Rumphius and the Herbarium Amboinense

Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a German-born servant of the VOC, lived on Ambon from the 1650s until his death in 1702, and wrote there the great natural history of the Spice Islands, the Herbarium Amboinense. The work was composed in the Dutch trading settlement on Ambon, in the years after the Banda conquest of 1621 had given the Company control of nutmeg and clove, and it was published in Amsterdam only after his death.

Rumphius belongs among the authorities of this book not as a cook but as a witness to the plants from which the cooking of Maluku is made. His Herbarium Amboinense describes the trees, shrubs, roots and fruits of Ambon and the neighbouring islands, among them the nutmeg Myristica fragrans, the clove Syzygium aromaticum, the coconut Cocos nucifera, the sugar palm Arenga pinnata and the sago palm Metroxylon sagu. He wrote of what he saw in the gardens and forests of the island and of the uses the people of the islands made of each plant, and a large part of his book is therefore a record of the Ambonese larder as it stood in the seventeenth century. The sago palm is the plant on which his testimony bears most directly on the table. Sago is the staple starch of Maluku, and the pressed flour cooked into a thick paste and eaten with fish soup is still the daily bread of the eastern islands. Rumphius treated the palm at length, as a tree that gave food, thatch and timber. Eleanor Ford, writing in Fire Islands of the cooking of the eastern archipelago, places the spice islands within a long history of trade, conquest and plant knowledge, and the Herbarium stands behind that history as a contemporary source. Rumphius wrote as an employee of a company that held a monopoly on nutmeg and clove, and the spices that fill his pages were the cause of the violence of 1621 at Banda. He lost his sight in the 1670s, and manuscripts were later lost to fire; the book was finished with the help of assistants and draughtsmen and was published in Amsterdam only after his death in 1702. It survived to become the foundation of the botany of the Moluccas. The Herbarium gives no recipes in the manner of Catenius-van der Meijden or the Mustika Rasa. It sets down what grew on the islands where the spice trade began, what it was called and what it was used for. The dishes of Maluku, the fish cooked with lime and chilli, the sago paste and the nutmeg-scented preserves, rest on a pantry that Rumphius had already described in print.

The flavours that Rumphius records are those of the Maluku table: nutmeg and clove, coconut, sago and the sharp fruit and lime that dress fish. The cooking of Ambon and the islands around it is built on grilled and soured fish, sago eaten as a paste, and the spices that made the islands famous, used with more restraint than the trade in them might suggest.