Cabai — the Chillies

The chilli is a plant of the Americas, and it reached the archipelago in the sixteenth century on Portuguese and Spanish ships, after the Columbian exchange. Before that the Indonesian table took its heat from pepper, long pepper and ginger. Within a few generations the chilli had displaced them in daily cooking, and it is now carried by every island kitchen. The Minahasa table of Manado, the Padang table of West Sumatra and the Javanese sambal tradition are those most closely tied to it. Lara Lee, in Coconut & Sambal, writes of sambal as the centre of the Indonesian meal, and the chilli as its first ingredient.

Two species stand behind most Indonesian cooking. Bird's-eye chilli, Capsicum frutescens, is the small, upright, fiercely hot cabai rawit, green when unripe and red or orange when ripe. Capsicum annuum supplies the longer, milder cabai merah keriting, the curly red chilli, and the straighter cabai merah besar, along with the green cabai hijau. Cabai rawit is pounded raw into sambal, as in sambal matah and sambal terasi. The larger red chillies are generally ground or fried into cooked pastes such as the base of rendang or balado. Dried chillies are soaked and ground when fresh ones are out of season, and they give a darker and duller heat.

Chilli is eaten with rice, grilled fish and poultry, fried tempeh and tofu, and with the fat of coconut milk dishes, where its heat and acidity cut through richness. It is drunk with plain water, sweet iced tea or young coconut water, which are mild and cool in the mouth rather than competing with it. The structural reason is balance: rice and coconut are bland and rich, and the chilli, with lime, salt and shrimp paste, gives a bright point to set against them.