A very good friend pointed me in the direction of an Anglo Indian recipe forum on social media, which has proven fascinating, not only because of the food posts, but also the flashes of personality, life style, and socio-cultural environment that glimmer through. I feel like I'm observing a remarkable culture, and it's evident that a number of other readers have similar perceptions.
Anglo Indians are people whose family make-up, history, and origins, sprung from India during the British period. Not necessarily the mixture of English and Indian. Some of them have surnames that point at Portuguese or Dutch ancestors, others are more strictly Indian, and some are English or English plus.
At present time, they live all around the globe.
I myself am not Anglo Indian. Actually of Dutch American ancestry (yes, some Anglo in the woodpile), we moved to Holland when I was an infant, and I came back to the States by myself when I was college age. My culinary data-sets at that point included beer, fried foods, Dutch Indies style cooking and condiments, and a smattering of other things, mostly rather French influenced, some English. No actual "Dutch American food", though I believe apple pie, donuts, and cookies, qualify as such.
No American food; my mother's meatloaf recipe (awful) and spaghetti (good) are in the final count, not really significant, except that I very rarely have meatloaf or spaghetti nowadays. That, plus 'chili beans', and Turkey, were the extent of my North American culinaria.
Pizza, fettuccine, hamburgers, Philly cheese steaks, cioppino, tuna salad.
The unmitigated horror of the chili cheese dog.
With onions and pickles.
Ketchup.
Sorry, not to sound snarky or anything, but if you put bacon, cheddar, and chopped pickled Jalapeños on top, almost anything tastes American.
Add a side of ranch dressing.
THE INDO LARDER
Netherlands Indies taste utilizes a number of things or concepts that aren't, strictly speaking, common in the American kitchen or restaurant. Many Dutch people have Indonesian connections in their family trees and family histories, both Prime Minster Mark Rutte and former Foreign Minister Koenders as examples have such links. But there isn't even a close overlap with family backgrounds and culinary tastes anymore, as many folks without a drop of Indies blood will have Indo Dutch ingredients and foods in their kitchen, while many people of Dutch Indo descent are somewhat unfamiliar with a number of these things entirely; 'yeah man, gotta ask my auntie 'bout all that stuff'.
As a rough set of basics, the larder often contains at least Atjar, Ketjap Manis, Sambal, Serundeng, Trassi or Blatjang, and a bag of shrimp chips (krupuk). Plus the makings of peanut sauce (sate saus, bumbu katjang), necessary curry spices, plus Chinese bottled sauces.
A nice red sambal goes with both fish and fried foods.
You should always have some on hand.
ALL THAT STUFF
ASAM
Sour. Asam djawa is tamarind, used as a cooking ingredient, sometimes mashed and cooked as a dip on the side. Asam gelugur is garcinia atroviridis, added as a souring agent, and often sold as dried slices (asam keping).
ATJAR
Pickles. Not dill chips or cornichons, but somewhat more like the Indian achaar, strong flavoured and meant to keep in a Tropic environment. Salt, vinegar, oil, spices. The most common version is atjar tjampur, mixed chopped vegetables jazzed up with salt, vinegar, oil.
BAWANG GORENG
Fried onion chips, used as a garnish on top of prepared dishes. Some people nowadays use crumbled potato chips instead.
BLATJANG
Fermented anchovies or shrimp, semi-liquid in form, and stinky-savoury. An ingredient in cooked dishes, also used with tomatoes or green mangoes as a table condiment.
DJERUK PURUT
Kaffir lime, most often used for the leaves -- daun djeruk purut -- the released oils of which add both fragrance and mouthfeel to dishes.
It is usually removed before serving.
DJINTAN
Usually Cumin seed (bidji djintan) or powder, although sometimes caraway and fennel are referred to as djintan also. Linguistic usages here are variable.
EBI
Dried shrimp, common to many South East Asian cuisines. You could soak them in garlic paste, lime juice, and hot sauce, then low-fry till crispy again.
GULA; GULA DJAWA, GULA AREN
Palm sugar, produced similarly to maple sugar. Crumbly, sometimes hard. Not essential, but often a beloved ingredient. Long resettled Indos will, in the absence of gula djawa ("Javanese sugar"), make do with golden sugar or coarse Chinese cake sugar (紅糖 and 冰片糖) instead.
HALIA (DJAHE)
Used fresh and dried. Self-explanatory.
KATJANG TANAH
Peanuts. Roasted and salted or spiced, as a snack or strewn on top. Or roasted and ground, cooked with onions, chilies, tamarind or lime, and spices, etcetera. When it has become a sauce, it is poured over barbecued items and salads, or, in the Netherlands, French Fries. The native Dutch versions are not very good.
KELAPA PARUT
Grated coconut. Soaked and squooze, it yields coconut milk for cooking. Carefully pan-toasted, it can be added to many dishes for a textural effect.
KELUWAK
Pangium edule nuts, which after considerable processing are a safe ingredient in black stews, often containing beef, chicken, even pork.
KEMIRI
Candlenuts. Toasted and ground up as a flavour addition, but also because they help keep sauces emulsified.
KETUMBAR
Coriander seed (bidji ketumbar) and leaf (daun ketumbar), frequently used in the same dish. The term is derived from a Dravidian language, and related to 'kotumir' as well as 'kachumber'.
KETJAP ASIN
Salty soy sauce, used in cooking. Especially Javan and Chinese.
KETJAP MANIS
Sweet soy sauce, available in every Dutch supermarket. Likewise used in cooking, but also drizzled over grilled foods, and absolutely one of the top inclusions in your cupboard.
KUNYIT
Turmeric.
LENGKUWAS
Galangal. Dwarf ginger.
LIMAU, LIMAU HIJAU
Lime types. A squeeze of juice is often added to fried or grilled food. Philippine calamansi is known as 'limau kasturi' or in some areas 'kalamunting'. The common Indonesian term for limes and other citrus fruits is 'djeruk'.
PANDAN
Fragrant screwpine. Daun pandan is often used as an extract in sweets, pastries, pudding.
PETIS
Stroppy Javanese fermented krill. But also confusingly used for Thai and Vietnamese fish sauces used condimentally.
SAMBAL
Probably the defining ingredient; chili paste, "plus". Plus onions, oil, and kemiri, fried into sambal badjak. Plus stinky fish paste and perhaps lime juice; sambal trassi. Plus fried onions; sambal bawang goreng. Plus tomato and garlic, cooked but still wet; sambal tomat. Plus a main ingredient and fried and sauced together; sambal goreng, a spicy side, of which there are innumerable kinds.
SANTAN
Coconut milk used for cooking. Often with stock and water added.
SERAI
Lemon grass; a major flavouring ingredient, which is often removed after simmering.
SERUNDENG
Toasted flavoured rasped coconut and peanuts, or almonds or other nuts, or seaweed substituted for one of the ingredients. The most common version is approximately one third peanuts two thirds rasped coconut, with a little palm sugar, ground coriander, and fish paste, dash tamarind water, slowly pan-toasted till brown and dry. Added on top of curry and rice it's wonderful, and the perfect taste of home. Make extra. It keeps.
TEMU KUNTJI
Finger root, Chinese keys. A relative of ginger used a lot in Javanese cooking, but also medicinally, which means that when American hippies finally discover it the price will go up along with all kinds of attestations about a mystic mysterious magic super ingredient.
TJABAI
Chilies. Essential. Among other things, no sambal without these.
TRASSI
Stinky purple brown fish or shrimp paste, pressed into a brick. Great as an ingredient, but if you cook a lot with this, your kitchen may smell like a South East Asian slum. You could just wrap the entire brick in aluminum foil and grill it at low temperature in the oven, then let it cool and coarsely grind it. Trassi bakar.
PLEASE HAVE SOMETHING TO EAT
Now then, a few nice Indonesian Restaurants: Have some peanuts with that!
Plus a selection of Indonesian dishes, and some eateries in Amsterdam: Do you want rice with that?
As for recipes, oh heck, they're all over this blog. Not all of them by any means are Indo, but sambal, fish sauce, and lime juice go with almost anything here. Even boeuf Bourguignonne. And Frites.
That sambal goes well with Chinese food or Chinatown chachanteng dishes, is, naturally, vanzelfsprekend.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Showing posts with label Tamarao & Tempo Dulo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tamarao & Tempo Dulo. Show all posts
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
FEELING PLEASANTLY ANTIQUE
One of the last times I saw my friends Henri and Suzanne before I left Valkenswaard for Berkeley was in neither place.
The centre of Valkenswaard ('Grote Markt') did not have the really ancient trees and the genuine Indonesian Restaurant occupying a dominant location as a few other towns, and had started modernizing, meaning that there were more bars than any other form of business.
It was not nearly as appealing for a long quite lunch as some other places.
We took the train somewhere else. Not far, but it would have been a two or three hour bicycle trip, and it threatened to rain. Besides, the owner of the restaurant we intended to visit was kin, in a way. Henry and Suzanne had not been born in the old country -- their parents had been forced out in the fifties -- but they and the restaurant man spoke the same language. Not standard Malay, which later became Bahasa Indonesia, but something a little wilder, more eastern. Yes, standard Malay also, because many of the transplantees and their families in the Kempen knew that language. But in the sixties and seventies odd linguistic strata were still evident.
[Transplantees: people who had left Indonesia when that country became independent. Many were Dutch legally if not entirely by descent, others did not have much or any Dutch blood at all. Most were too educated and too associated with the old regime to still be much welcome in the islands of their birth; the nationalists had since the Japanese occupation tried to erase as much of the Netherlandish overlay as possible. During the fifties and the sixties the local societal webbing and woofing got a lot worse. The term for such people in Holland nowadays is Indos, but up until the seventies, calling someone an Indo was considered depreciating. Some did not consider themselves 'Indo' in any way at all. Two of my classmates in high school, for instance, spoke barely a word of 'Indonesian' (Malay), but dreamed in the Hakka tongue of the mining settlements in Borneo. They were very white in that regard.]
Henri was back from college for a week, Suzanne would be at Leiden University after summer, and I was going to return to the United States in August. My exile was ending, and I both dreaded and welcomed the prospect of becoming more of what I was.
So it seemed perfectly appropriate to leave Valkenswaard for the day, and have a long lunch in a restaurant where another world was remembered.
At least one table leg elsewhere, so to speak.
Remarkable for a town far in the south, almost isolated from the modern world, Valkenswaard had much that subconsciously reminded one of Indonesia. After the war a number of people had arrived there, and while local society remained somewhat closed, it did welcome them. The cigar factories still used leaf from Djember and Bondowoso, the coffee everyone drank from dawn till midnight tasted still of the lost empire, and a number of the local people had served in the Preanger during the troubles. Poverty had sent local sons all over Europe and the East, many families had an uncle or cousin who used odd locutions, probably every household had something that recalled the Orient.
Valkenswaard even had some musicians that played Indo Rock.
Boisterous, melodic. Reminiscent of krontjong.
Other villages in the Kempen were similar. Cigar factories. Veterans. Mercantile people. And transplantees.
The "elsewhere" we visited that day had once had a cigar factory too, and a graduate of the Technische Hogeschool Bandoeng (Institut Teknologi Bandung - Technical University of Bandung) had opened a restaurant serving Dutch-Indonesian food there. He was a classmate of Henri and Suzanne's uncle, both men had worked with thousands of others on a railway in Sumatra.
After the war, they returned to their city looking out over the water north of 'returning plank', and discovered that it had changed. More Muslims, more Malays, more Madurese; along with destroyed oil installations and bridges. As engineers, they were perfectly suited to help rebuild it. But the world was a much different place by then.
When Henri's father finally came back from Semarang, all of them decided to leave.
Things were no longer the same.
['Returning Plank': Balik Papan. Semarang: where a P.O.W. camp had been.]
That afternoon there were eight of us at the restaurant named after a famous shopping street in Bandung.
Henri, Suzanne, and myself. The owner, his wife, a waiter, and two people in the kitchen in addition to the wife. She spoke to them in Cantonese, to her husband in Indonesian, and to us in Dutch.
Four people who had lived through the war. Three who had only heard about it secondhand. Two that had been in camps.
But, given that particular time and place, and that all of us had roots elsewhere, the war still seemed a significant factor, more than thirty years after it ended.
Our speech, naturally, was "mixed".
As was the food.
A lovely white-cooked chicken dish -- not the Chinese chicken with ginger shreds and green onion, but a pale and slightly sweet compound of breasts and livers in coconut milk -- a dark almost black beefy offering, and a golden bamboo shoot and dried fish gulai, which was actually a version of ebere without the pork.
Plus crunchy vegetables to dip in hot sauce, and a clear soup with tamarind and lemon grass.
Coffee and tobacco afterwards.
Douwe Egberts coffee with condensed milk. Pungent bolknak cigars from Hofnar.
Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (or were they Caballero?), and pipe-tobacco from a black and white tin.
"How are your parents?"
[Ei, Apak Amao mo, ma-ano dema? Sarwa bate sametek?]
"Oh, they're fine. They send their regards."
[O, dema bate bate sahadja, mag-ngirim salam pa' kuwang, ya.]
"How's your uncle's gout?"
[Bagemano sakit-yikit nya pamongmo?]
Odd, that after much rich food, gout should come up.
Somehow it just didn't seem right. Natural, yes, but not right.
I also remember wondering at the expression 'sakit-yikit'. It struck me that it was a term I had never heard before, ere I understood that it was merely a borrowing from Dutch.
Jicht (ph: 'yikht').
[This was years before I got to feel gout firsthand; like the war, it was something I only knew from hearing.]
Gout is probably a lot more common in Indonesian circles now than it was several decades ago, as eating habits have changed. What were once foods limited to festivals are now so widely available that middle-class children may at times resemble beach balls, much like in Holland and America at present. And pudginess is considered a virtue.
But before prosperity made us fat, our diets were much healthier.
In Indonesia, the women of Sunda and North-East Borneo were always considered beautiful, with clear glowing skin and bright expressive faces, because they ate so many vegetables.
Crisp greens dipped in fresh chilipaste, vegetable curries coloured with turmeric, ginger and green herbs in soups and stews.
Not very much meat.
Fresh fish.
In the Netherlands at that time, the repatriated veterans and colonial administrators wanted the rich coconut curries, fried dishes, and roasted meats they remembered from their insular East Indies environment, the exiled Indos longed for the water spinach (蕹菜 eng tsae, kangkong), longbeans (豆角 tau kok, 菜豆 tsae tau, atawa katjang manjang), amaranthus leaf (莧菜 hin tsae, daon bayem), fresh chilies (辣椒 loat tseo, tjabe hijo), and basil (九層塔 kau tsang tak, daon tulasi) of home.
Over all this, the fragrances of chilipaste (sambal), dried fish (ika karing, daeng) and shrimp-dew (patis), lime juice (tjeap limo), tamarind (asem djawa, atawa buwa tjaramanggi, tan wae kampal), coconut (kalapa, niyog; but more often the milk - santen - and the raspings - katjurokan kalapa).
Lemongrass (sere), ginger (djae, haleya), galangal (umbe langkuwas, langkwang), cilantro (ijo katumbar), Chinese keyes (kantjor, tamo kuntji, atawa umbe wangi).
Most Indonesian restaurants in North Brabant were actually Chinese, with a menu that offered food that neither the staff nor the kitchen really even understood. A few represented Javanese tastes -- often run by little old aunties and uncles from somewhere near Bogor or Surabaya -- and one or two catered to the ex Ambon military.
All of them had sate, and semur, gule and kare, lumpia, saoto, gado gado, besengek, ayam taliwang, and babi panggang, babi taotjo, babi ketjap, babi tomat.
That's skewers of small grilled meat chunks with peanut sauce, soy and onion braised meat, yellow soup curry and hot brown dry curry, small eggrolls, soup with meat and potato or rice-stick noodle, blanched vegetables with peanut sauce, spicy Javanese chicken stew, fiery Menadonese chicken, roast pork, beanpaste pork, soy pork, and pork with tomatoes and chili.
Pork is not really an Indonesian favourite, at least not in Java and Sumatra, where most of the people live and almost everyone is Muslim.
But Hindus, Christians, Chinese, and Tribals all love it.
As do restaurant owners and Dutch people.
For the best truly authentic food, you went to Den Haag or Amsterdam.
Or places run by retired exiles: the uncles and the aunties.
There were few such in the hinterlands.
But you probably cooked at home, even if all you wanted was bami goreng and gule ayam, or simply ketoprak, rendang, and a bit of rice.
My tastes have expanded since I left Valkenswaard, but I still cook at home. Especially if I want to remember. Things like Suzanne's ready wit, or Henri's smile -- her faint hint of girlish perfume (Joy, by Jean Patou), his subtle odour of cigars -- and above all the light of Northern Europe, strong coffee and amber tea, old camphor wood cabinets, as well as the whisper of sandalwood (keeps away bugs), and diluted lime juice or green tea used to soften the hair of the ladies in Indo households.
These elements are all revived when I have Indonesian dishes.
Which I cook myself. Because no one else does these.
[How do I know what perfume Suzanne wore? Simple. I asked. It was available at a store on the Grote Berg in Eindhoven, as well as a place on the Rechte Straat near the 18 September Plein.
I bought her some for her birthday that last year. Of course I remember.]
MANOK MAPUOG
Coconut milk white chicken
One chicken cut into 6 or 8 pieces.
One onion, minced.
Six kemiri (candlenuts), lightly toasted.
Six cloves garlic, slivered.
A slice or two ginger.
One TBS. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each: ground cumin, white pepper.
Small piece of cinnamon.
Two stalks lemon grass; bruised, folded, tied.
Whole green chilies.
Three cups coconut milk.
Three cups clear stock.
Pinches of salt and sugar.
Fry onion limp-translucent, add the garlic, ginger, and powdered spices. Gild very lightly. Now add everything except the chicken and whole chilies and simmer for an hour.
After this add the chicken and cook on low heat for about forty five minutes, then add the whole chilies and leave on the flame fifteen minutes more.
Remove the chicken to a dish, take out the whole chilies and piece of cinnamon, and reduce the liquid to a velvety consistency. Pour it over the chicken, and garnish with a few fresh basil leaves.
GULE KAMBING
Curry lamb
One and a half pounds lamb, cut into chunks.
One onion, chopped.
Thumb-length ginger, minced.
Two or three cloves garlic, ditto.
Half TBS. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each: paprika, turmeric, dry ginger.
Quarter Tsp. each: cayenne, ground pepper, mace.
A stalk of lemon grass.
A stick of cinnamon.
A bay leaf.
Three cups coconut milk.
One and a half cups water.
Quarter cup broken cashews.
Squeeze of lime juice.
Jigger of Louisiana hot sauce.
Grind powdered spices with the cashews to a paste, add the onion, garlic, and ginger, and mix - mash - grind till smooth.
Fry the spice paste till the oil separates, add the meat and stir to coat. Braise a bit, and keep stirring, to prevent burning at the bottom of the pan. Loosen the crusty bits as needed.
Add the remaining flavourings and about a third of the liquids (except the lime juice and hot sauce), cook into the oil comes out, then add the rest. Simmer for about half an hour to forty five minutes.
Stir occasionally to prevent scorching.
Squeeze the lime and jigger the hot sauce over before serving.
MANOK KUNIT
Yellow curry chicken
Half a chicken, in four pieces.
One onion, minced.
One or two cloves garlic, minced.
A little ginger, ditto.
Three kemiri (candlenuts); lightly toasted, ground smooth.
One TBS. sambal ulek.
One Tsp. tamarind paste.
One Tsp. each: ground coriander, turmeric, dry ginger.
Half Tsp. each: sugar, shrimp paste.
Generous pinch ground cumin.
A stalk of lemon grass.
One cup coconut milk.
Dash of amber fish sauce.
Gild the onion, garlic, and ginger. Add the kemiri, sambal, shrimp paste, and spices, stirfry till fragrant. Then add the chicken, lemon grass, and coconut milk. Cook till the chicken is tender and the oil starts coming out, about forty minutes. Add the sugar and fish sauce, and cook a few minutes more.
EBERE
Meat and bamboo shoots in rich sauce
Pound and a half of chunked goat.
Cup and a half of julienned bamboo shoots.
One carrot, also julienned.
A small onion, minced.
Some minced garlic and chili.
One or two TBS. sambal ulek.
One Tsp. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each turmeric, dry ginger, ground cumin.
Cup and a half coconut milk.
Cup of stock or water.
Dash soy sauce.
Squeeze of lime juice.
Frazzle the onion garlic and ginger with a little of the coconut milk until the oil comes out and the mixture gilds. Add the powdered spices, sambal, and goat, plus a splash more coconut milk. When the oil comes out again, add the remaining coconut milk and the water. Simmer for an hour. Then add the bamboo shoot, carrot, soy sauce, and the squeeze of lime juice, cook half an hour more.
BABUI MAKETJAP
Soy-sauce pork
One pound pork loin, chunked.
One or two stalks scallion, cut into small lengths.
A thumb-length ginger, coarse slivered.
One Tsp. sambal ulek
One or two star anise.
Quarter cup soy sauce.
Two TBS. sugar.
Half cup water.
Jigger sherry.
Salt and pepper the pork lightly. Stirfry the scallion and ginger in oil till fragrant, add the meat and sauté to colour. Add everything else and simmer for half and hour or so. The sauce should be velvety, but not treacly.
PATJOKAN LIMO
Lemon pickle-relish
One cup white vinegar.
Half cup water.
Quarter cup sugar.
Two TBS. salt.
Half Tsp. turmeric.
Pinch paprika (for colour).
Three large lemons.
Three small green chilies.
Blanch lemons and chilies. Remove seeds, and chop.
Mix everything in a large jar.
Age a week, shake regularly.
Use a little for a startling condimental addition.
RUDJAK
Sour and hot dressed salad.
Two TBS. each: lime juice, tamarind liquid, amber fish sauce, smooth peanut butter.
One TBS. each: brown sugar, Louisiana hot sauce, sambal ulek.
Hot water as needed for diluting, and a few drops of oil for smoothness.
Whisk together till smooth.
Serve as a dip, or use as dressing, for raw and blanched vegetables and sour fruits, with shrimp chips, fried tofu squares (tauhu pong), and slices of hard-boiled egg.
SARUNDENG BAWANG
Crispy coconut and onion garnish
One cup grated coconut.
One finely slivered shallot.
Two TBS. lime juice
One TBS. amber fish sauce.
One Tsp. sugar.
A few drops Louisiana hotsauce.
Pinches ground coriander and turmeric.
Mix it all together well. Let stand an hour or two. Spread thinly on an oiled baking tray, and toast it for two hours at slightly below 300 degrees Fahrenheit. If necessary, decant it to a skillet and toast it golden brown afterwards by hand. Keeps for a few weeks.
Use it to add textural excitement on top of curries.
[A version of serundeng with cashews is here: sarundeng kadjo. It can also be made with rehydrated laver (seaweed), at which point you have something that you will eat huge handfuls of in front of the teevee late at night.]
Note that lemon grass can be found in many Asian markets, sambal ulek is plain red chili paste as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods in Irwindale -- as well as other companies, and you can also substitute similar products -- and good amber fish sauce comes from Thailand or Vietnam. Avoid the Filipino versions; they're chemically unstable.
Kemiri nuts (Aleurites moluccana) are often used in Indonesian cuisine. They add a saveur of their own, and help unify emulsive sauces. But you can substitute many other nuts for a similar effect, entirely excepting kluwak (Pangium edule ), which has its own unique function within the Indies kitchen.
Customarily, freshly chopped cucumbers, a clear soup, simple and cooked sambals, and rice are part of the meal. Cucumbers lessen the effect of hot weather as well as gastric distress from too much sambal. Often some blanched or quick stir-fried vegetables will also be served.
Amounts of sambal ulek are suggestions.
Feel free to increase.
AFTER WORD
I remember that afternoon fondly. Suzanne was more sparkling than ever, and her brother Henri seemed pleased and proud that his sister was such a nice young lady. Over the next several hours he had three cigars, I smoked my pipe constantly, and Suzanne manfully put up with our smelly habit.
The uncle and his wife happily listened in on the juveniles, sometimes adding a comment. Perhaps it somehow reminded them of somewhere else, a different time and place. Youth, cleverly mixed languages, witty conversation, and spicy food.
Was it perhaps an echo of a city far away, and the people who had once lived there?
Outside it was raining. Not the hard downpours of winter, but a steady drubbing amid the green green leaves of the tall trees surrounding the square, muffling the sounds of traffic and whatever else.
Lights were on; you need lamps in Holland when it rains to drive away the gloom. And brightness adds cheer.
Later, when the rain lessened, we walked back to the station.
Henri and I let Suzanne use the only umbrella, resisting her demands that we all stay under it. The wetness was minor, and real men do not mind a little moisture.
Despite the long exposure to tobacco smoke, I could still notice the faintest hint of her perfume. How delightful, how feminine.
I wonder what would have happened if I had gone back in the eighties.
At that time it did not seem like such a good idea, and since then I have gotten acclimatized so thoroughly that leaving the Bay Area never even crosses my mind.
But I rather miss the weather, as well as the smells.
And above all, some of the people I knew.
Their fragrance remains strong.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
The centre of Valkenswaard ('Grote Markt') did not have the really ancient trees and the genuine Indonesian Restaurant occupying a dominant location as a few other towns, and had started modernizing, meaning that there were more bars than any other form of business.
It was not nearly as appealing for a long quite lunch as some other places.
We took the train somewhere else. Not far, but it would have been a two or three hour bicycle trip, and it threatened to rain. Besides, the owner of the restaurant we intended to visit was kin, in a way. Henry and Suzanne had not been born in the old country -- their parents had been forced out in the fifties -- but they and the restaurant man spoke the same language. Not standard Malay, which later became Bahasa Indonesia, but something a little wilder, more eastern. Yes, standard Malay also, because many of the transplantees and their families in the Kempen knew that language. But in the sixties and seventies odd linguistic strata were still evident.
[Transplantees: people who had left Indonesia when that country became independent. Many were Dutch legally if not entirely by descent, others did not have much or any Dutch blood at all. Most were too educated and too associated with the old regime to still be much welcome in the islands of their birth; the nationalists had since the Japanese occupation tried to erase as much of the Netherlandish overlay as possible. During the fifties and the sixties the local societal webbing and woofing got a lot worse. The term for such people in Holland nowadays is Indos, but up until the seventies, calling someone an Indo was considered depreciating. Some did not consider themselves 'Indo' in any way at all. Two of my classmates in high school, for instance, spoke barely a word of 'Indonesian' (Malay), but dreamed in the Hakka tongue of the mining settlements in Borneo. They were very white in that regard.]
Henri was back from college for a week, Suzanne would be at Leiden University after summer, and I was going to return to the United States in August. My exile was ending, and I both dreaded and welcomed the prospect of becoming more of what I was.
So it seemed perfectly appropriate to leave Valkenswaard for the day, and have a long lunch in a restaurant where another world was remembered.
At least one table leg elsewhere, so to speak.
Remarkable for a town far in the south, almost isolated from the modern world, Valkenswaard had much that subconsciously reminded one of Indonesia. After the war a number of people had arrived there, and while local society remained somewhat closed, it did welcome them. The cigar factories still used leaf from Djember and Bondowoso, the coffee everyone drank from dawn till midnight tasted still of the lost empire, and a number of the local people had served in the Preanger during the troubles. Poverty had sent local sons all over Europe and the East, many families had an uncle or cousin who used odd locutions, probably every household had something that recalled the Orient.
Valkenswaard even had some musicians that played Indo Rock.
Boisterous, melodic. Reminiscent of krontjong.
Other villages in the Kempen were similar. Cigar factories. Veterans. Mercantile people. And transplantees.
The "elsewhere" we visited that day had once had a cigar factory too, and a graduate of the Technische Hogeschool Bandoeng (Institut Teknologi Bandung - Technical University of Bandung) had opened a restaurant serving Dutch-Indonesian food there. He was a classmate of Henri and Suzanne's uncle, both men had worked with thousands of others on a railway in Sumatra.
After the war, they returned to their city looking out over the water north of 'returning plank', and discovered that it had changed. More Muslims, more Malays, more Madurese; along with destroyed oil installations and bridges. As engineers, they were perfectly suited to help rebuild it. But the world was a much different place by then.
When Henri's father finally came back from Semarang, all of them decided to leave.
Things were no longer the same.
['Returning Plank': Balik Papan. Semarang: where a P.O.W. camp had been.]
That afternoon there were eight of us at the restaurant named after a famous shopping street in Bandung.
Henri, Suzanne, and myself. The owner, his wife, a waiter, and two people in the kitchen in addition to the wife. She spoke to them in Cantonese, to her husband in Indonesian, and to us in Dutch.
Four people who had lived through the war. Three who had only heard about it secondhand. Two that had been in camps.
But, given that particular time and place, and that all of us had roots elsewhere, the war still seemed a significant factor, more than thirty years after it ended.
Our speech, naturally, was "mixed".
As was the food.
A lovely white-cooked chicken dish -- not the Chinese chicken with ginger shreds and green onion, but a pale and slightly sweet compound of breasts and livers in coconut milk -- a dark almost black beefy offering, and a golden bamboo shoot and dried fish gulai, which was actually a version of ebere without the pork.
Plus crunchy vegetables to dip in hot sauce, and a clear soup with tamarind and lemon grass.
Coffee and tobacco afterwards.
Douwe Egberts coffee with condensed milk. Pungent bolknak cigars from Hofnar.
Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (or were they Caballero?), and pipe-tobacco from a black and white tin.
"How are your parents?"
[Ei, Apak Amao mo, ma-ano dema? Sarwa bate sametek?]
"Oh, they're fine. They send their regards."
[O, dema bate bate sahadja, mag-ngirim salam pa' kuwang, ya.]
"How's your uncle's gout?"
[Bagemano sakit-yikit nya pamongmo?]
Odd, that after much rich food, gout should come up.
Somehow it just didn't seem right. Natural, yes, but not right.
I also remember wondering at the expression 'sakit-yikit'. It struck me that it was a term I had never heard before, ere I understood that it was merely a borrowing from Dutch.
Jicht (ph: 'yikht').
[This was years before I got to feel gout firsthand; like the war, it was something I only knew from hearing.]
Gout is probably a lot more common in Indonesian circles now than it was several decades ago, as eating habits have changed. What were once foods limited to festivals are now so widely available that middle-class children may at times resemble beach balls, much like in Holland and America at present. And pudginess is considered a virtue.
But before prosperity made us fat, our diets were much healthier.
In Indonesia, the women of Sunda and North-East Borneo were always considered beautiful, with clear glowing skin and bright expressive faces, because they ate so many vegetables.
Crisp greens dipped in fresh chilipaste, vegetable curries coloured with turmeric, ginger and green herbs in soups and stews.
Not very much meat.
Fresh fish.
In the Netherlands at that time, the repatriated veterans and colonial administrators wanted the rich coconut curries, fried dishes, and roasted meats they remembered from their insular East Indies environment, the exiled Indos longed for the water spinach (蕹菜 eng tsae, kangkong), longbeans (豆角 tau kok, 菜豆 tsae tau, atawa katjang manjang), amaranthus leaf (莧菜 hin tsae, daon bayem), fresh chilies (辣椒 loat tseo, tjabe hijo), and basil (九層塔 kau tsang tak, daon tulasi) of home.
Over all this, the fragrances of chilipaste (sambal), dried fish (ika karing, daeng) and shrimp-dew (patis), lime juice (tjeap limo), tamarind (asem djawa, atawa buwa tjaramanggi, tan wae kampal), coconut (kalapa, niyog; but more often the milk - santen - and the raspings - katjurokan kalapa).
Lemongrass (sere), ginger (djae, haleya), galangal (umbe langkuwas, langkwang), cilantro (ijo katumbar), Chinese keyes (kantjor, tamo kuntji, atawa umbe wangi).
Most Indonesian restaurants in North Brabant were actually Chinese, with a menu that offered food that neither the staff nor the kitchen really even understood. A few represented Javanese tastes -- often run by little old aunties and uncles from somewhere near Bogor or Surabaya -- and one or two catered to the ex Ambon military.
All of them had sate, and semur, gule and kare, lumpia, saoto, gado gado, besengek, ayam taliwang, and babi panggang, babi taotjo, babi ketjap, babi tomat.
That's skewers of small grilled meat chunks with peanut sauce, soy and onion braised meat, yellow soup curry and hot brown dry curry, small eggrolls, soup with meat and potato or rice-stick noodle, blanched vegetables with peanut sauce, spicy Javanese chicken stew, fiery Menadonese chicken, roast pork, beanpaste pork, soy pork, and pork with tomatoes and chili.
Pork is not really an Indonesian favourite, at least not in Java and Sumatra, where most of the people live and almost everyone is Muslim.
But Hindus, Christians, Chinese, and Tribals all love it.
As do restaurant owners and Dutch people.
For the best truly authentic food, you went to Den Haag or Amsterdam.
Or places run by retired exiles: the uncles and the aunties.
There were few such in the hinterlands.
But you probably cooked at home, even if all you wanted was bami goreng and gule ayam, or simply ketoprak, rendang, and a bit of rice.
My tastes have expanded since I left Valkenswaard, but I still cook at home. Especially if I want to remember. Things like Suzanne's ready wit, or Henri's smile -- her faint hint of girlish perfume (Joy, by Jean Patou), his subtle odour of cigars -- and above all the light of Northern Europe, strong coffee and amber tea, old camphor wood cabinets, as well as the whisper of sandalwood (keeps away bugs), and diluted lime juice or green tea used to soften the hair of the ladies in Indo households.
These elements are all revived when I have Indonesian dishes.
Which I cook myself. Because no one else does these.
[How do I know what perfume Suzanne wore? Simple. I asked. It was available at a store on the Grote Berg in Eindhoven, as well as a place on the Rechte Straat near the 18 September Plein.
I bought her some for her birthday that last year. Of course I remember.]
MANOK MAPUOG
Coconut milk white chicken
One chicken cut into 6 or 8 pieces.
One onion, minced.
Six kemiri (candlenuts), lightly toasted.
Six cloves garlic, slivered.
A slice or two ginger.
One TBS. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each: ground cumin, white pepper.
Small piece of cinnamon.
Two stalks lemon grass; bruised, folded, tied.
Whole green chilies.
Three cups coconut milk.
Three cups clear stock.
Pinches of salt and sugar.
Fry onion limp-translucent, add the garlic, ginger, and powdered spices. Gild very lightly. Now add everything except the chicken and whole chilies and simmer for an hour.
After this add the chicken and cook on low heat for about forty five minutes, then add the whole chilies and leave on the flame fifteen minutes more.
Remove the chicken to a dish, take out the whole chilies and piece of cinnamon, and reduce the liquid to a velvety consistency. Pour it over the chicken, and garnish with a few fresh basil leaves.
GULE KAMBING
Curry lamb
One and a half pounds lamb, cut into chunks.
One onion, chopped.
Thumb-length ginger, minced.
Two or three cloves garlic, ditto.
Half TBS. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each: paprika, turmeric, dry ginger.
Quarter Tsp. each: cayenne, ground pepper, mace.
A stalk of lemon grass.
A stick of cinnamon.
A bay leaf.
Three cups coconut milk.
One and a half cups water.
Quarter cup broken cashews.
Squeeze of lime juice.
Jigger of Louisiana hot sauce.
Grind powdered spices with the cashews to a paste, add the onion, garlic, and ginger, and mix - mash - grind till smooth.
Fry the spice paste till the oil separates, add the meat and stir to coat. Braise a bit, and keep stirring, to prevent burning at the bottom of the pan. Loosen the crusty bits as needed.
Add the remaining flavourings and about a third of the liquids (except the lime juice and hot sauce), cook into the oil comes out, then add the rest. Simmer for about half an hour to forty five minutes.
Stir occasionally to prevent scorching.
Squeeze the lime and jigger the hot sauce over before serving.
MANOK KUNIT
Yellow curry chicken
Half a chicken, in four pieces.
One onion, minced.
One or two cloves garlic, minced.
A little ginger, ditto.
Three kemiri (candlenuts); lightly toasted, ground smooth.
One TBS. sambal ulek.
One Tsp. tamarind paste.
One Tsp. each: ground coriander, turmeric, dry ginger.
Half Tsp. each: sugar, shrimp paste.
Generous pinch ground cumin.
A stalk of lemon grass.
One cup coconut milk.
Dash of amber fish sauce.
Gild the onion, garlic, and ginger. Add the kemiri, sambal, shrimp paste, and spices, stirfry till fragrant. Then add the chicken, lemon grass, and coconut milk. Cook till the chicken is tender and the oil starts coming out, about forty minutes. Add the sugar and fish sauce, and cook a few minutes more.
EBERE
Meat and bamboo shoots in rich sauce
Pound and a half of chunked goat.
Cup and a half of julienned bamboo shoots.
One carrot, also julienned.
A small onion, minced.
Some minced garlic and chili.
One or two TBS. sambal ulek.
One Tsp. ground coriander.
Half Tsp. each turmeric, dry ginger, ground cumin.
Cup and a half coconut milk.
Cup of stock or water.
Dash soy sauce.
Squeeze of lime juice.
Frazzle the onion garlic and ginger with a little of the coconut milk until the oil comes out and the mixture gilds. Add the powdered spices, sambal, and goat, plus a splash more coconut milk. When the oil comes out again, add the remaining coconut milk and the water. Simmer for an hour. Then add the bamboo shoot, carrot, soy sauce, and the squeeze of lime juice, cook half an hour more.
BABUI MAKETJAP
Soy-sauce pork
One pound pork loin, chunked.
One or two stalks scallion, cut into small lengths.
A thumb-length ginger, coarse slivered.
One Tsp. sambal ulek
One or two star anise.
Quarter cup soy sauce.
Two TBS. sugar.
Half cup water.
Jigger sherry.
Salt and pepper the pork lightly. Stirfry the scallion and ginger in oil till fragrant, add the meat and sauté to colour. Add everything else and simmer for half and hour or so. The sauce should be velvety, but not treacly.
PATJOKAN LIMO
Lemon pickle-relish
One cup white vinegar.
Half cup water.
Quarter cup sugar.
Two TBS. salt.
Half Tsp. turmeric.
Pinch paprika (for colour).
Three large lemons.
Three small green chilies.
Blanch lemons and chilies. Remove seeds, and chop.
Mix everything in a large jar.
Age a week, shake regularly.
Use a little for a startling condimental addition.
RUDJAK
Sour and hot dressed salad.
Two TBS. each: lime juice, tamarind liquid, amber fish sauce, smooth peanut butter.
One TBS. each: brown sugar, Louisiana hot sauce, sambal ulek.
Hot water as needed for diluting, and a few drops of oil for smoothness.
Whisk together till smooth.
Serve as a dip, or use as dressing, for raw and blanched vegetables and sour fruits, with shrimp chips, fried tofu squares (tauhu pong), and slices of hard-boiled egg.
SARUNDENG BAWANG
Crispy coconut and onion garnish
One cup grated coconut.
One finely slivered shallot.
Two TBS. lime juice
One TBS. amber fish sauce.
One Tsp. sugar.
A few drops Louisiana hotsauce.
Pinches ground coriander and turmeric.
Mix it all together well. Let stand an hour or two. Spread thinly on an oiled baking tray, and toast it for two hours at slightly below 300 degrees Fahrenheit. If necessary, decant it to a skillet and toast it golden brown afterwards by hand. Keeps for a few weeks.
Use it to add textural excitement on top of curries.
[A version of serundeng with cashews is here: sarundeng kadjo. It can also be made with rehydrated laver (seaweed), at which point you have something that you will eat huge handfuls of in front of the teevee late at night.]
Note that lemon grass can be found in many Asian markets, sambal ulek is plain red chili paste as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods in Irwindale -- as well as other companies, and you can also substitute similar products -- and good amber fish sauce comes from Thailand or Vietnam. Avoid the Filipino versions; they're chemically unstable.
Kemiri nuts (Aleurites moluccana) are often used in Indonesian cuisine. They add a saveur of their own, and help unify emulsive sauces. But you can substitute many other nuts for a similar effect, entirely excepting kluwak (Pangium edule ), which has its own unique function within the Indies kitchen.
Customarily, freshly chopped cucumbers, a clear soup, simple and cooked sambals, and rice are part of the meal. Cucumbers lessen the effect of hot weather as well as gastric distress from too much sambal. Often some blanched or quick stir-fried vegetables will also be served.
Amounts of sambal ulek are suggestions.
Feel free to increase.
AFTER WORD
I remember that afternoon fondly. Suzanne was more sparkling than ever, and her brother Henri seemed pleased and proud that his sister was such a nice young lady. Over the next several hours he had three cigars, I smoked my pipe constantly, and Suzanne manfully put up with our smelly habit.
The uncle and his wife happily listened in on the juveniles, sometimes adding a comment. Perhaps it somehow reminded them of somewhere else, a different time and place. Youth, cleverly mixed languages, witty conversation, and spicy food.
Was it perhaps an echo of a city far away, and the people who had once lived there?
Outside it was raining. Not the hard downpours of winter, but a steady drubbing amid the green green leaves of the tall trees surrounding the square, muffling the sounds of traffic and whatever else.
Lights were on; you need lamps in Holland when it rains to drive away the gloom. And brightness adds cheer.
Later, when the rain lessened, we walked back to the station.
Henri and I let Suzanne use the only umbrella, resisting her demands that we all stay under it. The wetness was minor, and real men do not mind a little moisture.
Despite the long exposure to tobacco smoke, I could still notice the faintest hint of her perfume. How delightful, how feminine.
I wonder what would have happened if I had gone back in the eighties.
At that time it did not seem like such a good idea, and since then I have gotten acclimatized so thoroughly that leaving the Bay Area never even crosses my mind.
But I rather miss the weather, as well as the smells.
And above all, some of the people I knew.
Their fragrance remains strong.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Thursday, March 28, 2013
TAMARIND CHUTNEY
Some relishes and spicy pickle preparations are universally useful.
A simple tamarind chutney also falls into this category. No, it cannot be employed for Papal blessings or rubbed on arthritic joints with any hope of successfully solving the problem. But it is rather good, it keeps well, and adds a bit of sparkle to any meal.
It is sour, mildly spicy, slightly sweet.
PATJERI ASEM, PATJERI KAMPAL
[TAMARIND CHUTNEY]
One cup of very thick tamarind water.
One medium yellow onion, minced.
Two TBS chili paste (sambal oelek).
Two TBS slivered fresh ginger.
One TBS brown sugar.
One Tsp. ground coriander.
One Tsp. salt.
A scant amount of oil.
Heat a pan and lightly gild the minced onion in the oil.
Add the ginger and garlic, saute briefly, add coriander powder and chilipaste and stir to incorporate. When the fragrance has increased, add the other ingredients, and simmer until it is considerably thickened. Let it cool, transfer to a jar, and refrigerate till next week.
The visual appeal is greatly enhanced, in the minds of some people, by adding a drop of red or orange food-colouring. I myself am not so sure of that, as it makes it look deceptively like sweet-sour sauce or tomato condiments such as American ketchup, and tjeap kwartir.
Note that sambal oelek is the basic building block of much that is good in the world. With its companion sambal badjak, it should never be absent from your kitchen.
A good source in the United States is Huy Fong, makers of SriRacha. Imported brands are Koningsvogel and Conimex, both based in the Netherlands.
It is also quite easy to make at home. Just pound a bunch of red ripe hot peppers with a little salt. Scoop the resultant paste into an appropriate vessel, then use a squeeze of lime juice to wash the remaining pulpy goodness from the pounder.
Thick tamarind water is made by mashing tamarind pulp with twice the volume of hot water, working it over with your hand as soon as it is cool enough to do so. After thoroughly mooshing it up, let it stand a while, then rub it through a tea strainer to leave seeds and strings of pulp behind.
In Indonesia, tamarind is Asam Djawa: Javanese sour.
Asem is the Indo-Dutch spelling.
In Tamarao it is Buwa Kampal.
Patjeri is a cooked relish.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
A simple tamarind chutney also falls into this category. No, it cannot be employed for Papal blessings or rubbed on arthritic joints with any hope of successfully solving the problem. But it is rather good, it keeps well, and adds a bit of sparkle to any meal.
It is sour, mildly spicy, slightly sweet.
PATJERI ASEM, PATJERI KAMPAL
[TAMARIND CHUTNEY]
One cup of very thick tamarind water.
One medium yellow onion, minced.
Two TBS chili paste (sambal oelek).
Two TBS slivered fresh ginger.
One TBS brown sugar.
One Tsp. ground coriander.
One Tsp. salt.
A scant amount of oil.
Heat a pan and lightly gild the minced onion in the oil.
Add the ginger and garlic, saute briefly, add coriander powder and chilipaste and stir to incorporate. When the fragrance has increased, add the other ingredients, and simmer until it is considerably thickened. Let it cool, transfer to a jar, and refrigerate till next week.
The visual appeal is greatly enhanced, in the minds of some people, by adding a drop of red or orange food-colouring. I myself am not so sure of that, as it makes it look deceptively like sweet-sour sauce or tomato condiments such as American ketchup, and tjeap kwartir.
Note that sambal oelek is the basic building block of much that is good in the world. With its companion sambal badjak, it should never be absent from your kitchen.
A good source in the United States is Huy Fong, makers of SriRacha. Imported brands are Koningsvogel and Conimex, both based in the Netherlands.
It is also quite easy to make at home. Just pound a bunch of red ripe hot peppers with a little salt. Scoop the resultant paste into an appropriate vessel, then use a squeeze of lime juice to wash the remaining pulpy goodness from the pounder.
Thick tamarind water is made by mashing tamarind pulp with twice the volume of hot water, working it over with your hand as soon as it is cool enough to do so. After thoroughly mooshing it up, let it stand a while, then rub it through a tea strainer to leave seeds and strings of pulp behind.
In Indonesia, tamarind is Asam Djawa: Javanese sour.
Asem is the Indo-Dutch spelling.
In Tamarao it is Buwa Kampal.
Patjeri is a cooked relish.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS
There are several Indonesian shadow-puppets in the television room. Late at night they sometimes speak. Heroic Ardjuna, his wise brother Yudistira, the dwarf Semar, and others.
Ardjuna, the paragon of chivalry, sometimes looks at me in a way that seems to suggest that I could do better.
His older brother maintains that things are as they are, deal with it.
And Semar takes it all in stride, averring that we're all insane.
Semar must be Canadian. That would explain his dry sense of humour.
The one three dimensional character is a wayang golek doll I brought back from Amsterdam. Painted wood, noble features, thoughtful yet controlled expression.
Though the tale cycle he represents is far younger than the Mahabharatic world of the five Pandawa brothers, he is the oldest of the dolls. Even Semar, battered and world-weary, was born from the artisan's labours more recently. The flat dolls probably date no later than the fifties, but the refined minister of an Islamic kingdom originated many years before the war. There is a gentleness to his carved face that suggests that he has seen much, lamented the collapse of society in the great upheavals of the twentieth century, and survived tumult and discord.
Java in the twenties and thirties, the Japanese invasion, the long ocean voyage to the Netherlands when the Dutch left the Indies forever......
And, more recently, emigration to the United States.
Of all of them, he is the least displaced.
Wherever he is, he belongs.
The two krisses on the high shelf have been much calmer since he arrived over a decade ago.
Peaceful. No longer tumultuous.
Despite the dreamed conversations that take place, it is often quiet.
When the shadow puppets speak, they do so seemingly by silence.
And krisses, of course, have no words. Only emotions.
One could not expect otherwise from wavy steel.
All of these entities assuredly like the snow-pear incense I burn.
Partly to chase away the occasional mosquito.
Partly to hide my smoking at night.
They do not mind the reason.
The world is aromatic.
Sandjaya spoke to king Dritarastra, saying: "long ago, when we all lived in Ngastinapura, before those five and Draupadi departed......"
The story is lengthy, and involves whole histories that must be detailed, so that the final battle on the field of Kuru, though forever in the background, need not be mentioned.
Not yet.
There were five brothers, who went and lived in the forest.
In each era they live again. They still live.
At some point, probably this year, I will carve Gatotkatja with the pale green-blue visage and ferocious facial hair, the gallant son of Bima and Hidimbi. To my mind he is the most complex of the characters in the Indonesian telling of the tale. For reasons which the Sanskritist will understand, he has to be more three dimensional than other puppets.
Most especially his head.
It's all in the head.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Ardjuna, the paragon of chivalry, sometimes looks at me in a way that seems to suggest that I could do better.
His older brother maintains that things are as they are, deal with it.
And Semar takes it all in stride, averring that we're all insane.
Semar must be Canadian. That would explain his dry sense of humour.
The one three dimensional character is a wayang golek doll I brought back from Amsterdam. Painted wood, noble features, thoughtful yet controlled expression.
Though the tale cycle he represents is far younger than the Mahabharatic world of the five Pandawa brothers, he is the oldest of the dolls. Even Semar, battered and world-weary, was born from the artisan's labours more recently. The flat dolls probably date no later than the fifties, but the refined minister of an Islamic kingdom originated many years before the war. There is a gentleness to his carved face that suggests that he has seen much, lamented the collapse of society in the great upheavals of the twentieth century, and survived tumult and discord.
Java in the twenties and thirties, the Japanese invasion, the long ocean voyage to the Netherlands when the Dutch left the Indies forever......
And, more recently, emigration to the United States.
Of all of them, he is the least displaced.
Wherever he is, he belongs.
The two krisses on the high shelf have been much calmer since he arrived over a decade ago.
Peaceful. No longer tumultuous.
Despite the dreamed conversations that take place, it is often quiet.
When the shadow puppets speak, they do so seemingly by silence.
And krisses, of course, have no words. Only emotions.
One could not expect otherwise from wavy steel.
All of these entities assuredly like the snow-pear incense I burn.
Partly to chase away the occasional mosquito.
Partly to hide my smoking at night.
They do not mind the reason.
The world is aromatic.
Sandjaya spoke to king Dritarastra, saying: "long ago, when we all lived in Ngastinapura, before those five and Draupadi departed......"
The story is lengthy, and involves whole histories that must be detailed, so that the final battle on the field of Kuru, though forever in the background, need not be mentioned.
Not yet.
There were five brothers, who went and lived in the forest.
In each era they live again. They still live.
At some point, probably this year, I will carve Gatotkatja with the pale green-blue visage and ferocious facial hair, the gallant son of Bima and Hidimbi. To my mind he is the most complex of the characters in the Indonesian telling of the tale. For reasons which the Sanskritist will understand, he has to be more three dimensional than other puppets.
Most especially his head.
It's all in the head.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
FROM BARBECUE TO SAND DADDY; A SAUCE POST
The other day I was discussing food with a gentleman from Louisiana who had spent some time in South East Asia. He mentioned a sauce his mother used, which she could no longer find.
I think I know roughly what it was. But really, it could be almost anything.
Sauce, in the South-East Asian context, means the entire spectrum from freshly made and soupy liquids to dark foul-smelling pastes that must be tempered and made palatable by diluting and cooking.
Sometimes they're concentrates, sometimes fermentation products.
And sometimes surprisingly familiar. Albeit cleverly disguised.
Here are two examples, both multinational.
燒烤醬 SIU HAAU JEUNG
Chinese barbecue sauce, as used in many restaurants, is one of the earliest examples of fusion cuisine.
From most to least, the ingredients are ketchup, apple cider vinegar, orange juice, and finely minced onion. Plus a little mustard powder, black pepper, chili oil, chili paste, and salt, as considered appropriate by the cook.
Generally three times as much ketchup as vinegar, four times as much vinegar as orange juice, and four times as much orange juice as honey. The quantity of the other ingredients ranges from minor to minute.
Usually it will be reduced to a thick gloop for storage, but it is also often compounded as needed and dumped over the raw meat to marinate.
Some cooks also add red miso (紅味噌 'hong mei chang') to the recipe.
Well-marbled fatty pork, whether 三層肉 ('saam chang yiuk': three layer meat), 梅花豬肉 ('mui faa chü yiuk': plum blossom pork), 五花腩 or 五花肉 ('ng faa naam', 'ng faa yiuk': five flower pork brisket), sauced and rubbed with the cooked-down version, then roasted in the oven or braised on the stove top, is quite scrumptious.
I know you've had it. Just think of all those delicious riblets!
It is also a stellar marinade for chicken wings, by the way. If you make it at home, adhere to the general proportions of ketchup, vinegar, juice, and honey as outlined above, then add the remaining ingredients to taste, before simmering down. It will keep for a while in the refrigerator.
沙茶醬, 沙爹醬 SATE SAUCE
The old-style Chinese sate sauce must be differentiated from the newer version. Both ultimately derive from a South-East Asian model brought back by Fujianese (Hokkienese) returning to China, but the version that has dried shrimp and fish-paste as a significant percentage is more of a longtime Chinese settlement in Java taste, and must be used sparingly as just one ingredient among many, whereas the modern Chinese version will contain more peanuts and the customary East-Indian spices.
Both 沙茶醬 and 沙爹醬 are pronounced 'sa-te cheo' in Hokkien, and mean the same thing. But 沙茶醬 (Cantonese: 'sa cha jeung') has the dried shrimpy flavour, 沙爹醬 (Cantonese: 'sa de jeung') is peanutty.
Either may be used as a component in other sauces, or condimentally when grilling or hot potting.
Note that the standard Hokkien term for sauce is 汁 (Hokkien pronunciation: chiap; Cantonese: 'jap'), from whence the second syllable in the English word 'ketchup' (茄汁) and the Malay-Javanese term 'ketjap' for soy-sauce. The difference between the concepts 醬 ('jeung') and 汁 ('jap') is one of compounding, processing, or fermentation, versus moisture and juice. Soy sauce (豉油 'si yau') belongs in the 醬 category, fish sauce (魚露 'yü lou') is clearly more 汁 than anything else.
KETCHUP
Speculatively, the path whereby the term 茄汁 ("keh-chap": tomato sauce) became the Javanese, Malay, and Indo-Dutch term for soy sauce may be explained by the habit of pickling fresh ingredients in a soy-sauce base, such as likely happened with tomatoes. If the resultant product is simmered down considerably till it approximates the same volume as the amount of soy sauce which was added, the salt content will be similar to that of soy sauce, hence it can be stored, and the taste will have been intensified.
Modern-day Indonesian soy sauce is often sweetened, which likewise provides a combination and layering of flavours. Once tomatoes became more common in the region, their addition would have been seen as an unnecessary complication; why pickle them when you can use them fresh?
Similar processes are still used to prepare strong condiments and non-perishable sauces by both Chinese and South-East Asians today. Mushroom soy sauce (草菰老抽 'tsou-gu lou-jau') is an example of one such. Look for either Pearl River Bridge brand (珠江橋牌) or Amoy (淘化大同, 淘大牌).
The Dutch version of sate sauce often consists of fried onion, peanut butter, palm sugar, tamarind or vinegar, chili sauce, and fish paste. Some versions are shockingly bad, some similar to the mediocre sweet versions preferred by Thais and Singaporeans.
Indonesians make the best. They invented it. It's a signature of their cuisine, and they add it to any number of meat and vegetable dishes.
But unlike the Dutch, they do not use it on French Fries.
About the title of this post?
沙爹醬 'sa de jeung': sand daddy sauce. The older name (沙茶醬) makes just as little sense, as it means 'sand tea sauce'.
Both are phonetic borrowings of the Javanese and Malay term 'saté', referring to grilled skewered meat.
Satay should not be confused with 'panggang', which is more like Southern-style barbecue, in that a large cut or the entire animal is slow-roasted and basted for several hours.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
I think I know roughly what it was. But really, it could be almost anything.
Sauce, in the South-East Asian context, means the entire spectrum from freshly made and soupy liquids to dark foul-smelling pastes that must be tempered and made palatable by diluting and cooking.
Sometimes they're concentrates, sometimes fermentation products.
And sometimes surprisingly familiar. Albeit cleverly disguised.
Here are two examples, both multinational.
燒烤醬 SIU HAAU JEUNG
Chinese barbecue sauce, as used in many restaurants, is one of the earliest examples of fusion cuisine.
From most to least, the ingredients are ketchup, apple cider vinegar, orange juice, and finely minced onion. Plus a little mustard powder, black pepper, chili oil, chili paste, and salt, as considered appropriate by the cook.
Generally three times as much ketchup as vinegar, four times as much vinegar as orange juice, and four times as much orange juice as honey. The quantity of the other ingredients ranges from minor to minute.
Usually it will be reduced to a thick gloop for storage, but it is also often compounded as needed and dumped over the raw meat to marinate.
Some cooks also add red miso (紅味噌 'hong mei chang') to the recipe.
Well-marbled fatty pork, whether 三層肉 ('saam chang yiuk': three layer meat), 梅花豬肉 ('mui faa chü yiuk': plum blossom pork), 五花腩 or 五花肉 ('ng faa naam', 'ng faa yiuk': five flower pork brisket), sauced and rubbed with the cooked-down version, then roasted in the oven or braised on the stove top, is quite scrumptious.
I know you've had it. Just think of all those delicious riblets!
It is also a stellar marinade for chicken wings, by the way. If you make it at home, adhere to the general proportions of ketchup, vinegar, juice, and honey as outlined above, then add the remaining ingredients to taste, before simmering down. It will keep for a while in the refrigerator.
沙茶醬, 沙爹醬 SATE SAUCE
The old-style Chinese sate sauce must be differentiated from the newer version. Both ultimately derive from a South-East Asian model brought back by Fujianese (Hokkienese) returning to China, but the version that has dried shrimp and fish-paste as a significant percentage is more of a longtime Chinese settlement in Java taste, and must be used sparingly as just one ingredient among many, whereas the modern Chinese version will contain more peanuts and the customary East-Indian spices.
Both 沙茶醬 and 沙爹醬 are pronounced 'sa-te cheo' in Hokkien, and mean the same thing. But 沙茶醬 (Cantonese: 'sa cha jeung') has the dried shrimpy flavour, 沙爹醬 (Cantonese: 'sa de jeung') is peanutty.
Either may be used as a component in other sauces, or condimentally when grilling or hot potting.
Note that the standard Hokkien term for sauce is 汁 (Hokkien pronunciation: chiap; Cantonese: 'jap'), from whence the second syllable in the English word 'ketchup' (茄汁) and the Malay-Javanese term 'ketjap' for soy-sauce. The difference between the concepts 醬 ('jeung') and 汁 ('jap') is one of compounding, processing, or fermentation, versus moisture and juice. Soy sauce (豉油 'si yau') belongs in the 醬 category, fish sauce (魚露 'yü lou') is clearly more 汁 than anything else.
KETCHUP
Speculatively, the path whereby the term 茄汁 ("keh-chap": tomato sauce) became the Javanese, Malay, and Indo-Dutch term for soy sauce may be explained by the habit of pickling fresh ingredients in a soy-sauce base, such as likely happened with tomatoes. If the resultant product is simmered down considerably till it approximates the same volume as the amount of soy sauce which was added, the salt content will be similar to that of soy sauce, hence it can be stored, and the taste will have been intensified.
Modern-day Indonesian soy sauce is often sweetened, which likewise provides a combination and layering of flavours. Once tomatoes became more common in the region, their addition would have been seen as an unnecessary complication; why pickle them when you can use them fresh?
Similar processes are still used to prepare strong condiments and non-perishable sauces by both Chinese and South-East Asians today. Mushroom soy sauce (草菰老抽 'tsou-gu lou-jau') is an example of one such. Look for either Pearl River Bridge brand (珠江橋牌) or Amoy (淘化大同, 淘大牌).
The Dutch version of sate sauce often consists of fried onion, peanut butter, palm sugar, tamarind or vinegar, chili sauce, and fish paste. Some versions are shockingly bad, some similar to the mediocre sweet versions preferred by Thais and Singaporeans.
Indonesians make the best. They invented it. It's a signature of their cuisine, and they add it to any number of meat and vegetable dishes.
But unlike the Dutch, they do not use it on French Fries.
About the title of this post?
沙爹醬 'sa de jeung': sand daddy sauce. The older name (沙茶醬) makes just as little sense, as it means 'sand tea sauce'.
Both are phonetic borrowings of the Javanese and Malay term 'saté', referring to grilled skewered meat.
Satay should not be confused with 'panggang', which is more like Southern-style barbecue, in that a large cut or the entire animal is slow-roasted and basted for several hours.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Sunday, March 04, 2012
IT SMELLS FISHY
I’m a wee bit stuffed, I can’t eat as much as I used to. Because I don’t eat so much anymore.
The soup was very good, so was the sooty grilled meat with hot sauce.
I added some pickle-chili juice to the soup for tanginess – mmm!
My dinner was delightful, but I left a slurry in the bowl.
I’m a more modest eater now.
I also probably spend more time scoping out my fellow diners than in the past. The whatever it was of Asian appearance who spoke no Cantonese or Mandarin at the table on the other side of the aisle, the young fellow at the other table who ordered in English, the elderly Cantonese couple at the table to my right sharing a plate of chow mein, and the sharp-tongued Northerner and her two men at the round table.
Plus the family at the table ahead of me, with the mommy, daddy, auntie, fat-faced boy-child, and perky little girl with pretty decorative things in her hair. The auntie seemed very casual about everything, the little girl was intensely enjoying the food in front of her.
A pinch of fresh lettuce or basil, a bit of grilled meat and bean-thread noodle, squeeze of lemon, dab of sauce – yummy!
Then repeat. Again yummy!
Her older brother just shoveled the food in, then went outside to play. Her auntie was already using a toothpick, swilling her mouth out with tea, and chatting with the women who work there, when the little girl was only half way through the tactile food in front of her.
Food is so much more enjoyable when you can play with it.
SOMEWHERE ELSE
The entire place smelled of drying fish, which told the arriving visitor what the main enterprise in that town was. From the ferry you could see tall palms scattered among the buildings and clustering further in, but other than these deliberate plantings the coast and hills behind looked somewhat bare, with sparse vegetation. It was the hot season, perfect for drying the catch. The warehouses near the dock shimmered in the heat, and one wondered how sensible it had been to use corrugated iron sheets for roofing in this climate. A few pedicabs stood in the shade of a covered loading dock waiting for the better-heeled passengers to disembark, their drivers casually slumped among the vehicles, relaxing.
Mr. Ho was waiting in his van with the air-conditioning going full-blast. From the outside all you could see was the grey haze of his cigar, until you got closer and discerned the grinning visage in the driver seat. As soon as we got going he rolled the windows down to let the smoke out. When I had met him months ago he smelled of burning tobacco too.
As he explained it, the choices were cheroot or dried fish as personal funk, and after a lifetime in Banda Djamroed, he had his preferences.
Still, the vehicle should not smell too much of smoke – his wife and daughters occasionally used it too.
Especially when the Japanese sedan was broken.
After nightfall four of us headed out to eat on Djalan Alamoedin – Mr. Ho, the older daughter, the maiden auntie who lived with them and did the books in the office, and myself.
Was I by any chance interested in the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Gang Apbal? Well, no, the street food looked much more interesting. But before I had a chance to voice that opinion, the maiden auntie mentioned softly that the chicken with chilipaste and peanuts at Restoran Taai Foek was soooo delicious! She sounded so wistful and dreamy that I promptly said that yes indeed the Chinese restaurant would be just fine.
The owner greeted Mr. Ho like an old friend – I found out later they regularly played mahjong together – and sat us in the back, away from the door and the windows, behind a screen which gave us privacy.
The chicken with chilipaste and peanuts was indeed delicious. It was, remarkably, sweet. Oyster-sauce kangkong, a fish I cannot identify steamed with three kinds of ginger-like root plus dried black mushrooms, stirfried stringbeans and pork shred, plus, too much at that point, a steamed pudding with dates, gingko nuts, and glutinous rice.
They tried to get me to have a beer to drink with my meal – all white people depend on beer, they knew this for a fact – but I simply had the tea. Plus some of the maiden auntie’s bottle of ginger ale.
When we left the restaurant the smell of drying fish from the seafront mingled with the sooty reek of barbecue from the street vendors, grilling pork and fresh fish over burning frond and coconut husk. A dense wall of odeur, intense, intoxicating, slightly nauseating.
I lit up a cigarette, and when Mr. Ho told us to wait while he went and got the car with one of the restaurant boys, both the maiden auntie and the daughter promptly cadged two of my non-filters. I’ve never seen ladies suck down nicotine so fast.
Both of them were chomping their chewing gum madly by the time mr. Ho drove up.
It’s good for digestion, lah!
And freshens breath after eating!
They firmly encouraged me to try it also.
A few days later I did get a chance to try out the street food. I was on my own that day, despite mr. Ho’s concern that a white face would attract attention from the locals, and the possessor of said face might not know how to deal with stares and questions.
But I assured him that I could handle myself, and I would not drift off the main streets into dodgy areas. His walled home and warehouses were in any case near enough to Djalan Alamoedin and Djalan Soekaboemi , and though it was unbearably hot, I was by that time fairly used to strolling sloyong sloyong, with arms drooping and relaxed, and not moving any more muscles or body parts than I had to. It would be okay. No car. I’ll be sure to have lots of tea before I go, and no, I shan’t buy any freshly made ‘cold’ beverages while in the poesoh (city centre).
Sloyong-sloyong. Not quite as relaxed and lazy-looking as selembe-lembe, but very close. It’s like ghost-walking, drifting along the road at a perceptible pace, but with the least amount of motion possible. White shirt, thin slacks, and lightweight shoes.
Unless there is too little shade you won’t really need a hat, though it helps.
But a cigarette drooping out of one’s mouth is essential. It’s the attitude.
I ate grilled squid at a rickety table underneath a tree. Soot-streaked white flesh, ripped basil leaves and lemon juice, crumbled fried peanuts, and a drizzle of thick sweet dark sauce. Fresh chilies optional.
While I bit into the succulent morsels, I observed a young lady at another table, close to the traffic. She’d raise a skein of noodles to her face and inhale it slowly, then stop chewing when a vehicle passed, turning her head to watch it as it went by. It took a long time for her to eat her noodles, she seemed much more interested in the cars. Occasionally she added a dollop of chilipaste to the noodles, once or twice a drizzle of sweet dark sauce. By the time she had nearly finished eating, her bowl had a thick slurry at the bottom, and the noodles going into her mouth looked rusty instead of white.
I have no idea what the flavour had originally been. It may have been seafood chunks in a pale broth, with tamarind, turmeric, and ground peanuts. But that was long ago.
Before all the cars, and absent-minded additions of chilipaste.
I had a glass of cool squigglies with green syrup and condensed milk while watching her down the last of her noodles. She still looked at the cars as they passed, her head swiveling away from her bowl each time.
The last night that I was there we went to the restaurant at the corner of Gang Apbal again. I had spoken to the owner and arranged a meal in advance, choosing among the dishes he recommended, and making sure that the chicken with chilipaste and peanuts was among them, as well as some of the nice fatty pork with pickled garlic that the daughter had mentioned. And plenty of vegetable dishes, because mr. Ho’s wife had remarked that leafy greens were good for the skin, and soothed the humours.
I’d heard the skin thing before, but I had no idea what she meant by the humours. Probably the surfeit of chilies in the local diet got on her nerves.
The restaurant owner knew who was coming, and made sure to have the table ready, as well as a soup that he know they all liked – expensive ingredients, clarified broth.
Plus another lovely soup half-way through, just before the juicy grilled squab with crunchy things.
I must commend him on his stellar recommendations. I gained much face that evening.
Three hours later we drifted out into the darkness. The barbecue sellers were folding up for the night, and a line of pedicabs stood empty along the far side of the street, their operators snacking on the last of the grilled meats and the baked banana wrapped in leaves.
Mr. Ho and his son went to get the vehicles, with the help of restaurant boys holding lamps. After thanking me for the meal, the two elderly Tangson brothers from the factory near the wharf (Tangson Primus, Tangson Secundus), and their sister (Tangson Nining) went up to Djalan Kebauwen where their driver had waited.
As soon as it was safe to do so, both of Mr. Ho’s daughters, and the maiden aunt, and even Mrs. Ho herself, lit up the cigarettes that I had given them. From the sea came the odour of dried fish, now all the more noticeable because there was so little smell from the street food vendors.
I got into the van with Mr. Ho and the maiden aunt, both daughters and Mrs. Ho rode in the sedan with the son.
Mr. Ho had a cigar in his mouth, and auntie chided him about the smell.
Then both agreed it was anyhow better than the reek of drying fish.
On the boat the next day I swear I could still smell the drying fish several hours after we had left the harbour.
But that may have been a faint perfume from the local people who were also on board.
Mr. Ho had given me some cigars; they would prevent sea-sickness.
I lit one, and the fishy remnant faded.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence. ==========================================================================
The soup was very good, so was the sooty grilled meat with hot sauce.
I added some pickle-chili juice to the soup for tanginess – mmm!
My dinner was delightful, but I left a slurry in the bowl.
I’m a more modest eater now.
I also probably spend more time scoping out my fellow diners than in the past. The whatever it was of Asian appearance who spoke no Cantonese or Mandarin at the table on the other side of the aisle, the young fellow at the other table who ordered in English, the elderly Cantonese couple at the table to my right sharing a plate of chow mein, and the sharp-tongued Northerner and her two men at the round table.
Plus the family at the table ahead of me, with the mommy, daddy, auntie, fat-faced boy-child, and perky little girl with pretty decorative things in her hair. The auntie seemed very casual about everything, the little girl was intensely enjoying the food in front of her.
A pinch of fresh lettuce or basil, a bit of grilled meat and bean-thread noodle, squeeze of lemon, dab of sauce – yummy!
Then repeat. Again yummy!
Her older brother just shoveled the food in, then went outside to play. Her auntie was already using a toothpick, swilling her mouth out with tea, and chatting with the women who work there, when the little girl was only half way through the tactile food in front of her.
Food is so much more enjoyable when you can play with it.
SOMEWHERE ELSE
The entire place smelled of drying fish, which told the arriving visitor what the main enterprise in that town was. From the ferry you could see tall palms scattered among the buildings and clustering further in, but other than these deliberate plantings the coast and hills behind looked somewhat bare, with sparse vegetation. It was the hot season, perfect for drying the catch. The warehouses near the dock shimmered in the heat, and one wondered how sensible it had been to use corrugated iron sheets for roofing in this climate. A few pedicabs stood in the shade of a covered loading dock waiting for the better-heeled passengers to disembark, their drivers casually slumped among the vehicles, relaxing.
Mr. Ho was waiting in his van with the air-conditioning going full-blast. From the outside all you could see was the grey haze of his cigar, until you got closer and discerned the grinning visage in the driver seat. As soon as we got going he rolled the windows down to let the smoke out. When I had met him months ago he smelled of burning tobacco too.
As he explained it, the choices were cheroot or dried fish as personal funk, and after a lifetime in Banda Djamroed, he had his preferences.
Still, the vehicle should not smell too much of smoke – his wife and daughters occasionally used it too.
Especially when the Japanese sedan was broken.
After nightfall four of us headed out to eat on Djalan Alamoedin – Mr. Ho, the older daughter, the maiden auntie who lived with them and did the books in the office, and myself.
Was I by any chance interested in the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Gang Apbal? Well, no, the street food looked much more interesting. But before I had a chance to voice that opinion, the maiden auntie mentioned softly that the chicken with chilipaste and peanuts at Restoran Taai Foek was soooo delicious! She sounded so wistful and dreamy that I promptly said that yes indeed the Chinese restaurant would be just fine.
The owner greeted Mr. Ho like an old friend – I found out later they regularly played mahjong together – and sat us in the back, away from the door and the windows, behind a screen which gave us privacy.
The chicken with chilipaste and peanuts was indeed delicious. It was, remarkably, sweet. Oyster-sauce kangkong, a fish I cannot identify steamed with three kinds of ginger-like root plus dried black mushrooms, stirfried stringbeans and pork shred, plus, too much at that point, a steamed pudding with dates, gingko nuts, and glutinous rice.
They tried to get me to have a beer to drink with my meal – all white people depend on beer, they knew this for a fact – but I simply had the tea. Plus some of the maiden auntie’s bottle of ginger ale.
When we left the restaurant the smell of drying fish from the seafront mingled with the sooty reek of barbecue from the street vendors, grilling pork and fresh fish over burning frond and coconut husk. A dense wall of odeur, intense, intoxicating, slightly nauseating.
I lit up a cigarette, and when Mr. Ho told us to wait while he went and got the car with one of the restaurant boys, both the maiden auntie and the daughter promptly cadged two of my non-filters. I’ve never seen ladies suck down nicotine so fast.
Both of them were chomping their chewing gum madly by the time mr. Ho drove up.
It’s good for digestion, lah!
And freshens breath after eating!
They firmly encouraged me to try it also.
A few days later I did get a chance to try out the street food. I was on my own that day, despite mr. Ho’s concern that a white face would attract attention from the locals, and the possessor of said face might not know how to deal with stares and questions.
But I assured him that I could handle myself, and I would not drift off the main streets into dodgy areas. His walled home and warehouses were in any case near enough to Djalan Alamoedin and Djalan Soekaboemi , and though it was unbearably hot, I was by that time fairly used to strolling sloyong sloyong, with arms drooping and relaxed, and not moving any more muscles or body parts than I had to. It would be okay. No car. I’ll be sure to have lots of tea before I go, and no, I shan’t buy any freshly made ‘cold’ beverages while in the poesoh (city centre).
Sloyong-sloyong. Not quite as relaxed and lazy-looking as selembe-lembe, but very close. It’s like ghost-walking, drifting along the road at a perceptible pace, but with the least amount of motion possible. White shirt, thin slacks, and lightweight shoes.
Unless there is too little shade you won’t really need a hat, though it helps.
But a cigarette drooping out of one’s mouth is essential. It’s the attitude.
I ate grilled squid at a rickety table underneath a tree. Soot-streaked white flesh, ripped basil leaves and lemon juice, crumbled fried peanuts, and a drizzle of thick sweet dark sauce. Fresh chilies optional.
While I bit into the succulent morsels, I observed a young lady at another table, close to the traffic. She’d raise a skein of noodles to her face and inhale it slowly, then stop chewing when a vehicle passed, turning her head to watch it as it went by. It took a long time for her to eat her noodles, she seemed much more interested in the cars. Occasionally she added a dollop of chilipaste to the noodles, once or twice a drizzle of sweet dark sauce. By the time she had nearly finished eating, her bowl had a thick slurry at the bottom, and the noodles going into her mouth looked rusty instead of white.
I have no idea what the flavour had originally been. It may have been seafood chunks in a pale broth, with tamarind, turmeric, and ground peanuts. But that was long ago.
Before all the cars, and absent-minded additions of chilipaste.
I had a glass of cool squigglies with green syrup and condensed milk while watching her down the last of her noodles. She still looked at the cars as they passed, her head swiveling away from her bowl each time.
The last night that I was there we went to the restaurant at the corner of Gang Apbal again. I had spoken to the owner and arranged a meal in advance, choosing among the dishes he recommended, and making sure that the chicken with chilipaste and peanuts was among them, as well as some of the nice fatty pork with pickled garlic that the daughter had mentioned. And plenty of vegetable dishes, because mr. Ho’s wife had remarked that leafy greens were good for the skin, and soothed the humours.
I’d heard the skin thing before, but I had no idea what she meant by the humours. Probably the surfeit of chilies in the local diet got on her nerves.
The restaurant owner knew who was coming, and made sure to have the table ready, as well as a soup that he know they all liked – expensive ingredients, clarified broth.
Plus another lovely soup half-way through, just before the juicy grilled squab with crunchy things.
I must commend him on his stellar recommendations. I gained much face that evening.
Three hours later we drifted out into the darkness. The barbecue sellers were folding up for the night, and a line of pedicabs stood empty along the far side of the street, their operators snacking on the last of the grilled meats and the baked banana wrapped in leaves.
Mr. Ho and his son went to get the vehicles, with the help of restaurant boys holding lamps. After thanking me for the meal, the two elderly Tangson brothers from the factory near the wharf (Tangson Primus, Tangson Secundus), and their sister (Tangson Nining) went up to Djalan Kebauwen where their driver had waited.
As soon as it was safe to do so, both of Mr. Ho’s daughters, and the maiden aunt, and even Mrs. Ho herself, lit up the cigarettes that I had given them. From the sea came the odour of dried fish, now all the more noticeable because there was so little smell from the street food vendors.
I got into the van with Mr. Ho and the maiden aunt, both daughters and Mrs. Ho rode in the sedan with the son.
Mr. Ho had a cigar in his mouth, and auntie chided him about the smell.
Then both agreed it was anyhow better than the reek of drying fish.
On the boat the next day I swear I could still smell the drying fish several hours after we had left the harbour.
But that may have been a faint perfume from the local people who were also on board.
Mr. Ho had given me some cigars; they would prevent sea-sickness.
I lit one, and the fishy remnant faded.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence. ==========================================================================
Saturday, February 04, 2012
A FRAGRANCE IN THE MIND
There was a time when Henri smoked cigars, obviously without his parents knowing. Many young men in Valkenswaard and nearby villages experimented with cigars – this was, after all, where the factories that made these beloved products thrived – and most parents firmly believed that their children were angels, pure and innocent.
Somehow the idea that youthful smoking was a sin had taken root, despite the generations of tobacco leaf strippers, bunchers, and rollers that inhabited the Kempen region, and the multitude of cigar factories in the various Southern towns – De Huifkar, Karel 1, Willem II, Hofnar, et autres.
At that time I already smoked a pipe openly. I had been buying my own tobacco since I was fourteen, and few people thought it particularly unusual that I smoked. Other people’s children ALWAYS smoked.
Henri’s parents knew, and regarded it benignly.
So charmingly eccentric! A pipe!
Thank G_d it’s not a stogey, or one of those horrid shag cigarettes.
Henri used me as his cover. Whenever we met outside for a smoke in the glade of ancient trees several blocks away, he would light up as my smoke wafted around him, perfuming his clothes and disguising his indulgence. He smoked the ‘halve’ coronas made by Hofnar, as well as some other brands. Seldom Willem II cigars, as he disapproved of their ties to organized sports.
It seemed sneaky to him for a tobacco company to feign an interest in the mental and physical health of the community, when obviously what they were more keenly invested in was their image and the well-being of their continuing enterprise.
The only sport, he maintained, that had any possible connection with cigars, was horse racing.
After several months, his sister Suzanne was in on the secret, which pleased me immensely. She was delightful company, and the three of us would park our bikes against one of the trees and sit on the bench. Two of us smoking, the third as a vivacious sparkling presence witnessing our depravity. All three of us would end up smelling woodsy from the Latakia in my blend, mixed with something 'else'.
It was a wonderful way to spend the twilight.
In summer the mist would drift in among the trees, and the glow from nearby streetlights would paint the glade a warm warm gold.
One evening we didn’t make it to our private place. His parents had some people over, and Henri and Suzanne could not leave.
I smoked a pipe in the quiet by myself, then went over to their house. Their mom had let it be known that I was welcome to drop by for coffee after dinner. We sat out on the veranda under the stars, and Henri’s father offered cigars to his old friend, indicating that I should have one also if I felt so inclined. I demurred, and filled my pipe.
The three of us smoked, with Henri among us and Suzanne just off to the side. Henri looked somewhat down, clearly wanting to smoke too. Suzanne suggested cheerfully to her father “maybe you should give Henri a cigaartje, he would look SO elegant smoking!”
The answer was no, Henri shouldn’t acquire the habit until he went away to college. Then tobacco might prove useful, especially if he was studying late at night. All university students smoked.
Old-style parents in the Netherlands in that day often disapproved of their children smoking. Not so much because the habit itself, as the horrifying idea that their children would neglect propriety by lighting up around them. Smoking, in some way, was a marker of the hierarchical distinctions that a family needed to maintain.
The older generation smoked.
The younger generation didn’t.
At least not around their parents.
I let my pipe go out, in deference to Henri’s plight. I was somewhat disquieted at having inadvertently been party to his father re-emphasizing the generational differences of status and privilege.
The next evening we met at the usual spot. Henri did not refer to yesterday’s events, and seemed unconcerned – he had his own cigars with him, and happily drooled faint whisps of smoke into the evening air. Afterwards, as we parted, he mentioned that after I had left, his father and the old friend had had one more cigar each, “just to keep the mosquitoes away”.
Both he and Suzanne had reeked of smoke when they went back indoors.
It had been quite lovely.
That autumn he went away to college, and occupied rooms in Utrecht with other students from Valkenswaard. Together they drank lots of strong coffee, and smoked the cigars manufactured by Hofnar every single evening. Once every three of four weeks he would come home for the weekend if he could, but most of the time I had no one to smoke with in the glade of trees, and I stopped going there, especially after the weather turned cold.
Months later, after winter had passed and the weather had warmed up again, I was bicycling towards the Wilhelmina Park when Suzanne on her own bike came next to me. I was very happy to see her, and without even thinking we rode toward the glade of trees. It was not yet even close to evening time; mid-afternoon, and pleasantly warm. We parked our bikes against a tree and sat on the bench.
I lit up, and we chatted for over an hour. I had another pipe-full to make the moment last, and whisps of smoke lazily drifted past and over her. I couldn't help noticing that she was, well... , "curvier" than last year.
When it was time to go, we both mounted our bikes, and rode back, still talking.
As we parted, she mentioned that Henri would come home for the summer. She looked forward to the three of us meeting every evening for a smoke in the glade again.
“Does your father now know that Henri smokes?”
“Yes. But he doesn’t do it around the old man.”
“Then how... ?”
“You’ve never sniffed his shirts, huh?”
“Oh.”
“They no longer smell of your tobacco, but reek of Java and Sumatra.”
She also said that she very much preferred the fragrance of Latakia.
It just smelled so much more “civilized”.
And her mom agreed.
Very nice!
...
Much has changed since then. None of us live in Valkenswaard anymore.
I left over thirty years ago, it has been a dozen years since I last went back.
The cigar factories are all gone, the rollers have retired.
It smells different now.
WOODSY, AND SOMETHING ELSE
In another few minutes I shall leave the office and go around the corner to the cigar bar to smoke a pipe or two.
Definitely a full Latakia mixture, perfuming the sparse Saturday evening crowd.
Henri and Suzanne will NOT be there, alas. Probably no vivacious sparkling presence at all.
But the same gold gold glow from the grove of ancient trees will be all around.
And a familiar dreaminess will rekindle.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Somehow the idea that youthful smoking was a sin had taken root, despite the generations of tobacco leaf strippers, bunchers, and rollers that inhabited the Kempen region, and the multitude of cigar factories in the various Southern towns – De Huifkar, Karel 1, Willem II, Hofnar, et autres.
At that time I already smoked a pipe openly. I had been buying my own tobacco since I was fourteen, and few people thought it particularly unusual that I smoked. Other people’s children ALWAYS smoked.
Henri’s parents knew, and regarded it benignly.
So charmingly eccentric! A pipe!
Thank G_d it’s not a stogey, or one of those horrid shag cigarettes.
Henri used me as his cover. Whenever we met outside for a smoke in the glade of ancient trees several blocks away, he would light up as my smoke wafted around him, perfuming his clothes and disguising his indulgence. He smoked the ‘halve’ coronas made by Hofnar, as well as some other brands. Seldom Willem II cigars, as he disapproved of their ties to organized sports.
It seemed sneaky to him for a tobacco company to feign an interest in the mental and physical health of the community, when obviously what they were more keenly invested in was their image and the well-being of their continuing enterprise.
The only sport, he maintained, that had any possible connection with cigars, was horse racing.
After several months, his sister Suzanne was in on the secret, which pleased me immensely. She was delightful company, and the three of us would park our bikes against one of the trees and sit on the bench. Two of us smoking, the third as a vivacious sparkling presence witnessing our depravity. All three of us would end up smelling woodsy from the Latakia in my blend, mixed with something 'else'.
It was a wonderful way to spend the twilight.
In summer the mist would drift in among the trees, and the glow from nearby streetlights would paint the glade a warm warm gold.
One evening we didn’t make it to our private place. His parents had some people over, and Henri and Suzanne could not leave.
I smoked a pipe in the quiet by myself, then went over to their house. Their mom had let it be known that I was welcome to drop by for coffee after dinner. We sat out on the veranda under the stars, and Henri’s father offered cigars to his old friend, indicating that I should have one also if I felt so inclined. I demurred, and filled my pipe.
The three of us smoked, with Henri among us and Suzanne just off to the side. Henri looked somewhat down, clearly wanting to smoke too. Suzanne suggested cheerfully to her father “maybe you should give Henri a cigaartje, he would look SO elegant smoking!”
The answer was no, Henri shouldn’t acquire the habit until he went away to college. Then tobacco might prove useful, especially if he was studying late at night. All university students smoked.
Old-style parents in the Netherlands in that day often disapproved of their children smoking. Not so much because the habit itself, as the horrifying idea that their children would neglect propriety by lighting up around them. Smoking, in some way, was a marker of the hierarchical distinctions that a family needed to maintain.
The older generation smoked.
The younger generation didn’t.
At least not around their parents.
I let my pipe go out, in deference to Henri’s plight. I was somewhat disquieted at having inadvertently been party to his father re-emphasizing the generational differences of status and privilege.
The next evening we met at the usual spot. Henri did not refer to yesterday’s events, and seemed unconcerned – he had his own cigars with him, and happily drooled faint whisps of smoke into the evening air. Afterwards, as we parted, he mentioned that after I had left, his father and the old friend had had one more cigar each, “just to keep the mosquitoes away”.
Both he and Suzanne had reeked of smoke when they went back indoors.
It had been quite lovely.
That autumn he went away to college, and occupied rooms in Utrecht with other students from Valkenswaard. Together they drank lots of strong coffee, and smoked the cigars manufactured by Hofnar every single evening. Once every three of four weeks he would come home for the weekend if he could, but most of the time I had no one to smoke with in the glade of trees, and I stopped going there, especially after the weather turned cold.
Months later, after winter had passed and the weather had warmed up again, I was bicycling towards the Wilhelmina Park when Suzanne on her own bike came next to me. I was very happy to see her, and without even thinking we rode toward the glade of trees. It was not yet even close to evening time; mid-afternoon, and pleasantly warm. We parked our bikes against a tree and sat on the bench.
I lit up, and we chatted for over an hour. I had another pipe-full to make the moment last, and whisps of smoke lazily drifted past and over her. I couldn't help noticing that she was, well... , "curvier" than last year.
When it was time to go, we both mounted our bikes, and rode back, still talking.
As we parted, she mentioned that Henri would come home for the summer. She looked forward to the three of us meeting every evening for a smoke in the glade again.
“Does your father now know that Henri smokes?”
“Yes. But he doesn’t do it around the old man.”
“Then how... ?”
“You’ve never sniffed his shirts, huh?”
“Oh.”
“They no longer smell of your tobacco, but reek of Java and Sumatra.”
She also said that she very much preferred the fragrance of Latakia.
It just smelled so much more “civilized”.
And her mom agreed.
Very nice!
...
Much has changed since then. None of us live in Valkenswaard anymore.
I left over thirty years ago, it has been a dozen years since I last went back.
The cigar factories are all gone, the rollers have retired.
It smells different now.
WOODSY, AND SOMETHING ELSE
In another few minutes I shall leave the office and go around the corner to the cigar bar to smoke a pipe or two.
Definitely a full Latakia mixture, perfuming the sparse Saturday evening crowd.
Henri and Suzanne will NOT be there, alas. Probably no vivacious sparkling presence at all.
But the same gold gold glow from the grove of ancient trees will be all around.
And a familiar dreaminess will rekindle.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Sunday, November 06, 2011
VALKENSWAARD: THE FRAGRANCE OF CIGARS
Saturday evening in a friendly establishment with a glass of whiskey-water is very good.
Unlike the rest of the week, it is a quiet night there.
I like quiet Saturday nights - I lament the lack of female companionship, but as I am totally s.o.l. in that regard, that cannot be helped - but the absence of the rowdiness and drunken merriment that is usual elsewhere in the city is very pleasant.
The Occidental Cigar Bar is our kind of place.
All I really want out of an inn at eventide is the same calm comfort that many Dutch cafés used to have, before they forbade smoking indoors and started catering to alcoholic teenagers, druggies, and drunkards.
That, and the displays of rutting behaviour.
Not having rutted in a while, seeing such is sickening.
A café is a place to relax, smoke contemplatively, and read a bit.
Or take in the world-map on the far wall, showing all the places where 'our' ancestors raped, pillaged, and conquered.
We Dutch used to be the world's incendiarists, now we simply light a pipe in the evening, or have a Java cheroot with a cup of coffee.
The old-style Dutch café is a living room - a public place where you can be a bit more private.
Except, of course, because of Brussels, one now has to behave.
Europeanization enforces clean new living.
No more smoking! And sit up straight!
Be social to the drunken puritans!
[Informational interstice: Java cheroot - Besuki filler, zandblad binder, Sumatra wrapper. Besuki leaf comes from Eastern Java, and has a fine mild fragrance and flavour. It is often used in mixed filler (the main part of the cigar). Zandblad ('Sand Leaf') are the leaves close to the ground, pale and large. Their strength and size make them suitable to hold the guts of a hand-rolled cigar together. Sumatra produces lovely thin and silky leaves with narrow veins, soft and pliable, that form the perfect outter layer; aesthetically pleasing and possessed of a spicy-floral fragrance. A good cigar is a work of art.
Brands to look for: Glorie van Java, Hajenius, De Olifant, Oud Kampen - the last mentioned is probably the only all-handmade smoke left. But the previous three (machine formed, hand finished), are also exceptional products. And there are many others, in a variety of shapes and sizes. The old-fashioned Tuit Knak (short torpedo shape) is harder to make and will cost marginally more than a Halve Corona or a Senorita. ]
VALKENSWAARD, THEN
There was a pleasant café-billard before the end of town. Broad tables covered with rugs, as is common in the Netherlands, with comfortable chairs. In one section of the large tap-room was a pool table, hardly ever used by patrons - that was the generation before us, by the seventies billiards had faded a bit - but mostly there were empty tables around, each with a large glass ashtray that was far too big to casually pocket.
Dark browns, muted carpet purples, small reflected glints of glass.
Like many cafés in that day the owner also sold a selection of cigars: cheaper greenish torpedoes that smelled of clay for the old farmer, Senoritas for the fancy man, and very decent Half-Coronas for the patron with good taste.
One of whom was a elderly woman of spare frame, who smoked them at her table while reading the newspapers.
I spoke with her a few times when I was there, and after a while I knew more about her.
No, I didn't pry.
In an otherwise empty establishment it is polite to say 'goede avond mevrouw' when passing to one's own table with another cup of coffee, or to occasionally borrow a pack of matches. Eventually conversation may happen.
She owned one of the local shops, which she and her husband had bought a few years after being thrown out of Indonesia. Like a fair number of people locally she was in a permanent state of exile, but unlike most such she was not a Northerner temporarily carpetbagging in the South, nor an actual Indo desperately trying to forget the emerald lands forever lost.
She had been born in Eindhoven, and had family in Valkenswaard - that was why she and her husband had returned after Soekarno's revolution.
They had met shortly after the war during the bersiap ("be on guard") period. She had been a nurse sent out in 1945, he was an engineer who survived the Japanese railway project in Pakan Baroe and escaped into the jungle a few months before end of the war.
She had known his uncle and aunt who lived in Eindhoven in the thirties, that was one of the things they had in common.
Both of them had lost relatives during the war, in Holland and in the Indies.
It seemed natural for them to get married.
What didn't seem so natural after their wedding was having children. Really, what had pulled them together was the places they shared and the people they used to know. They were mature individuals who found renewed stability with each other, they weren't hormonally stressed young lovers. And it was precisely because stability was lacking in Java during the last few years of the Dutch empire that children at the beginning had been out of the question. What kind of environment would they give a child, when the end of four hundred years in the East was in sight?
Was it responsible to bring someone into a world that had yet to recover from chaos?
When they settled in Noord Brabant, she ended up taking care of her sister's son Jan - her sister had died in prison in 1944, leaving a widower made unstable because of the war, and an infant - and by the time Jan was of college age, she and her own husband, while still close, no longer shared a bed. Jan was an adult now. An engineer working for the state. He had a promising career ahead of him, and would probably marry soon and have kids. She was looking forward to having the tiny ones stay with her during the summer, and visit regularly the rest of the year. Her husband could tell them tales of the Indies, and both of them would make sure the kids grew up knowing about all the people who had gone before, whose tales must be told, because their deaths had robbed them of their own voice.
She smoked cigars partly because of memory.
There had been several cigar factories in Valkenswaard before the war. Everyone in the town was, in some way, connected to tobacco.
The filler leaf came primarily from Eastern Java. The binder was often grown in Europe or South America. The best wrappers came from Sumatra, not too very far from where the Japanese during the war tried to build a railway through the jungle with slave labour.
Every few months buyers for the factories travelled to Rotterdam, and later to Hamburg, to inspect bales of new leaf, test samples, place orders. They would arrange transport back to Valkenswaard, guarding the precious cargo which was the life blood of so many people in the town, and the tobacco would be carefully warehoused. After fermentation, the central vein was stripped from the leaf by workers who lacked other skills, more experienced hands would roll the bigger cigars, young women made the thin little cigarillos that were barely thicker than cigarettes.
The town grew during the twenties and thirties, nice houses were built for successful merchants, and a few people got an education - learning was a little bit more affordable because of the money that cigars made.
The war was, of course, a disaster.
She had been in the North at nursing school when war broke out. For five years she did not see the South again. Finally, in 1945 after liberation, still rail thin from the hunger winter (the Germans had robbed all the food in the North for their own people), she went back for several months. But so much had been destroyed, or had simply worn down and not been repaired or restored, that she felt out of place. She was cognizant of her uselessness to relatives who had to share their own almost non-existent resources with a skeleton, and she was a stranger to people who had been there all the time and were still trying to digest what they had seen and what they themselves had experienced.
When the chance came, she took it. A re-opened hospital in the Indies was desperate for nurses, as many of their previous staff had died in the prisoner of war camps.
She signed up, shipped out. Learned a few phrases of Malay on the boat, as well as words like Tjimahi, Soekoen, Keloet, Lawiesegalagala, Pangkalan..... all of which have a peculiar resonance for those that lived.
Java when she first arrived was intense and brilliant, a place so different from the cold grey northern world. Viridian, gold, and crimson.
She met the engineer at a social event in the city where she worked. Many Dutch people still lived in or near the former P.O.W. camps, because going back into the countryside was dangerous. The Javanese were determined to be rid of the colonizers and tales of rape and murder in the outlying areas were common. In some towns and villages, the pemoeda (armed nationalist youth wing) had practiced unspeakable cruelties on those whom they considered collaborators, and destroyed all traces of the Netherlanders, including schools, churches, clinics, public facilities, even train stations.
In addition to the mental barriers that people had pulled up around themselves in order to survive the Japanese occupation, walls were growing between ethnic groups, and between those whose war years were not at all the same. Javans, Chinese, Ambonese, Holland-Dutch, and Indo-Dutch - they all seemed at times to be from different planets, and did not get along smoothly.
The engineer was different. Thin and gaunt, yes. But despite everything he had a sunny personality. He had survived, the Japs and Germans had been defeated, and no matter what happened, things could only get better.
Surely life would be good!
He seemed so very alive, and very attractive precisely because he was alive. They knew the same colloquialisms, the same dialect phrases, the same places in the gently undulating Southern landscape of sandy stretches, forests, and peat bogs.
They even know the same songs and dance moves. There had been no dancing for so long!
A year and a half after they married, the Dutch left Java forever. When the transports docked in Singapore, passengers weren't allowed on shore because the local politicians sided with the Indonesian Nationalists and were determined to be as inhospitable as possible.
When they arrived in Holland, there was no place in the big cities for most of them, and the refugees dispersed. Many ended up in North Brabant. Eindhoven, and surrounding towns like Valkenswaard, seemed to have more space and more prospects.
The multitude of cigar factories that existed before the war had been severely reduced - among those that remained were Hofnar and Willem II in Valkenswaard, Karel 1 in Eindhoven, a few more in various other settlements of the Kempen region. But they were finally flourishing again, and other industries were starting to grow.
She took in her sister's kid, and raised him in the small living quarters over a store that she and her man had found. Several years later they bought the store. It wasn't until they moved the business to a larger space that they finally had enough room for all three of them.
But by that time she and the engineer were just friends. He was still sunny, still reassuring, and comforting to be around. But they had met as mature adults after years of great hardship, at a time when they had already become fully formed individuals. After a period of play-acting at married life, they had percolated back into being independent by themselves.
Not solitary, mind you, but not quite able to function as a couple.
When the boy Jan moved out, her husband moved into Jan's room.
No fuss, no scene, no bitter argument. It just seemed right.
Among other things they sold cigars in the store. She worked during the day when her husband was at his job for Philips in Eindhoven, then when he had come home he would have dinner, and she would go to her evening job at the recovery facility among the pensioners. But during the day she puttered about, stocked the shelves, dealt with customers, kept track of what products people wanted.
The cigars had always fascinated her. Tobacco has such romantic names....... words that recall a warmer place, with more interesting scenery, smaragdine rice paddies, dormant volcanoes covered in forest green, the heat beating down and making the air vibrate, docks interspersing the dense dark line of palms along the shore, little black bugs that were everywhere during the rainy season when all was mildewed. Colours, fragrances, warmth.
Cigars connected Valkenswaard to a place that was not Valkenswaard. Different.
They had been young then. They weren't old now, but they were no longer young.
She hadn't worked at the recovery facility for several years by then. And her husband had retired.
They still ran the store, but in the evening she would go to the café for a few hours, to have a cup of coffee or a glass of sherry, smoke a cigar, and hear about the rest of the world through the eyes of the local newspapers.
Like many mature adults, she needed time alone. Her time.
One could escape for a while, dream a bit.
Have some coffee, and smoke a cigar.
A halve corona, or a bolknak.
As the first whisp of smoke rises, the long long piers of Tandjong Priok come into view.
The air trembles in the blazing heat rising up from the cement.
Briefly, autumn rain turns into summer.
Gilded evenings, silken leaves.
AND NOW
When I went back to Valkenswaard in 1999, the cigar factories were long gone. Nobody makes the product that once gave life to the town anymore, and far fewer people even smoke them. The place now smells of beer and car exhausts, not of country side and leaves.
Shopkeepers no longer live over their stores. Café-Billards have disappeared. Old buildings have been torn down and replaced.
The streets still follow the same plan.
For those who stayed, change has undoubtedly been both gradual and desirable.
But for someone now permanently in exile, the difference is drastic.
Many of the people I used to know are gone.
That is to be expected, we all get older.
At the Occidental on Pine Street, surrounded by the incense of other people's cigars, I can view the world through sepia-tinted spectacles if I desire.
Or happily wonder what rosy marvels will yet come.
All is briefly timeless in the smoke.
I can escape for a while.
And dream a bit.
My time.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Unlike the rest of the week, it is a quiet night there.
I like quiet Saturday nights - I lament the lack of female companionship, but as I am totally s.o.l. in that regard, that cannot be helped - but the absence of the rowdiness and drunken merriment that is usual elsewhere in the city is very pleasant.
The Occidental Cigar Bar is our kind of place.
All I really want out of an inn at eventide is the same calm comfort that many Dutch cafés used to have, before they forbade smoking indoors and started catering to alcoholic teenagers, druggies, and drunkards.
That, and the displays of rutting behaviour.
Not having rutted in a while, seeing such is sickening.
A café is a place to relax, smoke contemplatively, and read a bit.
Or take in the world-map on the far wall, showing all the places where 'our' ancestors raped, pillaged, and conquered.
We Dutch used to be the world's incendiarists, now we simply light a pipe in the evening, or have a Java cheroot with a cup of coffee.
The old-style Dutch café is a living room - a public place where you can be a bit more private.
Except, of course, because of Brussels, one now has to behave.
Europeanization enforces clean new living.
No more smoking! And sit up straight!
Be social to the drunken puritans!
[Informational interstice: Java cheroot - Besuki filler, zandblad binder, Sumatra wrapper. Besuki leaf comes from Eastern Java, and has a fine mild fragrance and flavour. It is often used in mixed filler (the main part of the cigar). Zandblad ('Sand Leaf') are the leaves close to the ground, pale and large. Their strength and size make them suitable to hold the guts of a hand-rolled cigar together. Sumatra produces lovely thin and silky leaves with narrow veins, soft and pliable, that form the perfect outter layer; aesthetically pleasing and possessed of a spicy-floral fragrance. A good cigar is a work of art.
Brands to look for: Glorie van Java, Hajenius, De Olifant, Oud Kampen - the last mentioned is probably the only all-handmade smoke left. But the previous three (machine formed, hand finished), are also exceptional products. And there are many others, in a variety of shapes and sizes. The old-fashioned Tuit Knak (short torpedo shape) is harder to make and will cost marginally more than a Halve Corona or a Senorita. ]
VALKENSWAARD, THEN
There was a pleasant café-billard before the end of town. Broad tables covered with rugs, as is common in the Netherlands, with comfortable chairs. In one section of the large tap-room was a pool table, hardly ever used by patrons - that was the generation before us, by the seventies billiards had faded a bit - but mostly there were empty tables around, each with a large glass ashtray that was far too big to casually pocket.
Dark browns, muted carpet purples, small reflected glints of glass.
Like many cafés in that day the owner also sold a selection of cigars: cheaper greenish torpedoes that smelled of clay for the old farmer, Senoritas for the fancy man, and very decent Half-Coronas for the patron with good taste.
One of whom was a elderly woman of spare frame, who smoked them at her table while reading the newspapers.
I spoke with her a few times when I was there, and after a while I knew more about her.
No, I didn't pry.
In an otherwise empty establishment it is polite to say 'goede avond mevrouw' when passing to one's own table with another cup of coffee, or to occasionally borrow a pack of matches. Eventually conversation may happen.
She owned one of the local shops, which she and her husband had bought a few years after being thrown out of Indonesia. Like a fair number of people locally she was in a permanent state of exile, but unlike most such she was not a Northerner temporarily carpetbagging in the South, nor an actual Indo desperately trying to forget the emerald lands forever lost.
She had been born in Eindhoven, and had family in Valkenswaard - that was why she and her husband had returned after Soekarno's revolution.
They had met shortly after the war during the bersiap ("be on guard") period. She had been a nurse sent out in 1945, he was an engineer who survived the Japanese railway project in Pakan Baroe and escaped into the jungle a few months before end of the war.
She had known his uncle and aunt who lived in Eindhoven in the thirties, that was one of the things they had in common.
Both of them had lost relatives during the war, in Holland and in the Indies.
It seemed natural for them to get married.
What didn't seem so natural after their wedding was having children. Really, what had pulled them together was the places they shared and the people they used to know. They were mature individuals who found renewed stability with each other, they weren't hormonally stressed young lovers. And it was precisely because stability was lacking in Java during the last few years of the Dutch empire that children at the beginning had been out of the question. What kind of environment would they give a child, when the end of four hundred years in the East was in sight?
Was it responsible to bring someone into a world that had yet to recover from chaos?
When they settled in Noord Brabant, she ended up taking care of her sister's son Jan - her sister had died in prison in 1944, leaving a widower made unstable because of the war, and an infant - and by the time Jan was of college age, she and her own husband, while still close, no longer shared a bed. Jan was an adult now. An engineer working for the state. He had a promising career ahead of him, and would probably marry soon and have kids. She was looking forward to having the tiny ones stay with her during the summer, and visit regularly the rest of the year. Her husband could tell them tales of the Indies, and both of them would make sure the kids grew up knowing about all the people who had gone before, whose tales must be told, because their deaths had robbed them of their own voice.
She smoked cigars partly because of memory.
There had been several cigar factories in Valkenswaard before the war. Everyone in the town was, in some way, connected to tobacco.
The filler leaf came primarily from Eastern Java. The binder was often grown in Europe or South America. The best wrappers came from Sumatra, not too very far from where the Japanese during the war tried to build a railway through the jungle with slave labour.
Every few months buyers for the factories travelled to Rotterdam, and later to Hamburg, to inspect bales of new leaf, test samples, place orders. They would arrange transport back to Valkenswaard, guarding the precious cargo which was the life blood of so many people in the town, and the tobacco would be carefully warehoused. After fermentation, the central vein was stripped from the leaf by workers who lacked other skills, more experienced hands would roll the bigger cigars, young women made the thin little cigarillos that were barely thicker than cigarettes.
The town grew during the twenties and thirties, nice houses were built for successful merchants, and a few people got an education - learning was a little bit more affordable because of the money that cigars made.
The war was, of course, a disaster.
She had been in the North at nursing school when war broke out. For five years she did not see the South again. Finally, in 1945 after liberation, still rail thin from the hunger winter (the Germans had robbed all the food in the North for their own people), she went back for several months. But so much had been destroyed, or had simply worn down and not been repaired or restored, that she felt out of place. She was cognizant of her uselessness to relatives who had to share their own almost non-existent resources with a skeleton, and she was a stranger to people who had been there all the time and were still trying to digest what they had seen and what they themselves had experienced.
When the chance came, she took it. A re-opened hospital in the Indies was desperate for nurses, as many of their previous staff had died in the prisoner of war camps.
She signed up, shipped out. Learned a few phrases of Malay on the boat, as well as words like Tjimahi, Soekoen, Keloet, Lawiesegalagala, Pangkalan..... all of which have a peculiar resonance for those that lived.
Java when she first arrived was intense and brilliant, a place so different from the cold grey northern world. Viridian, gold, and crimson.
She met the engineer at a social event in the city where she worked. Many Dutch people still lived in or near the former P.O.W. camps, because going back into the countryside was dangerous. The Javanese were determined to be rid of the colonizers and tales of rape and murder in the outlying areas were common. In some towns and villages, the pemoeda (armed nationalist youth wing) had practiced unspeakable cruelties on those whom they considered collaborators, and destroyed all traces of the Netherlanders, including schools, churches, clinics, public facilities, even train stations.
In addition to the mental barriers that people had pulled up around themselves in order to survive the Japanese occupation, walls were growing between ethnic groups, and between those whose war years were not at all the same. Javans, Chinese, Ambonese, Holland-Dutch, and Indo-Dutch - they all seemed at times to be from different planets, and did not get along smoothly.
The engineer was different. Thin and gaunt, yes. But despite everything he had a sunny personality. He had survived, the Japs and Germans had been defeated, and no matter what happened, things could only get better.
Surely life would be good!
He seemed so very alive, and very attractive precisely because he was alive. They knew the same colloquialisms, the same dialect phrases, the same places in the gently undulating Southern landscape of sandy stretches, forests, and peat bogs.
They even know the same songs and dance moves. There had been no dancing for so long!
A year and a half after they married, the Dutch left Java forever. When the transports docked in Singapore, passengers weren't allowed on shore because the local politicians sided with the Indonesian Nationalists and were determined to be as inhospitable as possible.
When they arrived in Holland, there was no place in the big cities for most of them, and the refugees dispersed. Many ended up in North Brabant. Eindhoven, and surrounding towns like Valkenswaard, seemed to have more space and more prospects.
The multitude of cigar factories that existed before the war had been severely reduced - among those that remained were Hofnar and Willem II in Valkenswaard, Karel 1 in Eindhoven, a few more in various other settlements of the Kempen region. But they were finally flourishing again, and other industries were starting to grow.
She took in her sister's kid, and raised him in the small living quarters over a store that she and her man had found. Several years later they bought the store. It wasn't until they moved the business to a larger space that they finally had enough room for all three of them.
But by that time she and the engineer were just friends. He was still sunny, still reassuring, and comforting to be around. But they had met as mature adults after years of great hardship, at a time when they had already become fully formed individuals. After a period of play-acting at married life, they had percolated back into being independent by themselves.
Not solitary, mind you, but not quite able to function as a couple.
When the boy Jan moved out, her husband moved into Jan's room.
No fuss, no scene, no bitter argument. It just seemed right.
Among other things they sold cigars in the store. She worked during the day when her husband was at his job for Philips in Eindhoven, then when he had come home he would have dinner, and she would go to her evening job at the recovery facility among the pensioners. But during the day she puttered about, stocked the shelves, dealt with customers, kept track of what products people wanted.
The cigars had always fascinated her. Tobacco has such romantic names....... words that recall a warmer place, with more interesting scenery, smaragdine rice paddies, dormant volcanoes covered in forest green, the heat beating down and making the air vibrate, docks interspersing the dense dark line of palms along the shore, little black bugs that were everywhere during the rainy season when all was mildewed. Colours, fragrances, warmth.
Cigars connected Valkenswaard to a place that was not Valkenswaard. Different.
They had been young then. They weren't old now, but they were no longer young.
She hadn't worked at the recovery facility for several years by then. And her husband had retired.
They still ran the store, but in the evening she would go to the café for a few hours, to have a cup of coffee or a glass of sherry, smoke a cigar, and hear about the rest of the world through the eyes of the local newspapers.
Like many mature adults, she needed time alone. Her time.
One could escape for a while, dream a bit.
Have some coffee, and smoke a cigar.
A halve corona, or a bolknak.
As the first whisp of smoke rises, the long long piers of Tandjong Priok come into view.
The air trembles in the blazing heat rising up from the cement.
Briefly, autumn rain turns into summer.
Gilded evenings, silken leaves.
AND NOW
When I went back to Valkenswaard in 1999, the cigar factories were long gone. Nobody makes the product that once gave life to the town anymore, and far fewer people even smoke them. The place now smells of beer and car exhausts, not of country side and leaves.
Shopkeepers no longer live over their stores. Café-Billards have disappeared. Old buildings have been torn down and replaced.
The streets still follow the same plan.
For those who stayed, change has undoubtedly been both gradual and desirable.
But for someone now permanently in exile, the difference is drastic.
Many of the people I used to know are gone.
That is to be expected, we all get older.
At the Occidental on Pine Street, surrounded by the incense of other people's cigars, I can view the world through sepia-tinted spectacles if I desire.
Or happily wonder what rosy marvels will yet come.
All is briefly timeless in the smoke.
I can escape for a while.
And dream a bit.
My time.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
AJOEN AJOEN
In this post we learn that you should not marry a girl from Pesapen because she has too many screws loose, pretensions, and 'attitude', or a young lady from Semarang because she's in debt up to her eyebrows and will likely bankrupt you, or even a dame from Krembangan - that type has too many lice.
I have no idea how many lice are just enough.
AYUN AYUN
[SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0VJeQ-4550]
Ajoen-ajoen
[In Dutch orthography, because it dates from the Dutch period. The 'j' in Dutch is like the 'y' in English when placed at the beginning of a syllable. The combination 'oe' is pronounced like 'oo' or 'ew' in English, or 'ou' in French. Double o ('oo') sounds like 'oh', as does a single 'o' preceding a single consonant.]
Djangan mandi Kali Pesapen,
Kali Pesapen banjak lintahnya;
Djangan kawin noni Pesapen,
Noni Persapen banjak tingkahnya.
Refrein:
Ajoen ajoen ajoen in die hoge klapperboom,
ajoen ajoen Masmira,
Djangan main gila.
Ajoen ajoen ajoen in die hoge klapperboom,
Ajoen ajoen Masmira,
Djangan main gila.
Djangan mandi Kali Semarang,
Kali Semarang banjak oedangnya;
Djangan kawin noni Semarang,
Noni Semarang banjak oetangnya.
Refrein.
Djangan mandi Kali Krembangan,
Kali Krembangan banjak batoenya;
Djangan kawin noni Krembangan,
Noni Krembangan banyak koetoenya.
Refrein.
Indorock instrumental version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TH4Vzkbu_w&feature=related
And whatever you do, avoid bathing in the rivers of those places too - leeches, crawdaddies, and boulders!
Plus, probably, the local women.
Other than that, you're fine.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
I have no idea how many lice are just enough.
AYUN AYUN
[SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0VJeQ-4550]
Ajoen-ajoen
[In Dutch orthography, because it dates from the Dutch period. The 'j' in Dutch is like the 'y' in English when placed at the beginning of a syllable. The combination 'oe' is pronounced like 'oo' or 'ew' in English, or 'ou' in French. Double o ('oo') sounds like 'oh', as does a single 'o' preceding a single consonant.]
Djangan mandi Kali Pesapen,
Kali Pesapen banjak lintahnya;
Djangan kawin noni Pesapen,
Noni Persapen banjak tingkahnya.
Refrein:
Ajoen ajoen ajoen in die hoge klapperboom,
ajoen ajoen Masmira,
Djangan main gila.
Ajoen ajoen ajoen in die hoge klapperboom,
Ajoen ajoen Masmira,
Djangan main gila.
Djangan mandi Kali Semarang,
Kali Semarang banjak oedangnya;
Djangan kawin noni Semarang,
Noni Semarang banjak oetangnya.
Refrein.
Djangan mandi Kali Krembangan,
Kali Krembangan banjak batoenya;
Djangan kawin noni Krembangan,
Noni Krembangan banyak koetoenya.
Refrein.
Indorock instrumental version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TH4Vzkbu_w&feature=related
And whatever you do, avoid bathing in the rivers of those places too - leeches, crawdaddies, and boulders!
Plus, probably, the local women.
Other than that, you're fine.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
ANTARA SESALAN DAN SAYANG
On the day that she went off to have dim sum with all of her relatives and her boyfriend she looked beautiful.
Red really suits her, it emphasis precisely how slender she is, how very young she looks.
And she knows how to choose lipstick.
Stunning colours - red sweater, golden necklace, pale ivory skin, crimson lips, and dark dark hair.
Quite the vision.
Radiant.
I left the house before she did. Felt a depressive mood coming on, and didn't want to rain on her parade.
I wished her a good time before I left.
It was a day I didn't want to hear or speak any Cantonese, so instead of stopping for breakfast in Chinatown as I usually do when I flee on weekends, I bypassed the old neighborhood entirely and went straight to the office.
One bad omen, visible from the bus, did manage to nauseate: a double happiness in magnificent calligraphy surrounded by traditional decorations and propitious symbols.
Golden script on a deep crimson background; a very fine presentation piece.
Given present circumstances I do not need to see stuff like that.
Even if we didn't still live together I would manage to make myself miserable on weekends. It's a peculiar talent. Probably always latent, but not being in a relationship really gives it the chance to come out and shine. Remarkable.
I never knew that about myself.
Gonna learn to squelch that.
For much of the weekend I listened to old-timey krontjong. Not the ballads of Zhou Xuan (周璇) in Mandarin, nor Francis Yip (葉麗儀) in Cantonese. Not even the mellifluous ('saccharine') tones of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君) singing Hokkien songs. Krontjong.
Oh, and also some Indo-rock.
But mostly Krontjong.
Kertjong-kertjong-kerontjongong!
Various renditions of Bengawan Solo, several versions of Sayang Sayang E, and a number of Ambonese and Stambul classics.
As well as dulcet-voiced thirteen year old Sandra Reemer, when she first recorded for Philips back in the sixties.
One or two songs by Wieteke van Dort, though she specializes a bit too much in unhappy airs about leaving the old country, about parting and separation, about the good old days.
The Dutch have too much a taste for sugared lyrics and honeyed dreariness.
Trying to put oneself in an other-where and an other-when is done best when listening to more light-hearted stuff.
Krontjong.
Krontjong.
Krontjong.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Red really suits her, it emphasis precisely how slender she is, how very young she looks.
And she knows how to choose lipstick.
Stunning colours - red sweater, golden necklace, pale ivory skin, crimson lips, and dark dark hair.
Quite the vision.
Radiant.
I left the house before she did. Felt a depressive mood coming on, and didn't want to rain on her parade.
I wished her a good time before I left.
It was a day I didn't want to hear or speak any Cantonese, so instead of stopping for breakfast in Chinatown as I usually do when I flee on weekends, I bypassed the old neighborhood entirely and went straight to the office.
One bad omen, visible from the bus, did manage to nauseate: a double happiness in magnificent calligraphy surrounded by traditional decorations and propitious symbols.
Golden script on a deep crimson background; a very fine presentation piece.
Given present circumstances I do not need to see stuff like that.
Even if we didn't still live together I would manage to make myself miserable on weekends. It's a peculiar talent. Probably always latent, but not being in a relationship really gives it the chance to come out and shine. Remarkable.
I never knew that about myself.
Gonna learn to squelch that.
For much of the weekend I listened to old-timey krontjong. Not the ballads of Zhou Xuan (周璇) in Mandarin, nor Francis Yip (葉麗儀) in Cantonese. Not even the mellifluous ('saccharine') tones of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君) singing Hokkien songs. Krontjong.
Oh, and also some Indo-rock.
But mostly Krontjong.
Kertjong-kertjong-kerontjongong!
Various renditions of Bengawan Solo, several versions of Sayang Sayang E, and a number of Ambonese and Stambul classics.
As well as dulcet-voiced thirteen year old Sandra Reemer, when she first recorded for Philips back in the sixties.
One or two songs by Wieteke van Dort, though she specializes a bit too much in unhappy airs about leaving the old country, about parting and separation, about the good old days.
The Dutch have too much a taste for sugared lyrics and honeyed dreariness.
Trying to put oneself in an other-where and an other-when is done best when listening to more light-hearted stuff.
Krontjong.
Krontjong.
Krontjong.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Monday, October 03, 2011
PUNCAK
It's odd that the restaurant should be named after a mountain resort where Dutch civil servants went to escape the heat and eat their own food. Especially when it's one of the few places in that country where 'poffertjes' are known.
Poffertjes are perhaps the quintessential Dutch fair food. Tiny puff-batter pancakes cooked in a special pan with indentations, buttery hot and dusted with powdered sugar. Quite unsuited to the tropics. Other Dutch delicacies commonly available at hotels and restaurants there are pannekoeken (crepes) and kroketten. As well as Dutch cakes and confections.
The frikadel, which did not become well-known till the sixties, is of course unknown.
To say nothing of the bamibal or the nasischijf.
The restaurant in Amsterdam, however, serves none of those things.
But the food is very good indeed.
RESTAURANT POENTJAK PAS
Nassau Kade 366
Amsterdam
Telephone: 020-6180906
Unlike the steep slopes near the peaks of Gunung Gede and Pangrango in western Java, in the Bogor Regency, Puncak Pass restaurant in Amsterdam is in one of the flattest areas you will know. Holland does not have mountains, and the great city on the Amstel river is, essentially, a glorious mud flat. The restaurant is barely two blocks away from the Overtoom, relatively near the Van Gogh Museum and the Vondel Park.
The food, of course, is Indonesian.
In the days when the Dutch were still in Java, they sometimes times felt homesick for cool weather and Dutch food. Those who returned to Holland after the war still had the air of the Indies in their nostrils, and were homesick instead for distant emerald islands and the familiar tastes of their younger years.
The Puncak ('peak') pass area was a place additionally that many veterans were familiar with, because of heightened nationalist activity in Western Java during the Indonesian independence struggle. Western Java (Sunda) had been the heartland of the Dutch colonial world, where the empire maintained longer than anywhere else. Consequently it was also the area that many would miss the most when they departed - some of them had family histories in Sunda dating back several generations.
What you will eat at the Poentjak Pas Restaurant is some of the best Indonesian food in the Netherlands.
The proprietress, if she is still alive - it has been over ten years since I was last there - is a gracious elderly lady, whose Indonesian speech still has the antique flavour of the pre-war period.
I remember her as a warm hostess, both intensely interested in her guests as well as diplomatically discrete. The food, every single time, was stellar.
Sundanese food is not as sweet as dishes in Central Java, and has a lighter touch with strong flavours, relying instead on freshness and fragrance. With a vast array of vegetable dishes, or vegetable and meat or fish combinations, plus salads of raw and blanched ingredients, and tangy relishes, it is reputed to be good for the skin, accounting for the lovely complexions of the women in Western Java.
My uncle Jan may dream of the old days on the Puncak Pass in Indonesia.
I remember evenings at the Poentjak Pas in Amsterdam.
My memories are no less golden.
A very warm place.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Poffertjes are perhaps the quintessential Dutch fair food. Tiny puff-batter pancakes cooked in a special pan with indentations, buttery hot and dusted with powdered sugar. Quite unsuited to the tropics. Other Dutch delicacies commonly available at hotels and restaurants there are pannekoeken (crepes) and kroketten. As well as Dutch cakes and confections.
The frikadel, which did not become well-known till the sixties, is of course unknown.
To say nothing of the bamibal or the nasischijf.
The restaurant in Amsterdam, however, serves none of those things.
But the food is very good indeed.
RESTAURANT POENTJAK PAS
Nassau Kade 366
Amsterdam
Telephone: 020-6180906
Unlike the steep slopes near the peaks of Gunung Gede and Pangrango in western Java, in the Bogor Regency, Puncak Pass restaurant in Amsterdam is in one of the flattest areas you will know. Holland does not have mountains, and the great city on the Amstel river is, essentially, a glorious mud flat. The restaurant is barely two blocks away from the Overtoom, relatively near the Van Gogh Museum and the Vondel Park.
The food, of course, is Indonesian.
In the days when the Dutch were still in Java, they sometimes times felt homesick for cool weather and Dutch food. Those who returned to Holland after the war still had the air of the Indies in their nostrils, and were homesick instead for distant emerald islands and the familiar tastes of their younger years.
The Puncak ('peak') pass area was a place additionally that many veterans were familiar with, because of heightened nationalist activity in Western Java during the Indonesian independence struggle. Western Java (Sunda) had been the heartland of the Dutch colonial world, where the empire maintained longer than anywhere else. Consequently it was also the area that many would miss the most when they departed - some of them had family histories in Sunda dating back several generations.
What you will eat at the Poentjak Pas Restaurant is some of the best Indonesian food in the Netherlands.
The proprietress, if she is still alive - it has been over ten years since I was last there - is a gracious elderly lady, whose Indonesian speech still has the antique flavour of the pre-war period.
I remember her as a warm hostess, both intensely interested in her guests as well as diplomatically discrete. The food, every single time, was stellar.
Sundanese food is not as sweet as dishes in Central Java, and has a lighter touch with strong flavours, relying instead on freshness and fragrance. With a vast array of vegetable dishes, or vegetable and meat or fish combinations, plus salads of raw and blanched ingredients, and tangy relishes, it is reputed to be good for the skin, accounting for the lovely complexions of the women in Western Java.
My uncle Jan may dream of the old days on the Puncak Pass in Indonesia.
I remember evenings at the Poentjak Pas in Amsterdam.
My memories are no less golden.
A very warm place.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
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