The Mustika Rasa of 1967

The Mustika Rasa was issued in Jakarta in 1967 under the Ministry of Agriculture and the Republic's first president, Sukarno, who is credited with its inspiration. It was assembled as a national undertaking in the early years of independence, when the new state was concerned to set down the cooking of its many islands in its own name. It is a compilation of recipes gathered from across the archipelago, not the work of a single hand.

The Mustika Rasa is a large collection of recipes gathered from the regions of Indonesia and published at the close of the Sukarno period. Its purpose was national as much as culinary. The Republic had inherited a printed cookery that was largely Dutch-colonial in its habits, of which the Oost-Indisch kookboek of 1902 by Catenius-van der Meijden is the best-known example, and the Mustika Rasa answered it with a book in Indonesian, compiled by Indonesians and presented as the cooking of one nation. Its recipes are set down in the brief manner of a record, with the dish named and the method given plainly, and with few of the directions on quantity or timing that a modern reader expects. The book is best read as a register of dishes, a statement of what the young state held its table to contain. Rendang, gudeg, sate and the regional soups and sambals stand in it beside preparations from the smaller islands that had rarely been printed before. For the writer of regional cookery it has therefore been a point of reference: it shows which dishes were counted as Indonesian in 1967, and under which names they were known. William Wongso, in Flavors of Indonesia, writes from the same conviction that the national table is made of regional tables, and his book belongs to the line of thought that the Mustika Rasa began in print. Its limits are those of its method. Recipes of this kind were contributed in condensed form, and the cook who follows one must bring knowledge of the dish from elsewhere, from a regional authority or from a kitchen that still makes it. Used in that way it is a witness to names, to ingredients and to the range of the table, and it is cited here for those things. Out of print for many years, it has returned to attention in recent decades as cooks and writers have looked again at the first national record of Indonesian food.

The table the Mustika Rasa records is one of rice with several dishes set beside it: a coconut-milk curry, a grilled or fried preparation, vegetables, and a sambal to season each mouthful. Its regional entries show the spread of the archipelago's flavours, from the spiced coconut cooking of Sumatra to the chilli-forward dishes of the east, set in a single national frame.