Sri Owen: Indonesian Kitchen

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Many restaurants around the county are featuring Obama-friendly meals to celebrate the inauguration of the 44th president. These meals include Hawaiian, Indonesian and African-American cuisine. Sri Owen's impressive The Indonesian Kitchen (Interlink 2008) couldn't come at a more fortuitous time. This is an ambitious book by an authority in Indonesian food. Indonesia is such a diverse land with a multitude of different peoples with vastly different cuisines. Sri tackles this complexity by breaking the book into various sections, the first three are stories of her own life and the food she ate, the next cover Staples and Basics, Methods and Techniques, and Food for Celebrations and Special Occasions. This is both a memoir and a cookbook .What makes the book work so well are not only the excellent classic recipes and modernized recipes and personal history she includes in the book, but also the wonderful photographs by Gus Filgate that capture the vibrant ingredients, people and food of Indonesia. Sri starts her first chapter with his earliest memory, eating edaname when she was not yet four years old: Moments of the past become associated with taste and textures. Patterns emerge: an early life spent mostly in small towns in Sumatra and Java, settled and peaceful at first, then disrupted by war. My life story and my development as a cook are interwoven, in those early years especially, with the story of my country. (p. 10) Her family moved often, but in the first chapter (1939-1952 Early Days), she recounts her grandmother's kitchen, cooking in earthenware and woks in the open air, and the rules of hospitality. The recipes include Braised Fish with Young Vegetable Shoots (pp. 17-18) that would be terrific in the spring when fiddlehead firms are available in farmer's markets. She includes street snack recipes like Fried Bananas (p. 28) best made with plantains. And Sticky Rice Flour Cakes with Brown Sugar Filing (pp. 33-34) a favorite children's snack. The following chapter follows Sri to university and graduate school and marriage to British Roger, who had recently graduated from Oxford: 1952-1964 Starting Out. She translates President Sukarno's speeches for diplomats and helps support her family by working several jobs at once. The writing is straightforward and descriptive, and yet evocative of the hopes and dreams of Sri at the time. The recipes that follow include student food, street food and Javanese classics – dishes that are full of flavor from aromatic spices and heat. Gule Kambing, an aromatic lamb stew (pp. 5-57) calls for several unusual ingredients like salam leaves or kaffir lime leaves, galangal or laos powder, and tamarind water or asam gekugur. There are so many alternatives to each hard-to-find ingredient, that you are bound to be able to purchase at least one of them in a good Southeast Asian market. Sri goes over all these ingredients in the following chapter, so, in a sense, its best to read her personal history last and start mid-way through the book with Staples and Basics (p. 112). This is a cookbook to be read, so that even if you do start with this chapter, you will encounter Sri's memories of how her grandmother prepared rice: My grandmother used the absorption method when she cooked her rice. She called her rice nasi tanak, she used an iron saucepan with a thick bottom…As I remember it, the rice always came out soft and fluffy, with a thin layer of intip sticking to the bottom of the pan. She would take out the intip carefully, to be dried in the sun. When dry, the intip was deep-fried in a wok to make crisp rice cake. (p. 129) This is a cookbook that is rich in context, not only how and when a dish was eaten, but the memories that go with it – encouraging us to seek out a Southeast Asian store and get ingredients to cook these dishes. Previous articles: [Cookbook reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, cookbooks, cookbook reviews, Indonesian cooking --> back to Cookbook Reviews --> back to Super Chef