Malacca and the Straits

Melaka stands on the narrow western coast of the Malay Peninsula, facing Sumatra across the Strait that carries its name. The port rose in the fifteenth century as a Malay sultanate and became the chief meeting point of the monsoon trades, where the cloves, nutmeg and mace of Maluku met the cloth and merchants of India and the porcelain and traders of China. Tomé Pires, in the Suma Oriental, wrote of Melaka as a place whose trade reached from Cairo and Mecca to the Moluccas, and the Portuguese took the city in 1511. The Dutch held it from 1641, and the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 then divided the Straits between the two powers, placing Melaka and the Peninsula on one side and Sumatra on the other. Eleanor Ford, in Fire Islands, follows the spice trade that made such ports, and the cooking of both shores of the Strait grew from that traffic.

The cooking of the Straits is best understood as one table seen from two shores. Sumatra on the southern side and the Peninsula on the northern share a Malay language of trade, a coconut-milk cooking and a habit of pounding fresh aromatics into a paste, so that a Minangkabau gulai and a Malay kari differ less in principle than in emphasis. The pastes rest on the same plants: galangal Alpinia galanga, turmeric Curcuma longa, lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus, candlenut Aleurites moluccanus and the bird's-eye chilli Capsicum frutescens, ground together and fried in oil until the raw smell has gone. Coconut Cocos nucifera supplies the milk in which the dish is simmered, and tamarind Tamarindus indica the sourness that balances it. Melaka was a meeting place before it was a colony. Indian and Arab merchants brought the spice-and-gravy tradition on which the gulai and the kari rest, Chinese traders settled in the port, and the Portuguese, and after them the Dutch, added their own ingredients and habits. The Peranakan table that grew from the Chinese settlement is the clearest product of this mixing: Chinese households taking Malay aromatics, coconut milk and chilli into their own cooking, so that a dish of pork or chicken is built on a rempah paste and finished with keluak Pangium edule or tamarind. The same exchange runs through the Indonesian coast, in Java and Sumatra, where the Chinese-Indonesian kitchen made a related use of the pounded paste. Eleanor Ford, writing of the eastern archipelago in Fire Islands, treats the spice trade as the long argument behind all of this: the cloves, nutmeg and mace of Maluku travelled west through ports such as Melaka, and the pepper and chilli of the trade, with the dried and salted goods that kept at sea, shaped what each coast cooked. Nutmeg Myristica fragrans and clove Syzygium aromaticum passed through Straits hands on their way to India, Arabia and Europe, and the sweet-spiced flavour of many western Malay dishes follows the same road. Dried shrimp paste and dried fish, both made on these shores, supplied the savoury depth that the rempah needs. The Strait also divided what it joined. The Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 drew a line down the middle of the sea, placing Melaka and the Peninsula on one side and Sumatra on the other, and the two shores have since been called by different national names. The cooking did not follow the line. A cook in Melaka and a cook in Riau still work from the same family of pastes, the same coconut and the same rice, and the dishes that each claims as its own are more often variants of one another than separate inventions.

The taste of the Straits is built on a fried paste, fragrant and rounded by coconut milk, then sharpened with tamarind and lifted by chilli. A gravy of this kind is eaten with rice, and the sauce is taken as seriously as the meat in it. In Melaka and on the Sumatran coast alike, the table is set with a balance of rich, sour, hot and salty dishes passed around a shared plate of rice.