Catenius-van der Meijden and the Dutch Colonial Cookbooks

The Dutch colonial cookbooks belong to the Java of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, written in the households of the Indies for the European and Indo-European women who ran them. Among them the Oost-Indisch kookboek of J. M. J. Catenius-van der Meijden, published in 1902, stands as the best-known record of what a Dutch-Indonesian kitchen cooked at the turn of the century.

A colonial cookbook of the Indies had a practical purpose before it had any literary one. It served a housewife who rarely cooked herself, and who needed to instruct a Javanese cook, the koki, in the dishes of a European table that had drifted far from its Dutch origins. The books therefore fix on paper a cooking that had until then passed from hand to hand, and they record the dishes of the Indies in the language of the household that ordered them. Catenius-van der Meijden's Oost-Indisch kookboek of 1902 belongs to this tradition, and it is cited by later writers as a witness to the table of the colonial Indies. The interest of such a book lies in the mixture it reveals. The Dutch table of the Indies took in rice, sambal, coconut milk and the spice paste, the bumbu, as the staples of daily eating, while keeping bread, butter, roasts and the pastry of the Netherlands for the occasions that called for them. The great shared meal of the Indo-European household, the rijsttafel, set a quantity of dishes around plain rice, and it is the clearest expression of that union. Sri Owen, in Indonesian Food, places this colonial table within the larger history of the archipelago's cooking, as one layer among the many that foreign trade and settlement left on it. The books must be read with care for what they are. They were written from the side of the household that gave the orders, and they record the dishes in the form that table preferred, often adapted in sweetness, in heat and in the use of European ingredients. They are accordingly a source for the Indo-European kitchen first, and for the Javanese or Sumatran village kitchen only at one remove. Their value to the historian is nonetheless considerable, since they preserve recipe names, methods and proportions from a period for which few other written kitchen records survive. Their legacy runs forward into the modern Indonesian cookbook. The habit of setting down measured recipes in a book, rather than carrying them in the memory of a cook, was strengthened by this colonial literature, and the national collection of the Mustika Rasa in 1967 stands in a very different spirit but in the same line of recording. A reader who turns from Catenius-van der Meijden to Sri Owen finds the same subject, the food of the islands, treated in the one case from the verandah and in the other from the kitchen and the market.

The table these books describe is one of plain rice surrounded by many dishes, among them curries in coconut milk, fried and grilled meats, vegetables and a range of sambals, with pickles and crisp accompaniments to set against them. In the Dutch-Indonesian household the heat and sweetness of the Indonesian bumbu sat beside the bread, butter and roasts of the European table, and it is this meeting that gives the Indo-European kitchen its character.