Coconut & Sambal — Lara Lee

Coconut & Sambal is a cookbook by Lara Lee, a cook and writer of Indonesian-Chinese and Australian background, drawn from her Indonesian family's kitchen and from travel between the islands. Its title names the two elements on which the cooking of the archipelago most often turns: the coconut Cocos nucifera and the sambal, the chilli relish of every island table.

The book is arranged around ingredients and preparations rather than regions, and the two named in its title organise much of it. Coconut appears as milk, as grated flesh, as toasted and ground kerisik and as oil, and each form has its own work in the pot: milk for the long simmer of a curry, kerisik for the nutty body of a dry-cooked dish, oil for frying a paste. The sambal chapters set out the pastes and relishes of the archipelago, raw, pounded and cooked, so that a single family of preparations can be followed from Java to Bali to Sulawesi. The recipes reach across the islands: the rendang of the Minangkabau, sate, nasi goreng, gado-gado and the raw sambal matah of Bali. Each is written for a home kitchen using ingredients that can be bought outside Indonesia, which means that fresh galangal, turmeric and candlenut stand in a pantry far from the archipelago, and substitutions are kept to what the dish can bear. The method is that of the practical cookbook. Pastes are built from shallot, garlic, chilli, galangal Alpinia galanga, turmeric Curcuma longa and candlenut Aleurites moluccanus, and the instructions concern the order of frying, the patience needed to cook a paste until its oil separates, and the balance of salt, sourness and sweetness at the end. In a rendang the coconut milk is reduced slowly, first to a gravel-textured simmer and then to a dark, dry-fried finish, and the dish lives or dies on that long reduction. Sambal matah shows the other pole of the preparation. It is raw: sliced shallot, lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus, chilli and makrut lime Citrus hystrix leaf, bound with hot coconut oil and lime juice, and eaten fresh beside grilled fish or chicken. Set against the cooked pastes of Java, it shows how much of the sambal's character lies in whether the ingredients meet the fire.

The cooking is built on contrast: the fat sweetness of coconut against the heat of the chilli, and the sourness of lime or tamarind Tamarindus indica against salt and palm sugar. Rice is the constant ground of the meal, and the sambal is the point at which each diner adjusts the heat and sharpness of the plate.