The Chinese Kitchen and the Peranakan Table

Chinese traders and settlers had been present in the ports of the archipelago for centuries before the Dutch arrived, and the longest-settled communities grew up along the north coast of Java, in the Straits and on the east coast of Sumatra. Their cooking did not remain a separate cuisine. It entered the kitchens of the Indonesian ports and, in the households of the settled families who married into local communities, produced the table now called Peranakan.

The Chinese contribution to Indonesian cooking is in the first place one of ingredients and techniques. Soy sauce and the fermented soy bean, the tofu press, the wok and the habit of the quick stir-fry, the noodle and the dumpling wrapper all came with Chinese settlers, and each was absorbed into the local kitchen under a local name. Tahu and tempe stand side by side in the Javanese kitchen, one from the Chinese craft of coagulating soy milk and the other from the older Javanese fermentation of soy beans with the mould Rhizopus oligosporus. Kecap, the Indonesian word for a fermented soy sauce, gave its name to the sweet soy sauce that Indonesian cooks use for braising and glazing. Bakmi, bakso, lumpia, siomay and bakpao are the names of the borrowed forms, and the Indonesian cook has made each of them a street dish of the country. The Peranakan table is the result of settlement and marriage rather than of trade alone. Chinese men who settled in the ports took wives from local families, and their descendants kept a Chinese identity and a Chinese calendar of feasts while speaking Malay or Javanese at home. The women of these households ran kitchens in which Chinese method met the spice paste of the archipelago: the rempah of shallot, garlic, galangal Alpinia galanga, turmeric Curcuma longa and candlenut Aleurites moluccanus, cooked with coconut milk and sharpened with tamarind Tamarindus indica. Lara Lee, who writes from her Chinese-Indonesian family's kitchen, presents this inheritance as a living household cooking in which the two traditions are not separable on the plate. The dishes of the Peranakan kitchen show the mixture plainly. A braise may take its sweetness from palm sugar and its depth from soy; a noodle dish may be dressed with a sambal; a dumpling may be filled in the Chinese manner and eaten with chilli. Pork, forbidden to the Muslim majority, remained at the Chinese table and in the Chinese-Indonesian kitchen of the cities, where it sits beside dishes made with chicken, fish and prawn that the whole community could share. The feasts of the Chinese calendar, above all the lunar new year, kept their own foods, among them the long noodle for long life and the sweet glutinous rice cake, and these passed into the wider festive vocabulary of the country. The history of this table is not a smooth one. The Chinese communities of the archipelago passed through the Dutch colonial order, in which they were placed as middlemen between rulers and population, and later through periods of suspicion and restriction in the independent state, when the public use of Chinese names and festivals was limited. Cooking continued in the home through these years, and many of the dishes now regarded as ordinary Indonesian street food were carried by Chinese-Indonesian families. The Peranakan table is therefore best understood as a household record of the archipelago's long coexistence, kept by cooks rather than by writers.

At the Peranakan table the balance is of sweet, salty and sour set against the warmth of chilli and the fragrance of aromatics such as lemongrass Cymbopogon citratus and makrut lime Citrus hystrix. Soy gives a savoury depth that the plain spice paste does not, and palm sugar rounds it. A meal is built around rice, with a braise, a fried dish, a vegetable and a sambal shared across the table, and the festive tables of the lunar new year add their own foods of noodles and sweet rice cakes.