Tomé Pires and the Suma Oriental

Tomé Pires was a Portuguese apothecary who reached Malacca in 1512, soon after its capture by Afonso de Albuquerque, and wrote the Suma Oriental there and in the years that followed. The work describes the trading world from the Red Sea to the China coast, and its sections on Java, Sumatra, the Banda islands and the Maluku clove islands are among the earliest European descriptions of the lands where the spices grew.

The Suma Oriental is a merchant's survey rather than a cookbook, and it is read in a book on Indonesian cooking for what it says about goods, ports and prices. Pires set down which islands produced which spice, where it was gathered and by whom it was carried to Malacca. Cloves are placed in the Maluku islands, including Ternate and Tidore. Nutmeg and mace are placed in Banda, and the account makes plain that a handful of small islands supplied a demand that reached across Asia and Europe. Eleanor Ford, in Fire Islands, writes of the eastern archipelago as the place where this trade began and where the kitchen still shows its marks, and she draws on that early history to explain why a region so small shaped so much of the world's cooking. Pires also describes Java and its ports, and the movement of rice, salted goods, pepper and spices between the islands and Malacca. The picture is of a cuisine already formed by exchange: Javanese and Malay merchants, Gujarati and Chinese traders and the courts of the coast all handled the same commodities. For the cook, the value of the text lies in this evidence that the spice table of the archipelago was a trading table long before the Dutch company arrived. The Portuguese came as buyers and then as rivals, and the Suma Oriental belongs to the moment before the Banda conquest of 1621 and the VOC monopoly reshaped the clove and nutmeg islands. The book must be read with care as a source. Pires wrote from reports gathered at Malacca as well as from observation, and he was concerned with commerce, not with what was eaten at the table. It is therefore a witness to ingredients and routes, and the dishes themselves must be sought in the Serat Centhini, in Rumphius and in the regional authorities. Placed beside them, Pires gives the earliest outside date on which the history of the Maluku spice islands can be fixed.

The flavour of the Suma Oriental is that of the raw spice: cloves and nutmeg, pepper and the aromatic woods of the islands as they were bought, weighed and shipped. In the eastern kitchens that Fire Islands describes, nutmeg, clove and chilli are still cooked with fish, coconut and fresh herbs, and the market goods that Pires listed explain why those seasonings sit at the centre of the Maluku table.