All Food Recipes

This cucumber like plant is known in America by its old Amerindian names, Choco or Chayote. Burkill is right in saying that the young shoots can be eaten, rather like asparagus, as well as the fruit.

Many English people will recognize this by its Polynesian name of Taro. Herklots and others also call it Dasheen. The OED Supplement backs him in saying that this name is derived from French de Chine, which makes one wonder whether this is a bit of Louisiana French that got attached to the plant in the southern United State, where I believe it is grown a good deal. It was well known in ancient Egypt and ancient China. If you are living in a tropical or subtropical country, by all means try talas or taro as an alternative to rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams. There are many ways to cook it. I particularly like it boiled, like a floury potato, sliced and eaten with freshly grated kelapa muda; or sliced very thin and fried, like potato crips. Make sure, though, that it is boiled or baked long enough to destroy the calcium oxylate crystals that form in some (not all) varieties. These can taste unpleasantly acrid, or even cause mild inflammation in the mouth and throat.

Daun talas-the huge, waxy leaves, like upside-down spades on playing cards-are often used for wrapping food, but you can also eat them. Children who are playing out of doors and are caught by a tropical shower will break off talas leaves, if their are any neraby, and run down the street waving them over their heads as umbrellas.

This is flat-leafed or ‘continental’ parsley, which is becoming better-known in Britain and which many people consider has a better flavour than the crinkly-leafed kind. Seledri is sometimes confused with coriander leaves, but the two plants are quite different. In fact, it is Thai cuisine which relies heavily on coriander leaves; Indonesias recipes more often favour parsley.

The beans of this plant, with the pod and skin removed, are packed in brine and sold by Conimex under Peteh Asin; they look rather like broad beans, shelled. ‘Asin’ means ’salty’, which is not really an accurate description; the flavour is bitter and at the same time nutty-’remotely suggesting garlic’, as Burkill puts it. In the tropics you buy fresh pete in pods, up to half a metre long. A favourite way to cook young ones is to top and tail the pod, trim off the stringy edges, and slice the pod very thin with the beans still in it. Crisp-fry the pod, and the beans remain soft in the middle of the slices. Pete is even more delicious mixed with tempe and hot sambal, but I doubt if this would be to the taste of most Europeans. More commonly, fresh pete is taken out of the pod and the skin peeled off each bean with a sharp knife before cooking.

If you buy this in tins in London it will probably be labelled ‘Bitter Cucumber’, though the reference books suggest other names for it such as Balsam Cucumber, Bitter Gourd and Maiden’s Blush. Another Indonesian name, Periok, recalls a word for a cooking pot and also the name of the seaport of Jakarta, Tanjung Priok. Peria grows on tall vines is a knobby, unattractive-looking object which, cooked, is very good to eat, if you like this rather bitter-tasting kind of vegetable. It is not unlike an unpickled gherkin. It is also said, in some querters, to be good against evil spirits.

Remember that kacang in Indonesian means both bean and nut. The name of this one translate into English quite literally as ‘ground-nut’, so called, of course, because the flowers of Arachis have the remarkable habit of diving back towards the soil and burying their seedpods in it. Like so many other useful plants, the ground-nut or peanut evolved in Central America and the basin of the Parana River; it was one of the first prozes that Colombus’ men and their successors brought back to europe. Dialect names for the plant, however, suggest that it may have reached the East in Spanish or Portuguese ships across the Pacific. Certainly peanuts have been an important crop in Java for at least 200 years. Raffles says that in the early 1800s they were grown near all the large towns, principally for their oil, which I suppose was used for cooking. Peanut oil is indeed very good for this purpose, though personally I prefer corn or coconut oil.
There are several ways to make peanuts into delicious savoury snacks or makanan kecil 9’small food’). Rempeyek Kacang, admittedly not the easiest, is perhaps the best of all. People in Java even make them into a fermented paste, called oncom, rather like a kind of peanuts tempe, which they fry before eating. Unfortunately I have nit yet been able to find out what strain of bacillus is used in this process.

From the botanist’s point of view these are distinct species, but for the cook they are virtually indistinguishable, because the fruit must be eaten while still very young. As it grows older, L. Acutangula develops little ribs or ridges along its length, while L. Cylyndrica remains smooth. Both have a fibrous inner structure, which hardens with age, but it is the ’skeleton’ of L. Cylyndrica which is easier to separate from the surrounding pulp, so that this species provides, or used to provide, bath-loofahs on a commercial scale. The fruit of both species becomes bitter and strongly purgative when fully grown, and you are not likely to find any on sale which are more than about 20 cm (8 in) long.
The plant is a kind of climbing cucumber. The Arabs call it luff, which obviously gives us our botanical and English names, and there is a great conflusion of regional and dialect names all over South-East Asia. I think oyong was originally a word in the Jakarta dialect, but it seems to be quite generally used in Central and East Java also.

This is a rather unsual bean, which seems to have been brought eastwards by Arab traders out of Africa. Each pod has four wavy-edged wings growing along its length, giving it a distincly dressy appearance, like a French bean going  to a party. The young beans are excellent if you boil or steam them, in the pod, for about 4 minutes, and eat them whole like mange tout peas (larger ones can be cut into convenient lengths before cooking). Kecipir make a good substitute for French beans in Urap.