuguese, and part Dutch.

As a boy, Tanya went on, Des was taken under the wing of Bung Hatta, the nation’s first vice-president, who’d been exiled to Banda for his political beliefs by the Dutch colonial government that ruled Indonesia for nearly 400 years. Through his affiliation with Bung Hatta and, later, with Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, Des was active in combat against the Dutch, and was regarded as a national hero after the country’s independence was won in 1942. Des (Tanya, I learned, always referred to him by his first name) later became a member of Indonesia’s diplomatic corps and served in Hong Kong (where Tanya was born) and Geneva. “Now we’re back in Jakarta,” Tanya said, finishing another espresso. “All’s well that end’s well. Isn’t that what they say, yes?” Her laughter filled the café.

“It sounds like you’re the princess of the Spice Islands,” I said. Tanya asked me about my background. After hearing about her exotic past mine felt especially boring. I told her that my dad was an office-products salesman. I told her that I grew up in a suburban California tract house watching The Brady Bunch and eating frozen chicken pot pies. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “my life so far has been classic middle-American.”

Tanya studied me with her penetrating eyes. “Have you ever been to Asia?” she asked. I shook my head. Except for a few cross-country road trips in the family’s Dodge station wagon and a three-week journey to Mexico when I was 17, I’d barely seen the rest of the world. “Why don’t you come to Indonesia after the spring semester is over?” Tanya continued. “You can stay at our house in Jakarta over the summer vacation.” I looked at her apprehensively. I’d long been taught to be mistrustful of things that sounded too good to be true. As we were saying goodbye to each other, I made up my mind to forget her offer. But that night at home I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was dying to travel. I whispered the word “Jakarta” a few times as though I could will myself into being there just by saying it. I called Tanya before I went to sleep.

“No, I wasn’t joking. You can come,” she confirmed. “You’ll love it there.”

A few weeks later, thanks to my dad’s sponsorship of a round-trip Singapore Airlines ticket to Jakarta, I was on a flight high above the Malay Archipelago, the vast expanse of Southeast Asian islands (plus the Malay peninsula, connected to Thailand by a thin stretch of land called the Isthmus of Kra) that include Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. As the plane lowered I saw hundreds of small, lush islands, many not more than half a mile in diameter, dotting the Java Sea. Soon we were over Java itself, Indonesia’s most densely populated island and, according to the reading I’d done in the weeks leading up to my departure, home to its most storied old civilizations. I saw red-tile-roofed villages interspersed with coconut palms and neatly laid out rice paddies. In the distance there were three volcanoes rising to perfect cones, like a trio of Mount Fujis. Steam trickled from the mouth of the tallest one into the sky. I held my breath, not wanting the moment to pass.

Tanya and Johnny—who I found out later was one of the Alwi family drivers—were standing in the shade just off the tarmac at the Jakarta airport. I beamed, happy to see a familiar face after the nearly 30-hour journey. “Welcome to the other side of the world, James,” Tanya said as we inched our way through the long line at customs toward the car. Once we got outside the foreignness of everything hit me head on—the sticky heat, the dust, the pervasive sweet aroma of kreteks (Indonesia’s clove-laced cigarettes), and the vivid colors of everything I saw: Day-Glo sarongs, glossy green tropical plants, a blood-red sunset, my first glimpse of the sun from this side of the world. As we drove down bumpy streets in Tanya’s fortress-like Toyota Land Cruiser, I felt like I was dreaming. There were rickshaws and horse and buggies competing for road space with honking trucks. There were old Dutch colonial mansions, their stucco facades covered with pink bougainvillea vines. But most of all, down every street and narrow alley, there were canvas-covered food stalls lining the roadsides. Each of these stalls (Tanya said they were called warung-warung) was a self-contained miniature restaurant, with wooden tables for diners to sit at and makeshift kitchens built around wood-burning stoves. They were like no fast-food joints I knew back home. Hand-painted illustrations hanging outside each stall announced what was being sold. One offered fried noodles, another chicken satay, another fresh coconut water—the Indonesian version of Coca-Cola, I guessed.

We arrived at the Alwi home about an hour later. It was a large, recently built house, the front yard dotted with tall mango trees. Johnny helped unload my bags from the car and we entered the foyer. In sharp contrast to the noisy Jakarta streets outside, the interior was quiet and graceful. Everywhere I looked there was shiny teak and mahogany furniture, each piece arranged to create visual harmony. A cool breeze ruffled a length of turquoise-colored silk curtains. Further inside I saw a screened-off aviary filled with pale-gray mourning doves. Their soft cooing filled the room.

“It’s time to meet the big man himself,” said Tanya, guiding me to the master bedroom just off the living room. She knocked, then opened the door. Des sat at the foot of a large bed reading a section from a stack of newspapers spread around him. He was a truly big man, like an Asian Francis Ford Coppola, in his 50s, with a gray batik shirt, a shock of unruly black hair, and thick eyebrows. I nervously approached him, feeling a bit like the Cowardly Lion approaching the Wizard of Oz. “You must be James,” he said in a basso voice that fit his appearance to a tee. “Tell me, is it your first time in Asia?” I nodded. “Well, I hope you didn’t leave your heart in San Francisco.” He chuckled, proud of his joke, and returned to his paper. At the other end of the room sat Ann, Tanya’s mother, at a dressing table. She was a fine-boned woman also in her 50s, with long black hair pulled into a neat bun. She was sketching on her eyebrows in a thin arch with a makeup pencil. She stopped and turned to me. “My husband and I have a dinner to go to,” she said softly. “But welcome. I hope that you will remember your stay in Indonesia always.” I smiled, grateful for her gentle words.

Tanya led me into the dining room and introduced me to the staff of servants. There was Mat, a lanky young fellow from East Java; Siti, a shy, pretty girl in her early twenties; and Inam, the cook, a woman with a wide, apparently ever-present smile. Inam handed me a tall glass.

“Drink it,” Tanya said. “It’s stroop—a lime-syrup cordial. It’s a traditional welcome beverage.” I took a sip, letting the cool sweet drink trickle down my dry throat. I knew at once I was going to like it here.
—-

About a week after I arrived, my jet lag—not to mention the dislocation I felt from being in such a radically different environment—was finally starting to fade. I slowly began to settle into the rhythm of life in the Alwi home. Everyone, from Inam to Ann, made it as easy a process as possible, offering me anything that would ease my introduction into Indonesian life, from fluffy new pillows to a small Indonesian dictionary that I quickly became addicted to for translating all the unfamiliar words I was hearing. Unfailing hospitality, I was to learn over time, is a way of life for the people of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Anything less is considered taboo.

Every morning at 8:30 I’d go downstairs to the dining room, where Inam would have the day’s first meal laid out on the table. Elaborate and elegant, it was like no breakfast I’d ever encountered. There would be individual china bowls and plates at each place setting of chile fried rice topped with a crisp fried egg, sliced sweet papaya with lime, glasses of sweet orange pekoe tea scented with cinnamon—a Banda favorite—and, at the center of the table, a few coconut milk curries left over from the previous day’s dinner. As Tanya and I ate we would listen to Des recite his agenda for the day. Some days he would be taking lunch with the president of Indonesia, Suharto, others he would be off to a board meeting in Singapore, 90 minutes away by plane. Ann would come down to breakfast a little later than everyone else. Before she ate, she would lean over and inhale the fragrance of the fresh- plucked jasmine—her favorite flower—that Inam set out at her place every morning in a small cloisonné bowl. The aroma was Ann’s first course.

One morning after breakfast Tanya told me about a party that her mother would be hosting the following Saturday. It was to be a selamatan, she said, a traditional feast in honor of a charity group that Ann had founded. “The food is going to be really wonderful,” Tanya explained, drawing out her words for dramatic emphasis. “All of the guests will be providing the dishes. It’s our version of a potluck.”

I waited eagerly for the day of the party to arrive, watching as Inam, Siti, and Mat scrubbed, dusted, fluffed, and polished everything in sight in the week leading up to it. Finally Saturday came. It was hotter than usual, with a bright cloudless sky that made the plants in the backyard droop. From my room upstairs I could hear a gamelan (the lilting traditional music of Java) quartet that had been hired for the afternoon. I walked downstairs into the living room. Smartly dressed guests, most of them women in orange, pink, yellow, and red batik silk and cotton sarongs, were greeting each other and sipping tea and glasses of iced stroop. A few ladies smiled at me as I walked past.

Not seeing anybody that I recognized, I made my way to a large banquet table that had been laid with a silk tablecloth. Inam was doing some last-minute fine-tuning, carefully adjusting platters of food to suit her sense of visual balance. I counted 32 dishes on the table. There were glistening coconut-milk curries, pickled vegetables tinted yellow with turmeric, green vegetable stir-fries, whole grilled fish adorned with fresh lemon basil, and sticky-rice sweets in every color of the rainbow.

“Are you hungry?” someone from behind me asked in heavily accented English. I turned around to see a beautiful Indonesian woman in her 50s wearing an orange batik dress. She placed on the table a platter of grilled chicken whose perfectly charred skin smelled of coriander and smoke.

“I’m not hungry,” I joked. “I’m starving.” I eyed the chicken and asked her about it.

“It’s a recipe from my family’s home on the island of Sulawesi, from the town of Manado,” she said. “Where are you from?” San Francisco, I told her. “I’ve been there, once,” she responded. “It’s very nice. You even have palm trees. Do you speak Indonesian?”

“No, not yet,” I answered, “unless you count ya, yes; tidak, no; and satu, dua, tiga [one, two, three].”

“Don’t worry,” she said, laughing. “That’s better than most. How do you like our food so far?”

“What I’ve had in the last week has been incredible,” I told her. “I had only known about satay before I came here. I had no idea there was so much more.”

She smiled and said, “People usually don’t. We’re the best-kept secret in Asia. There are so few of us living abroad to share our cuisine, and what you get in our fancy hotels here is, well, not so authentic. My name is Ibu Suzan.” She extended her hand. “I am an old friend of Ibu Ann’s. Tell me, do you know any of these foods?” (Ibu means “mother” in Indonesian and Malay, but it is also used as a term of respect for older women.)

“A few,” I answered. “I know that’s some kind of curry.” I pointed toward a bowl full of what looked like a coconut-milk curry with vibrant orange swirls of oil on top. “And I know that’s stir-fried bok choi over there. But I’m not really sure about the rest.”

“Let me take you on a tour,” Ibu Suzan said. “The food on the table is a map of the nearby region, not only Indonesia. The guests who have brought these dishes come from all over Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, but now they all live in Jakarta. Each dish is a specialty of where they come from.”

She pointed to a handsome blue-and-white antique Delft bowl which held fresh tuna braised with tomatoes and whole spices. “This one is called ikan bumbu rujak,” Ibu Suzan said. “It was brought by Tanya’s aunt from Banda, in the Spice Islands of Indonesia. They use cloves and nutmeg in everything there. Here, have some.” She served me a small portion on top of some warm, fluffy rice, then handed me a spoon, the eating utensil of choice when fingers aren’t used. The dish was sublime, gently sweet and savory at the same time, with tantalizing hints of nutmeg and cloves—the local fruits of Banda—in the background.

“Now try these,” Ibu Suzan said, pointing to a group of four dishes that she told me were brought by a woman from Padang, in West Sumatra, Indonesia. “The city of Padang is one of the most famous places in Southeast Asia for food. They love chiles there more than anybody on Earth.”

I was especially drawn to a beef dish with finely shredded fresh lime leaves adorning it. Ibu Suzan told me it was called rendang. I put a piece into my mouth with my spoon. It was meltingly tender, with delicate layers of flavor I could only begin to identify. It reminded me of the Thai dishes I had tasted in San Francisco, but it was even more complex, more bold.

By now other guests were coming over and fixing plates for themselves. Some sat down in chairs, while others remained standing nearby as they ate. “Rendang is Padang’s best-known dish,” Ibu Suzan continued. “Every good cook in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore can make it—even the local Chinese people have their own version, made with pork. We Muslims aren’t allowed to eat pork. We make it with beef instead.”

Next, Ibu Suzan had me try a few dishes from Java. As she explained what each consisted of, I sampled small portions of opor ayam, a subtle chicken curry with coconut milk seasoned with cinnamon sticks and coriander seeds; tempe kering, crisp, thin strips of fried tempe (the nutty-tasting soybean cakes native to Java) with a sweetish, sticky sauce of palm sugar, chiles, and shallots; and a tumpeng, a two-foot-high cone of fragrant yellow coconut rice surrounded by a patchwork of colorful condiments. It was intensely fragrant with lime leaves and lemongrass.

We moved on from the Javanese dishes to some that Ibu Suzan said were from Singapore and Malaysia. “These were brought by Ibu Teresa—that lady over there,” said Ibu Suzan, pointing to a woman who wore a smart lilac suit instead of a sarong. “She’s a Nyonya, or Straits Chinese, from Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. That means her ancestry is part Chinese, part Malay. Nyonya food is a combination of both.”

Though Ibu Teresa’s stew, curry, and salad contained some obviously Chinese ingredients, such as dried plums and salted mustard greens, they tasted unlike any Chinese food I was familiar with—the flavors were more untamed, with a liberal use of spices, coconut milk, and fresh tropical fruit. I caught Ibu Teresa looking at Ibu Suzan and me from across the table. I smiled. “Your food is beautiful,” I said. Ibu Teresa smiled back, pleased.

As I sampled more dishes, including Ibu Suzan’s richly seasoned grilled chicken, I understood her point. This food, all of it, was a culinary map. It represented cuisines that were, I was to learn, deeply connected in spite of the miles separating them. Just then, Tanya, who was wearing a pink and gold sarong that glittered in the light, nudged her way between Ibu Suzan and me. “James,” she said, picking up a spoon. “I see you’ve already discovered the secret to life in Indonesia. Pretty good for just a week.”

“The secret?” I asked.

“That eating is the only thing that really matters here!” she answered with her signature laugh. I moved in for seconds.
—-

Weeks passed and I continued to settle into Jakarta life. My days were hot and lazy, full of ample time in which to take in the details of my new surroundings. When I wasn’t wandering on foot through the winding streets behind the Alwi’s home, I would join Tanya on her social rounds. One morning, she asked if I would accompany her on a visit to a special family friend. “Bebe Huwei is her name,” she said. “She was a famous Indonesian film star when she was younger. Now she’s supposed to be the best psychic in Jakarta. She should do a reading for you. Do you believe in such things?” I shrugged. I wasn’t sure.

Soon we arrived at Bebe Huwei’s home, a grand 19th-century mansion. A servant let our car enter the grounds. Inside the house, we were led into a candlelit room cluttered with dusty antiques. On the walls were five-foot-high oil paintings of, I assumed, a much younger Bebe Huwei. In one, she wore a designer gown, in another, a form-fitting sarong, her hair teased into a ‘60s bouffant. Everywhere there were mementoes of her life as a celebrity—framed newspaper clippings, awards, old black-and-white film stills.

A few minutes later, Bebe Huwei entered the room. She was now in her 60s but lived up to the majesty of the portraits. She was elegantly dressed in a sarong and kebaya (a tight-fitting long traditional blouse), with a fine gold brooch pinned to her white cotton blouse. “Please, come to the dining room,” she said. Tanya and I followed. We took seats at a large table covered with pads of paper and newspaper clippings. I sat there silently as Bebe Huwei and Tanya chatted away for a few moments in Indonesian. A servant brought a plate of Dutch butter cookies and a pot of hot tea.

“Please, take a biscuit,” Bebe Huwei said, offering me one of the cookies. I bit into one. It was as crisp as a cracker and buttery sweet.

“I learned to make these in Amsterdam. I lived there for years,” she said, straightening her hair. “But I could never live in Europe again. They have no belief there.”

With that, she reached for a pen and began to slowly draw small concentric circles on a blank piece of paper. Tanya shot me a look. I suppressed a giggle. The circles soon became a wild, erratic spiral that ran over the edges of the paper onto the newspaper underneath. Finally, Bebe Huwei stopped and stared at me. Her eyes were as black as coal.

“Your life has changed by coming here,” she said. “Everything you knew about the world will never be the same.”

I was silent for a few seconds. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“You came here for three months, but you will stay for a year,” she answered. “Then you will keep coming back for the rest of your life. Look.” She pointed to what she had drawn. “This is you at the outside of the spiral. As the years pass, you will move more closely to the center, which represents the part of the world you’re in now, and you will find what you are looking for. A revolution has begun inside of you. You must accept it.”

Tanya and I went to our next appointment that morning without saying a word.
—-

Bebe Huwei had been right. There was indeed a revolution going on inside of me, only not the kind I had expected. One night a few weeks later, I woke up in a drenching sweat. My head throbbed as if it were being pierced by a drill. I knew at once that something was seriously wrong. The next morning I paid a visit to the Alwi’s family doctor. The diagnosis came quickly, and was not at all what I wanted to hear: I had dengue fever, the doctor said, a viral mosquito-borne disease that, though not usually fatal, would cause a high fever and a severe headache for several weeks. There was no cure or treatment, except for traditional herbal remedies—called jamu in Indonesia—and bed rest. Lots of it.

I recuperated for a few miserable days in a crowded hospital and then in my room at the Alwi home, staring at the constantly whirring ceiling fan that hung directly above me. I sweated and trembled, imagining big, oily mosquitoes dive-bombing my head. Three times a day, Inam would bring me food, usually rice porridge flavored with ginger, which is thought to have restorative powers, and a glass of bitter-tasting jamu followed by sweet lime stroop to clear my palate. In my delirium, I watched the only two English-language videotapes I could find in the house, Chinatown and Logan’s Run, at least 20 times each. When it got to the point that I could recite long stretches of dialogue from Logan’s Run, I knew it was time to get out of bed.

So one day I gathered my strength and ventured downstairs for one of Inam’s lime drinks. I walked into the kitchen—the dapur, in Indonesian—a small half-indoor, half-outdoor room that extended into a backyard garden. In contrast to the elegance of the rest of the house, the kitchen was spare. There was a small four-burner gas range with a few woks and some pots hanging on hooks above it. There were a few open shelves that held staple ingredients like Indonesian sweet soy sauce and spices bundled into small paper bags. Perishable aromatics—shallots, chiles, garlic, and fresh turmeric—were placed inside wire-mesh baskets hanging from the ceiling. (There was no need for other storage space or even a refrigerator, I learned, since shopping was done daily and ingredients were cooked soon after Inam had brought them home.) Interestingly, there was no counter space, as food preparation—peeling, cutting, grinding—was done on cutting boards and in mortars placed directly on the spotlessly clean tile floor.

Which is where I found Inam, gently crushing whole long red chiles in a flat granite mortar. She looked up and smiled. “You’re not sick anymore?” she asked in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. I had started to pick up the basics of it in the past few weeks, enough to carry on simple conversations. I squatted on the floor next to her and gave a hand gesture for so-so. “What are you making?” I asked.

“Bumbu-bumbu,” she said, “flavoring paste”—the foundation of dishes. I asked her what it was for. “Sambal goreng buncis,” she replied. I knew it: a simple green bean dish with coconut milk. It was one of my favorites. “Do you want to watch?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding. It would be much better than another viewing of Logan’s Run. Inam moved from the mortar and pestle to a wooden cutting board, where she began to slice a few small purple shallots and cloves of garlic into thin, lacy pieces. She placed the sliced shallots and garlic into a bowl and then cut into a cylindrical block of hard, brown palm sugar. Though I knew the ingredient was responsible for sweetening many of the dishes I had eaten in Indonesia, I had yet to taste it on its own.

“May I?” I asked. Inam shaved a piece of the sugar off with her knife. It was delicious, a combination of caramel and honey, with a touch of smokiness.

Next, she pressed a small piece of dried shrimp paste, a salty, pungent condiment made from fermented tiny shrimp, onto the tip of a bamboo skewer. I rose from my chair and moved closer. Over a low flame on the stove, she twirled the skewer so that the fire touched all sides of the shrimp paste. Soon a sharp, burning odor permeated the air. I recoiled. Inam burst into laughter.

“The smell is no good, but the taste is delicious,” she said, still laughing.

“Why grill it?” I asked.

“It makes it more halus,” she told me. I grabbed the paperback dictionary that Ann, Tanya’s mother, had given me. Halus meant subtle. I continued to watch, admiring the relaxed, unhurried way Inam went about her cooking. It was as though she were meditating with her eyes open.

“Are you from Jakarta?” I asked. She shook her head from side to side. “Ngak,” she said, the local term for “no.” “I’m from East Java.” She slid the grilled shrimp paste off the bamboo stick into a bowl. “It’s a nice, small, quiet place, very different from Jakarta. My family are rice farmers. You want to go there and visit?”

“I hope so, someday,” I replied. “Is sambal goreng buncis an East Java specialty?”

She nodded, then removed a small iron wok, blackened from years of use, from a hook on the wall. She poured a stream of coconut oil into the wok and allowed it to heat up. In a single motion, she eased the sliced shallots, garlic, chiles, and shrimp paste into the oil. They sizzled around frantically. Their combined aromas wafted into the air in a spicy invisible cloud. I sneezed. Inam smiled.

After a few minutes, she added a few fistfuls of green beans she had cut into diagonal slices, followed by some freshly made coconut milk. In just a few minutes, the dish was ready. Inam handed me a spoon. The dish was mellow and enticing, with a sauce that was both strong and subtle.

For the next few weeks, as often as I felt up to it, I spent my time in the kitchen with Inam. I’d never really taken a great interest in cooking before (except, I’ll admit, for a long-running love of browsing through the international cookbooks at my local library), but watching everything that happened in the Alwi kitchen, from the focus Inam gave to cleaning a whole fish to the way she and Siti would carry on lively conversations as they pounded flavoring pastes, captivated me. It was my entry point not only into Indonesian cuisine, but into the culture that had created it.

The cooking for lunch and dinner would begin every morning at 9, seven days a week, usually after a trip to the nearby vegetable market or visit from the traveling vegetable man, Ali, who signaled his arrival from the street out front with a low-pitched gong. He pushed a worn wooden cart that creaked with every inch. It burst with just-picked vegetables, including cabbages, carrots, and fresh bamboo shoots, along with unfamiliar (to me) produce such as water spinach, which resembled long bunches of thick, just-cut grass. Inam would approach the cart, purse her lips, and assess what looked good. She was part scientist, part mystic. After she had finished gently squeezing and poking, she would make her selections—a pound of tofu, a coconut, a few bunches of long beans, a head or two of garlic, whatever seemed especially vibrant, not just what she needed—and I’d help her carry it all back to the kitchen. Then I would silently watch from my usual seat in the corner as she and Siti and whomever else was around that particular morning began preparing the day’s lunch and dinner. One day Inam would make Indonesian-style fried chicken, the next day, rendang and gado-gado, a Javanese mixed vegetable salad with peanut dressing.

I started jotting down recipes. I didn’t want any of what I was observing to slip away. I wrote down how Inam extracted tamarind pulp, how she carefully coaxed coconut milk from grated coconut flesh and warm water, how she balanced the spices that would go into her curries so they wouldn’t overwhelm each other. It began to dawn on me that cooking a meal didn’t have to be what I’d experienced in my mom’s kitchen: a chore performed on a schedule. What I saw instead in the Alwi family’s kitchen was a soulful, relaxed act more akin to painting. And Inam, for her part, seemed to find my interest amusing. In spite of the fact that men were basically unknown in Indonesian kitchens, she always did her best to make me feel welcome, never shooing me away or discouraging me. “You’re strange,” she said once with a wink, “but it’s good for a man to learn to cook.”
—-

Another prediction that Bebe Huwei, the psychic film star, had made turned out to be true. Though I was supposed to have stayed in Southeast Asia only for the duration of my summer vacation, I remained much longer. Tanya returned to school in San Francisco at the end of August, but I decided to stay on and put my studies on hold; exploring the sights, smells, and tastes of Indonesia seemed like a far more exciting learning experience. The Alwis, endlessly gracious hosts that they were, didn’t seem to mind. I think they were fascinated by the food-obsessed young American in their midst.

After fully recovering from my bout of dengue fever, I came down with a major case of itchy feet. Alone and with no particular route in mind, I started venturing into other parts of Indonesia. First, I crossed Java by train to Bandung, a colonial city tucked away high in green volcanic mountains; it had been founded by Dutch settlers trying to escape the sweltering heat of lowland Jakarta. On my second day in town, a friendly young bus conductor named Radja invited me to join his family for supper. I ended up staying two weeks. Though the family was of modest means, they were as hospitable as the Alwis. In their apartment, I slept on a bed that sagged like a hammock and bathed publicly, in an open-air bath 100 yards away. And I ate very, very well: Radja’s mother was an excellent West Javanese cook. After discovering my interest in eating, she made several local specialties every day: lemongrass-scented coconut rice, mixed vegetable salads with fresh lemon basil and grated coconut, and ginger-infused fish curries. Each dish was more delicious than the one before it.

Inspired by stories Tanya had told me about Central Java, I traveled east from Bandung by a combination of bus, train, and thumb, and went to the Hindu and Buddhist temple ruins found there, including Borobudur, not far from the city of Yogyakarta. Built in the eighth century A.D. by the Sailendra dynasty—one of many ancient Javanese kingdoms—this vast Buddhist monument, rising from rice paddies like a man-made mountain, made Java’s past a thing of the immediate present. But what connected me even more deeply to the place were the local foods I encountered in street stalls, markets, and people’s homes. I ate gudeg, a tender braise of young jackfruit and palm sugar; garlic-marinated deep-fried tempe; and nasi liwet, rice served with an array of spiced side dishes, fresh herbs, and vegetable pickles. I went by rickety bus through East Java and discovered soto, a spiced chicken soup topped with bean sprouts, fresh lime juice, and finely chopped celery greens. I was beginning to be able to discern the regional differences in the foods I ate—Central Javanese dishes, for example, contained immense quantities of palm sugar, while those of East Java got most of their sweetness from combinations of spices such as coriander and cinnamon.

With my dog-eared copy of the only Indonesian guidebook available back in those days (Bill Dalton’s out-of-print Indonesia Handbook) I trekked to the small island of Bali—just a few miles east of East Java—with its ancient Hindu culture and moss-covered temples. The foods in Bali, rich in coconut milk and aromatic with wild herbs, echoed those I had eaten in East Java, a reflection of the fact that Balinese culture was descended from the kingdoms of ancient Java. I journeyed by boat to Banda, Des’s nutmeg paradise, and was as mesmerized by the foods I ate there as I was by the old spice groves I strolled through. Nutmeg and cloves, as Ibu Suzan had told me months before at the selamatan in Tanya’s home, appeared in nearly every Bandanese dish I ate, from the richly spiced chicken and fish curries to the salads, which had tart slivers of fresh nutmeg fruit.

With Karma, Tanya Alwi’s older brother, I traveled by plane to Kalimantan, which covers the southern two-thirds of the vast island of Borneo and is governed by Indonesia (the northern third belongs to Malaysia and the small nation of Brunei). Together we explored Banjarmasin, a hot port city with Dutch-built canals crisscrossing through it—an Amsterdam of the tropics. Alone, I went up the Barito River, deeper into Borneo, and traveled, mostly on foot, into what was during those years still the isolated home of the Dayaks, the indigenous tribal people of Borneo’s rainforests whose culture hadn’t changed much since the Stone Age. I slept in tribal houses without electricity and watched harvest ceremonies at 2 a.m. in which pigs were sacrificed to local gods, then slow-roasted over huge fires. I thought about my life in California and wondered if I could ever go back.

Five times during my travels, my Indonesian visa expired, requiring that I leave the country to renew it. I flew to Singapore each time and checked into the same small hotel for week-long stays in the heart of the city’s Little India neighborhood. I reveled in the sweet smell of the spice shops, the omnipresent air-conditioning, and, most of all, the astonishing local food. If Indonesia had awakened my palate, my journeys into Singapore and peninsular Malaysia—the country of 24 million people just to the north of Singapore—helped refine it. Though many people think of Singapore and Malaysia as separate from Indonesia, they are, in fact, a continuum of the same web of cultures. Until relatively recent times the political borders that distinguish these nations (all of which were imposed by Dutch and British colonialists) didn’t exist. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore share the same languages, ethnic groups, histories of trade and conquest, and culinary traditions—give or take a few ingredients and cooking methods. (The name “Singapore,” or, more precisely, “Singapura,” I learned, is the ancient Sumatran name for this tiny island nation—it was once an outpost of Sumatra’s Srivijaya empire.) In the maze of open-air food stalls across the street from my Little India hotel I tasted fried noodle dishes that were closely linked to those I’d eaten in Indonesia. I snacked on tropical-fruit salads that were called “rujak” in Indonesia, but known as “rojak” in Singapore and Malaysia. I devoured kare kepala ikan, a gingery, chile-hot Singaporean fish-head curry that was a close relative of the gulai ikan (coconut-milk fish curry) I knew from West Sumatra, Indonesia.

A four-week train journey up peninsular Malaysia, from the country’s hot, flat south to its hilly, jungly north, allowed me to start clearly seeing the influences that Chinese, Indian, and Arab traders had made on dishes over the last 2,000 years of traveling to the region for spice trade. I ate foods in Malacca, an ancient spice-trading port on the country’s west coast, that combined Chinese and Indian ingredients with Malay sensibilities, such as popiah, jicama-stuffed Chinese spring rolls drizzled with a typically Malay-style peanut-chile sauce. I also tasted assam laksa, a rice-noodle soup that was Chinese in concept but was made with tamarind, fresh mint, shallots, chiles, and pineapple—favorite Malay ingredients. I ate nasi kemuli, a gorgeous Nyonya rice dish seasoned with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, cumin, fennel, and poppy seeds—it called to mind Indian briyani (spiced rice), but was wholly Malaysian. I watched spellbound as street-food hawkers made Chinese-style stir-fries with local greens.

I ended my travels that year in Penang, an island city built by the British in northern Malaysia. One late afternoon under a neon-pink sunset, as I sipped sweet milky tea in a noisy Chinese coffee shop, I thought for a moment that I had found my home.
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But San Francisco was still technically home, and so I returned, almost a year to the day after I left. I was happy to see my family again, happy to see the green Bay Area hills from my bedroom window. As the months passed, though, I began to long for all the friends I’d made in Southeast Asia and for the delicious foods they’d introduced me to. Hoping to recapture the flavors I’d come to love, I made repeated visits to the handful of Indonesian and Malaysian restaurants I could find in the Bay Area. I was continually disappointed. Where was the sophisticated layering of flavors I had known in true Indonesian beef rendang or the unabashed use of spices that were the hallmarks of Spice Islands cooking? It was time to start cooking some of the recipes I’d written down.

For my first dish, I decided to make opor ayam, the Javanese chicken curry with coconut milk, coriander seeds, cinnamon, galangal, and ginger. I went to Chinatown for the ingredients that I didn’t already have. I bought candlenuts (a relative of macadamia nuts used for thickening), a can of coconut milk (oh, how I yearned to get my hands on some that had been squeezed by hand!), a nub of frozen galangal, and imported dried daun salam leaves (a Javanese herb that lends an earthy undertone to dishes). As I cooked, I closely followed my notes. I took care to grind the flavoring paste to the proper smoothness (“like creamy mashed potatoes,” according to my notes). I butchered the chicken into 16 pieces, the way I had seen it done many times before in Southeast Asia. I wanted this dinner to be a celebration of my travels. I invited Tanya and Mike, a professor of ours, over to sample my efforts. I laid out a piece of yellow silk as a tablecloth. I set the table as carefully as Inam might have.

The dinner wasn’t bad—but it wasn’t wonderful, either. Although I had used all the right ingredients, the opor ayam had none of the depth that I knew it should. Despite my misgivings, Tanya and Mike ate what I’d cooked heartily. “Inam would be proud,” Tanya said as I cleared the table. But I resolved myself to do better.

During the next few weeks, I prepared several other dishes; none satisfied me. I convinced myself that I couldn’t be a good cook without some Indonesian, Malaysian, or Singaporean cook beside me, guiding me through what to do. Then I came up with a new plan: I would make one dish over and over until I got it right. I chose a slightly easier one—the simple green bean curry that I’d watched Inam make, sambal goreng buncis. My first try was acceptable, but the coconut milk curdled slightly because I let it come to too vigorous a boil for too long. (Why couldn’t I remember Inam’s quiet admonitions to prevent this?) My second try was only marginally better—the green beans were undercooked and made the dish taste raw.

By my third try, I was more determined than ever. I didn’t just automatically grab the first green beans I saw in the supermarket. I waited until I found really radiant, fresh beans from the farmers’ market near my home and carefully picked through them, one by one. I made doubly sure that the canned coconut milk I was using was the right thickness and sweetness, tasting it a few times after I opened it before adding it to the curry. And most important, I remained calm as I cooked, tuning out the rest of the world as I had seen many cooks in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore do. I forged a connection with what I was doing. I paid close attention to what was happening with each ingredient at each step of the way. How was the shallot in the flavoring paste reacting to the heat as it sautéed? At what point was the lemongrass beginning to infuse the broth? Had Inam somehow taught me all this? I was sure she had, but I couldn’t remember when.

After simmering for 25 minutes, the dish was ready. Anxiously, I dipped a spoon in the pot. The curry tasted bold and direct, soft and mellow, with just the right balance of pungency and sweetness. I smiled. My second journey had begun.
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In the two decades since, I’ve traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore more than 25 times, learning, exploring, seeing old friends and making new ones, and gathering recipes. I’ve studied the Nyonya dishes of Singapore and Malaysia, the chile-hot foods of West Sumatra, and the sweet ones of Central Java. I’ve trekked through hundreds of the region’s markets, vegetable farms, tempe factories, and rice paddies. I’ve learned its main languages, Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia (actually, they’re almost identical, so I’m bragging when I say I know both). I’ve come to understand how the spices native to each region are used in its dishes—nutmeg, for instance, is sometimes added whole and cracked, not ground, to season stocks and curries. And I’ve become an expert at making these dishes in my own home. Many food lovers have gone to France and Italy and discovered the spectrum of flavor that lies beyond the food they’ve been raised on. I ended up in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore instead. This book is the result.

A comprehensive look at the foods of these countries could fill a ten-volume set. Because I don’t have that many pages, I can only present a collage of some of the dishes, people, and places I’ve grown to love on my visits. There are entire islands and regions, such as Borneo and Nusa Tenggara (the vast expanse of Indonesian islands that includes Lombok, Flores, and Sumbawa), that I’ve not included here. I’ve also purposefully omitted certain difficult-to-make dishes, such as the Indian-style bread roti canai, one of my favorite Malaysian street foods, which requires a tricky sequence of rising and kneading to achieve the right texture. Instead, I’ve focused on classic, easy-to-make home dishes, the heart and soul foods of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The majority of these recipes have come from cooks like Inam or Radja’s mother in Bandung. Each reflects the cook’s personal expertise, her intimate interpretation of a dish. Most are simple to make. In them there is no intricate method for slicing herbs, no razzle-dazzle display involved in stir-frying vegetables. Nearly all dishes go from the cutting board to the table in less than an hour. And, like your favorite aunt, they readily forgive mistakes—I’ve yet to make a dish in this book that didn’t taste good, even if I’ve made a misstep somewhere along the line.

In translating these dishes for our kitchens I made only the smallest of changes. Where Inam slowly grinds the flavoring pastes for her curries with an old stone mortar and pestle, I use a food processor, which can reduce the preparation time of a dish by 20 minutes. Where my favorite roaming satay vendor, Jimi, in Java, uses a fire of coconut shells to grill his satay, I’ve given you the easier option of oven-broiling. Still, I’ve remained true to the origins of each recipe, respecting its essence and integrity. If a recipe I encountered on my travels called for a key ingredient that would be difficult (or impossible) to find in North America—such as fresh belimbing buluh, a pinkie-sized sour fruit used to add an acidic note to curries and soups—rather than trying to find a substitute ingredient that would only approximate the taste, I didn’t include the recipe.

This book is not intended to be the final word. It is simply my way of helping food lovers gain an appreciation of little-known—and supremely delicious—cuisines. But the real reason I wrote it is to honor the hundreds of women and men who shared their recipes, their lives, and, indeed, their souls with me over the years, like Tamalia, the mother-in-law of a friend in Central Java, Indonesia. One hot July afternoon, Tamalia invited me to watch her make lunch and then to feast on it. “Take this recipe,” she said as she drizzled fresh coconut milk into the curry she was making, “and whenever you make it, remember me.” And I do, every time.