WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

During the night I dreamed of some of the people I knew as a child, and their parents. Dutch Indonesian environments. The startlingly blonde girl in grammar school, for instance, who came over to the cluster of us on the street once, and in the middle of nothing admitted "sangat suka pedes, ako" (I really like spicy), whereupon the conversation veered into discussing foods everyone's family ate. I felt a little odd at that point, because although there were sambal, serundeng, and ketjap manis in the house, my father was the only one who used them at first, and while the number of Indonesian ingredients and substances increased over the years, my father and I kept them mostly in the cellar down the steep cement staircase where my mother would not go.

Also the bright youngsters from an extremely cultured background. Their parents, a number of uncles, aunties, and very many relatives and family friends had all been in the camps. Food was extremely important to them. "Do sit down and eat with us. That's klepon, those are kwe kwe, this is yellow curry chicken, and the soup has tamarind and ginger in it."

Something I did not realize until I came back to the United States was that in that part of the Netherlands if someone spoke excellent proper Dutch there was probably something Indo in the family woodwork. If the local dialect, it was far less likely.

Ex soldiers, bureaucrats, and graduates from the technical university in Bandung.
Sometimes long family connections to the Dutch East Indies going back centuries.

Dishes I first started cooking in the United States were rawon, semur, besengek, satay, rendang, sambal goreng, and telur pindang. Because much American food was quite flavourless, and both condiments and spices were so difficult to find, I lost a lot of weight in the first two years in Berkeley, before I knew the English names of things we had never spoken about in English at home. Ketjap manis is still hard to find. So I make my own. Sambal is now made by Huy Fong among others and easily found, and with a blender one can do that at home almost without thinking anyway. Keluak and kemiri nuts can now be found, as well as fresh sereh and lengkuas, and many fermented seafood products are available at Chinese or Vietnamese stores.
[Rawon: dishes made black with keluak nut, usually meat stews. Semur: brown gravy meat stews with sweet soy sauce (ketjap manis) as a very important component. Besengek: coconut sauce curry. Satay: grilled skewered meat usually served with peanut sauce. Not that sweet crap the Thais make, but real peanut sauce. Rendang: a coconut curry where chili is a decisive ingredient, cooked till the moisture is all taken up by the meat. Sambal Goreng: something stirfried with chilies and or chilipaste. Not necessarily very spicy, but someone from the Midwest might not think so. Telur pindang: soy eggs rather like Chinese tea eggs.]

As it turns out, however, typical Dutch things like frikandel, goene haring, and zoute drop, aren't so common in San Francisco. Apparently other Dutch speakers are desperate for those things when abroad.

My apartment mate, without a drop of Dutch blood in her (she's of Cantonese stock), is still quite upset about the unavailability of groene haring.

She is, consequently, convinced there's something wrong with us Americans.
And she's probably right about that.



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