The Sago Swamps of Maluku and Papua

The sago palm, Metroxylon sagu, grows in the freshwater and brackish swamps of the eastern archipelago, and Maluku and Papua are where it remains a daily staple rather than a occasional food. The palm stores starch in its trunk, and the people of the eastern islands have lived from that store for longer than any written account of them. Eleanor Ford, in Fire Islands, writes of the eastern cooking as one in which sago, fish and the produce of the sea and garden come before rice.

A sago palm grows for some years before it flowers, and it is felled at the point when the trunk is fullest of starch, just before the flower spike appears. The trunk is split, and the pith is rasped or pounded to a fibrous mass. That mass is kneaded and rinsed with water over a filter of fibre, and the starch washes through and settles in a trough or vessel, where the water is poured off and the pale starch is left. Worked in this way, one palm yields a store of starch that a household can keep and draw on for a long time. The labour is done largely in the swamp itself, and the work belongs to families and villages rather than to any estate. In Maluku the starch is cooked in two principal forms. Papeda is the starch stirred with boiling water until it turns translucent and glutinous, and it is eaten with a sour yellow fish soup, the kuah kuning, in which fish such as skipjack tuna Katsuwonus pelamis is cooked with turmeric Curcuma longa and a sharp acid. The other form is sago baked in clay moulds, which produces hard, dry cakes that keep and can be carried on a voyage, and that are softened in tea, water or soup before eating. Ford describes both as belonging to a table that is shaped by the sea around the islands. The swamps lie within the same eastern geography as the spice islands, and the contrast is instructive. The clove Syzygium aromaticum and nutmeg Myristica fragrans drew traders from across the world to Ternate, Tidore and Banda, and the Banda conquest of 1621 by the VOC under Jan Pieterszoon Coen is the plainest record of what that desire cost. The sago swamps drew no such trade, and the people who lived from them were fed whatever happened to the clove and nutmeg markets. The starch of the palm was the food of the islands, while the spices were the commodity of the ships. In Papua sago remains the staple of many communities, particularly in the lowland swamps and along the coasts, and it is prepared as a paste, a baked cake or a roll cooked in bamboo or over embers. Fish, shellfish, greens and the larvae and fruit of the forest accompany it, and cooking over open fire is as common as cooking in a pot. The palm also supplies leaf for thatch and wrapping, so that the trunk and the frond serve both the kitchen and the house.

Sago itself has almost no taste, and its place at the table is as a neutral, glutinous body that carries the sour and savoury dishes beside it. Papeda is eaten with a fish soup of turmeric and acid, and often with sambal, so that the starch is lifted by the sharpness of the accompaniment. Baked sago cakes are plain and dry, and are softened in a hot drink or broth before they are eaten.