The Geographical Indications of Indonesia

A Geographical Indication names a product whose character belongs to a defined place, its soil, altitude, climate and the practice of the people who grow and prepare it. In Indonesia the register is held by the state and covers a small number of agricultural products, chiefly coffee, spices and salt, from the highlands and islands that gave the archipelago its trade. The country's foremost reason for being known to the world, the spice islands of Maluku, stands behind the idea, though the register itself is a modern instrument and a young one.

The Geographical Indications that exist in Indonesia read, taken together, as a map of the land and sea described in this chapter. Coffee holds the largest place. Kopi Arabika Gayo comes from the highlands of Aceh in northern Sumatra. Kopi Kintamani Bali is grown on the volcanic slopes around Mount Batur. Kopi Arabika Toraja belongs to the highlands of South Sulawesi, Kopi Arabika Java Preanger to the mountains of West Java, and Kopi Arabika Flores Bajawa to the central highlands of Flores in Nusa Tenggara. Each name ties the cup to a particular upland of volcanic soil, which is the same ground that carries the rice terraces of Bali and the gardens of Java. The spices hold the second place, and with them the oldest history. Lada Putih Muntok is the white pepper of Bangka, an island off the south-east coast of Sumatra, where the pepper vine Piper nigrum is grown and the berries are steeped and stripped of their husks to give the pale spice. Pala Siau is the nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, of the island of Siau in North Sulawesi, a neighbour of the Maluku groups where nutmeg and clove, Syzygium aromaticum, first drew the Portuguese, the Dutch and the earlier traders of Asia. Tomé Pires wrote of these islands in the Suma Oriental, and the Banda conquest of 1621 under Jan Pieterszoon Coen was a fight for the nutmeg of a few small islands. Salt completes the register from the sea. Garam Amed Bali is the sea salt of the Amed coast in the east of Bali, made by hand from seawater on the black volcanic shore. It stands for the other half of the archipelago's wealth, the reef and the deep-sea waters of the Banda Sea, where skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis, is taken, and the milkfish ponds of the north Java coast, where Chanos chanos is raised. Salt is the preserving agent behind the dried and salted fish of the islands, and the coast gives the kitchen its seasoning as the highlands give it coffee. The register is not complete as a picture of the cooking. The sago swamps of the east, from which Metroxylon sagu yields the starch of Maluku and Papua, and the rice of the Balinese subak, the water-temple system of shared irrigation, are not protected names in this sense, and neither are the great regional dishes, which are known by their makers and their regions rather than by law. William Wongso, in Flavors of Indonesia, treats the cooking island by island, and the Geographical Indications are best read as the part of that geography which has been given a legal name: a few mountains, a few islands, one stretch of salted coast.

At the table the register appears as a short list of things the cook buys by name: a Gayo or Toraja coffee drunk black and sweet after a meal, white pepper from Muntok ground into soups and stir-fried dishes, and nutmeg from Siau grated into sweet and savoury cooking and into the preserved nutmeg fruit of the east. Salt from Amed is used to season the Balinese table, where it goes into the pastes and the grilled dishes of the island.