All Food Recipes

350 g (12 oz) desiccated coconut is the equivalent of one fresh nut. Put it into a pan and pour over it about 150 ml (1/4 pint) of water. Heat it gently until the water just starts to bubble (if it actually boils for a short time, this does no harm). Pour this into a liquidizer and add enough cold water to make the amount of santen you require. Run the liquidizer for 20 or 30 seconds, then sieve the resulting mush, forcing it through the sieve with your hand and squeezing the coconut flakes as dry as you can. If the recipe calls for thick santen, the ‘first extraction’ is sufficient. If you need thin santen, put the coconut back into the liquidizer, add more cold water and repeat the process. If you have no liquidizer, you can still squeenze and sieve coconut and water, several times over if necessary, until you have the consistency and quantity you require.

Creamed coconut can be bought from many grocers and supermarkets, and also from stores. It comes in compressed dry white slabs, looking like half a pound of lard. You can use it as a kind of ‘instant santen’ - but only in those recipes 9e.g. Sambal Goreng) where santen is added at the and, after the main process of cooking is complete. Simply cut off a chunk from the slab and put it in the pan; it will melt, excatly as butter does. If you find, in almost any dish, that your sauce is going to be too thin, this is the easiest and quickest way to thicken it at the last moment.

The only kind of vinegar that I recall having seen in Indonesia is clear and colourless, and is called cuka. It is very widely used, however. The bearest to it in Britain is distilled malt vinegar. Do not use any kind of vinegar which has been specifically flavoured (e.g. with tarragon).

Many of the dialect names for this plant resemble the Indonesian word ‘kuning’, which means yellow, and certainly yellowness is one of the most obvious characteristics of turmeric. Yellow is traditionally a sacred colour in the East and India, and Nasi Kuning (Yellow Rice). is still thought of as a dish for celebrations. ‘Curry’, says Burkill magisterially, ‘is impossible without turmeric,’ and it imparts not only its colour but also its pleasing, pungent flavour to quite a number of Indonesian dishes. The part you eat is the rjizome, which looks pretty much like ginger, but in Britain it is, I think, always sold in dried or powdered form. If you can get fresh kunyit, cut off a small piece, peel it, and crush it with the other spices, garlic, etcetera in your cobek.

This is yet another product of the versatile soya bean, once again involving fermentetion and a good deal of salt. Two tyoes of bean are used, black and yellow. Tauco makes a most mouth-watering strongly aromatic sauce, quite indescribable and not comparable to any taste known in Europan cooking. The beans should always be crushed to a smooth paste before being mixed with the other ingredients. I prefer the taste of the black beans, but they do make the sauce look rather dark and they leave small black fragments in it. The yellow beans taste very nearly as good and they make a beautiful old-gold coloured sauce which looks more tempting.
In England or the United States you can buy tauco in tins at Chinese food shops, labelled ’salted black beans’ and ’salted yellow beans. You can also buy tinned salted black or yelllow beans sauce, but I would recommend the beans themselves if you have the choice. In Indonesia you buy tauco by weight, spooned out from big stoneware jars.

Santen is not the liquid which you pour from a newly-opened nut, but a mixture of water and the oils whhich can be pressed from grated coconut flesh. It is used all over Indonesia, both to thicken sauces and to add flavour, and generally speaking no other thickening agent is ever used-certainly not wheat flour, which is almost unknown in most areas, nor rice flour. In some recipes, santen forms the basis of a more or less thick sauce; in other, it is absorbed wholly into the meat in the course of cooking, and gives it a delicious nutty flavour which is quite unobtainable in any other way. It is sometimes said that the flavour of santen is an acquired taste, and certainly no one would want their cooking to reek of coconut; but santen, properly used, is indispensable to Indonesia food, and I don’t recall meeting anyone who did not acquire the taste within the first mouthful or so.
Santen ought obviously to be made from fresh coconut, but it can be made perfectly satisfactorily from desicated or creamed coconut as well.

This tree produce leaves, daun salam, containing an aromatic, volatile oil which ginves a sutle flavour to certain dishes if a single leaf is placed in the pan during cooking. The dried leaves can now be bought in London, at a few specialist shops, but are still much easier to find in Holland. If you cannot get any, use a bay leaf instead.
The salam leaf plays in Indonesia something like the same role as the ‘curry’ leaf in India. But latter is the leaf of a quite different tree. Murraya koenigii.

The nutmeg probably originated in eastern Indonesia, but it was carried westward as soon as trade of any sort got going and it had apparently reached Europe by about AD 600. Burkill gives, as he does for many other fruits and spices, a fascinating review of its commercial history, and a pretty bloody story it is. Indonesia has paid heavily, over the centuries, for the richness of her spice islands. ironically, we do not value nutmeg for cooking as highly as Arabs and Europeans seem to; for us, their medicinal uses are more important. Among other effects, they are alleged to be aphrodisiac, though I suspect this might be said of most foods. We use nutmeg occasionally in cooking, and we also make a very agreeable kind of candied sweetmeat, with a gingery taste, from the flesh that surrounds the nutmeg itself and the red ‘cage’ of mace. Burkill says that this manisan pala used to be exported to europe; I wish it still was.