Indonesian Food and Indonesian Regional Food & Cookery — Sri Owen

Sri Owen, a cook and writer born in West Sumatra and long resident in Britain, wrote two books that together form one of the standard English-language accounts of the Indonesian table.

Both books are organised by the cooking of the archipelago rather than by a single national canon. Owen writes of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sulawesi and the eastern islands as distinct tables with their own methods, and she does not flatten them into one idea of Indonesian food. The reader finds the Padang kitchen with its rendang and its long cooking of coconut milk, the Javanese kitchen with its sweet, slow dishes, and the chilli-driven cooking of the north, each set in its place. The books are strongest as practical instruction written for a cook working outside Indonesia. Owen names the spice pastes, the leaves and the rhizomes, such as galangal Alpinia galanga, turmeric Curcuma longa, lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus and salam leaf Syzygium polyanthum, and she proposes sensible substitutes where the fresh ingredient cannot be had. Rice is treated as the centre of the meal, with the dishes arranged around it, and the sambal is given the standing of a dish and not an afterthought. Rendang, sate, gado-gado, nasi goreng and the sayur of the home kitchen appear as the working repertoire. The author's own Sumatran upbringing gives the books their authority and their limits. She writes most surely of the Minangkabau and Javanese kitchens, and the cooking of the far east of the archipelago is treated more briefly. The books also rest on a cook's memory of the household table and on the markets, which makes them a record of how the food was cooked in the families she knew, and not a scholarly history. For this library the two works stand with the other authorities of the list as the foundation of method. William Wongso, Eleanor Ford, Lara Lee and Vivienne Kruger each take a narrower or more recent view, and Owen supplies the broad ground against which their books are read. Where an entry here needs the standard form of a dish, her account of the paste, the pan and the order of cooking is the first reference.

The table Owen describes is built on rice with several dishes set out together, a sambal beside them and a balance of rich, sour, sweet and hot. She follows the Sumatran preference for coconut milk and chilli and the Javanese leaning towards sweetness, and she shows how a single meal can set the two against each other. The cook who follows her learns to judge a dish by its paste and its patient cooking.