The Indian Traders — Gulai, Kari and Martabak

The Indian Ocean monsoon carried traders from Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, together with Arab and Persian merchants, to the ports of northern Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and the Javanese coast. Their trade in cloth, and in the pepper, cloves and nutmeg of the archipelago, ran for many centuries before the Portuguese and the Dutch arrived. It left its mark on the cooking of the western islands, above all on Sumatra, where the spiced, coconut-milk-based dishes of the Padang table and of Aceh stand closest to the Indian kitchen.

The word gulai and the word kari are the plainest evidence of the meeting. Kari is generally held to come from the Tamil kari, and in Indonesia it names a gravy-dish more loosely spiced and more often yellow with turmeric than a gulai, while gulai belongs to the Malay world and is the older, wider term for a dish simmered in coconut milk with a ground spice paste. Sri Owen treats the two as close relations in the cooking of Sumatra, and the line between them is one of habit and region more than of rule. The paste for either is built on shallot, garlic, chilli, turmeric Curcuma longa, ginger Zingiber officinale and galangal Alpinia galanga, with lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus and salam leaf Syzygium polyanthum thrown into the pot, and the whole is cooked in the milk of the coconut Cocos nucifera until the meat is tender and the oil begins to separate. What the Indian traders brought was less a set of recipes than a manner of using spice: dry spices such as coriander, cumin, fennel and cardamom, ground and fried in the paste, which the archipelago's own kitchens, accustomed to fresh rhizomes and leaves, took up in measure. In Aceh, which faced the Bay of Bengal and received traders longest, the gulai and the kari lean furthest towards the Indian table, with a heavier hand with dry spices, and goat and lamb are cooked as they are across the ocean. In the Minangkabau kitchen of West Sumatra the same inheritance became the family of gulai that fills the Padang table: gulai of beef, of offal, of fish head, of cassava leaf and of young jackfruit, each in its own pot and each with its own paste. Martabak is the clearest case of a dish that crossed the water almost whole. The name is generally traced to the Arabic mutabbaq, meaning folded, and the dish belongs to the Arab and Indian-Muslim traders of the ports. In Indonesia it now stands in two forms. The savoury martabak telur is a thin dough stretched very fine, filled with egg, minced meat and spring onion, folded into a square and fried on a flat griddle, and it is eaten with a sour-sweet pickle of cucumber and chilli. The thick, sweet martabak manis, cooked as a risen pancake, is a later and distinctly Indonesian development of the same name. Sri Owen's account of the savoury form shows how closely it keeps to the technique of the stretched, folded and fried bread of South Asia. The lesson of the thread is that the borrowing was selective and then wholly absorbed. Pepper, cloves and nutmeg went out from the islands in the Indian ships, and spice habits, a few names and the skill of the griddle came back. The cooks of Sumatra and the Malay coasts reworked them with their own coconut, rhizomes and chilli, so that the gulai on a Padang table is recognisably of the archipelago and recognisably related to a kari of the Indian coast.

The taste of this inheritance is of coconut milk made rich and then sharpened and warmed by turmeric, chilli, ginger and galangal, with the dry spices adding depth in the Acehnese and Padang kitchens. A gulai is eaten with plain white rice, which takes up the gravy, and with a plate of boiled cassava leaf or a sambal at its side. Martabak telur is eaten hot from the griddle, cut into squares, with its sour pickle set against the richness of the egg and fried dough.