Sumatra from Aceh to Lampung

Sumatra is the westernmost of the large Indonesian islands, a long landmass lying along the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean, with the Barisan mountains running down its western flank and broad lowland plains and river systems falling away to the east. Its position on the sea lanes between India, China and the archipelago made it a place of passage and trade from the time of the Srivijaya court, and its cooking carries the marks of that position.

The Barisan range, a chain of volcanoes and high plateaus, gives the island its two faces: a narrow, steep western coast open to the Indian Ocean, and a wide eastern lowland of rivers, swamp and plain that drains towards the Strait of Malacca. In the highlands the volcanic soils carry rice, chilli, coffee and the spices of the kitchen, while the lowlands and the coasts give coconut, freshwater fish and the catch of the sea. Sri Owen, in Indonesian Food, treats the island's cooking as the cooking of these regions in turn, and the geography explains much of what she describes. At the northern tip, Aceh faces the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, and its table shows the long contact with India and the wider Muslim world. Curries thick with coconut milk, spice pastes built on chilli, turmeric, galangal Alpinia galanga and lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus, and the use of dried spices more freely than elsewhere in the archipelago mark the north. The Gayo highlands of Aceh grow the coffee protected as Kopi Arabika Gayo, one of the Geographical Indications of the island. Further south, the Minangkabau of the West Sumatran highlands, with Padang as the name by which their restaurants are known across Indonesia, keep the most celebrated cooking of the island. Their rendang, simmered in coconut milk with a paste of chilli, galangal, turmeric, lemongrass and other aromatics until the liquid has cooked away and the meat darkens in its own fat, is the dish by which Sumatra is best known beyond it. The Padang table, many dishes set out together at once, rests on the same habit of cooking in coconut milk and spice that preserves and flavours. On the eastern side of the island, the rivers of Jambi and South Sumatra lead to Palembang, historically the seat of Srivijaya. Its cooking is built on freshwater fish from the Musi river, and its best-known preparations, pempek, fish-and-sago cakes eaten with a dark, sour-sweet sauce, and the sour and spiced fish soups of the region, belong to the river rather than the mountain. The island also gives Lada Putih Muntok, the white pepper of Bangka protected as a Geographical Indication, from the island of Bangka off its south-eastern coast. At the southern end, Lampung looks across the Sunda Strait to Java and is the island's gateway to it; its coast and its robusta coffee fields bring the cooking of the sea and the plantation into the account. Taken together, Sumatra from Aceh to Lampung is less a single cuisine than a succession of tables laid along one mountain chain and two coasts, joined by coconut, chilli and the slow cooking of spice pastes.

The taste of Sumatra is the taste of chilli, coconut milk and spice paste, strongest in the Minangkabau and Acehnese kitchens, where galangal, turmeric, lemongrass and chilli are cooked long and deep. In Palembang the flavour turns to the river, with the sour and the sweet set against fish, while the coffees of Gayo and the white pepper of Muntok give the island its drinking and seasoning crops.