The Court Kitchens of Yogyakarta and Solo

The court kitchens of Central Java belong to the two kingdoms that emerged from the division of the Mataram sultanate in the mid-eighteenth century: the Sultanate of Yogyakarta and the Susuhunan court of Surakarta, known as Solo. Their cooking grew inside the walls of the kraton, where the kitchens fed the ruling household, its retainers and the guests of ceremony, and from there it passed outward into the streets, markets and homes of Central Java.

The cooking of the two court cities is usually set against the sharper, hotter tables of Sumatra and Sulawesi: a table of restraint, sweetness and careful balance. Javanese cooks use palm sugar and sweet soy sauce to soften coconut milk, shallot, garlic, coriander seed, galangal Alpinia galanga and salam leaf Syzygium polyanthum, and it is in this handling of sweetness that the court idiom is most readily recognised. The food most closely tied to Yogyakarta is gudeg, young jackfruit simmered for many hours with coconut milk, palm sugar and salam leaf, and traditionally coloured brown by teak leaves in the pot. It is served with krecek, a stew of cattle skin, with egg, chicken and a thick coconut cream sauce called areh. Solo is associated with its own dishes, among them nasi liwet, rice cooked in coconut milk and stock and served with chicken and egg, and with soupy, delicately sweet tastes. Javanese cooks themselves distinguish the sweeter manner of Yogyakarta from the milder, less sugared manner attributed to Solo, a distinction that points to separate culinary habits kept by the two courts after the division of Mataram. The kraton kitchens also shaped the Javanese idea of the meal as an act of hospitality and rank. Dishes were prepared for ceremonial occasions with a discipline of method that the street and the village kitchen later adopted in simpler form. Much of what is now called Javanese home cooking, including the careful use of ground spice pastes, slow simmering in coconut milk and the pairing of rice with several small dishes, carries the manner of the court. Set at the family table and the festival, these dishes show how a court idiom became a regional one. The oldest literary witness to the Javanese table is the Serat Centhini, compiled at the Surakarta court between 1814 and 1823, which describes the foods and customs of Javanese life. It belongs to the same Solo milieu in which the court cooking was refined, and it stands behind the living practice of the two cities.

The taste of the Central Javanese court table is one of sweetness held in balance, in which palm sugar and sweet soy sauce meet coconut milk, shallot, garlic and galangal. Gudeg, eaten with rice, egg, chicken, krecek and areh, shows it plainly, and the sweetness is set against salt and a modest heat from the accompanying sambal.