Simple And Easy All Food Recipes in Many Categories…..
Water-melon. These are plentiful and cheap in Java, as one would expect on a tropical island with a high rainfall; you often see them for sale at roadside stalls, to refresh the weary traveller. Water-melon seeds, which can be bought at Chinese shops in London and elsewhere, have a pleasant nutty flavour when they are roasted. We call them kwaci. Just crack them open with your teeth.
This is a most attractive pear-shaped fruit that grows on a stemless palm. It has a shiny brown tesselated skin, rather like snakeskin, wich peels off easily. The flesh inside is segmented, white, and somewhat dry and waxy, but very good to eat provided you do not get salak which contains too much tannin. Salak from Bali are usually reckoned to be the best and sweetest.
The name literally means ‘hairy’, because the skin of this fruit, which is reddish-pink, has long, soft spines growing from it, though these are too thick and too few to be really like hair. The fruit is about the size of an egg, and the thick rind splits or cuts open easily to reveal a softfleshed, white interior. Inside this a large, rough stone, rather like a plum-stone. The flesh is sweet, juicy, and fragrant, not unlike a lychee, which is indeed a closely related species. The lychee, however, has a smooth skin.
Like many good things that tgrow min South-East Asia, pineapplea were cultivated long ago by the Indians of tropical America and were carried by colonizers to anywhere alse where they could be made to grow-including European greenhouses, where fresh ones were cosseted into becoming expensive gifts for royalty. Commercial growers in the tropics quickly developed races and varieties with the characteristics they wanted for the market; the first cannery in Singapore was operating by the late 1880s. But even big business cannot spoil the pineapple; it remains a favourite fruit for almost everyone, and succeeds somehow in being both commomplace and exotic at the same time. It is particularly good as a dessert fruit because it contains chemicals that aid digestion. Unripe fruit, indeed, are said to do this to extent of being violently purgative, but I have known many Javanese eat them as part of a dish of Rujak with no ill-effects. in Java, the best pineapples are those from Bogor.
The Spanish introduced these to the East from Central America, and now they grow everywhere, both wild and cultivated. The flesh, with its orange-pink colour and rather bland sweetness, is certainly very agreeable to eat, though I think one can grow tired of it. The leaves and flowers, however, are more interesting. The male flowers are good for Urap, and the young leaves are better still; Javanese urap daun kates is well worth trying. Burkill says the flowers, fruit and leaves contain papain, which helps to tenderize meat and has many medicinal properties. He doesn;t mention, however, that the juice of young leaves can be drunk as a prophylactic against malaria if quinine is unavailable. At any rate, that is what we did during the War, though I daresay it was just the unpleasantly bitter taste of the juice that made us think it must be good for us.
Mangoes came originally from India, but have been cultivated all over Indonesia for a long time, wherever the climate is dry enough to give them a chance to fruit. They need no introduction to Western readers, though I cannot say that the imported mangoes I have bought in London have really been worth all that money. There is no substitute for fresh ones, and to my mind the best are from Indramayu or Cirebon in West Java. They need not be ripe; unripe mangoes, apart from making the best chutney, can be cooked like vegetables or simply sliced and served raw in Rujak.
The mangosteen: a relation of Asam Kandis, but larger (about as big as an apple) and with a deliciously sweet white flesh inside a thin, hard skin. As with most members of this family, the skin is extremely bitter, and the brownish-yellow fluid that it contains will stain anything it touches irredeemably-so break the fruit open with care.
