Kalimantan and Its Rivers

Kalimantan is the Indonesian part of Borneo, one of the largest islands in the world, and its geography is written by its rivers. The Kapuas in the west, the Barito and the Kahayan in the south, the Mahakam in the east and the Kayan in the north run from the interior highlands to the coast, and for most of the island's history they were the roads along which people, salt, rice, forest produce and news travelled.

Much of the island is lowland: river plain, peat swamp, mangrove and tidal flat, rising inland into forested hills and the central mountains. The soil is not the young volcanic soil of Java or Bali, and the cooking reflects it. Rice is grown, in dry fields cleared from the forest and in the wet flats of the south, but the table does not rest on the terraced abundance of the volcanic islands, and the river and the forest supply much of what accompanies it. Freshwater fish are the centre of the river kitchen. They are cooked fresh in soups and over a fire, and they are also preserved by salting and drying, which allows the catch of the high-water season to feed a household through the lean months. Sri Owen, in her regional writing on Indonesian cooking, treats the cooking of the outer islands as a cooking of what the immediate landscape gives, and Kalimantan is a clear case: the fish, the rice, the wild and cultivated vegetables, and the sour and hot seasonings are those of the riverbank. The peoples of the interior, the Dayak communities, and the Malay and Banjar peoples of the river towns and coast, hold the island's table between them. The Banjar of South Kalimantan, whose centre has long been the river city of Banjarmasin, are associated with a trade conducted on the water itself, in boats gathered as a floating market, where produce, fish and cooked food were sold from one hull to another. Their cooking, with its soups and its fish dishes, shows the closeness of the Malay and Javanese worlds to the river coast. In the interior the cooking is plainer and tied to the forest: bamboo used as a cooking vessel for rice and for meat or fish, leaves used to wrap and steam, and the shoots, ferns and fruits of the forest used as vegetables. The method of cooking in bamboo over an open fire is among the oldest in the region and needs no pot, which suits a life lived on the river and in the clearing. The rivers also explain the island's place in history. Coastal kingdoms grew where the great rivers met the sea, and their trade in forest produce linked the interior to the wider archipelago. Kalimantan's food is therefore a river food in two senses: it is taken from the water and the banks, and it was carried along them.

The flavour of the river table is clean, sour and hot rather than rich: fish cooked fresh or dried and salted, seasoned with chilli, shallot and the sourness of fruit or tamarind rather than the heavy coconut milk of the western islands. Rice, often cooked with the forest leaves or in bamboo, is the plain ground on which the fish, the vegetables and the sambal are set.