Stamford Raffles Reviews Indonesian Cuisine
Stamford Raffles. Image used under Creative Commons.
Over 200 years ago Stamford Raffles came to the island of Java and did what many white people have done in the centuries since - he wrote a review about the local cuisine, as if he was the first one to have discovered it. And, like many white people who came after him, he couldn’t handle the sambal.
Raffles was briefly the lieutenant governor of Java during the British Interregnum, a period between 1811 and 1815 when the British invaded the island. Based on his time there, Raffles wrote a book called The History of Java in which he documented everything about the island as he saw it. My friend and mentor Professor Farish Noor is very critical of this book because it basically gives Raffles credit for writing the history of Java, as if the ways of the Javanese and the local flora and fauna and geology were unknown and didn’t exist until he discovered them and wrote about them in English for an English audience.
It’s a valid point, and this is why critical theorists speak of the need to decolonize history. History is not exclusively the domain of white people discovering the world and writing about it. But The History of Java nevertheless contains interesting things, like Raffles ruminating on Javanese food. It’s interesting because much of the Javanese diet remains unchanged since 1817, and because it establishes the first known historical record of a white person in Indonesia complaining about sambal trasi.
His first two comments on the subject note that “rice is on Java, what it is throughout Asia, the chief article of subsistence” and that “dairy forms no part of domestic economy of Java, neither milk itself nor any preparation from it.” With regards to the milk situation he calls this a “circumstance very remarkable” and I agree. Outside of speciality stores, cheese is nowhere to be found on Java. So that hasn’t changed much in two centuries.
He then describes the way ants are treated as a food source. “Their extensive nests are opened to take out the chrysalis; or they are watched, and swarms of the perfect insect are conducted into basins or trays containing a little water, where they soon perish: they are called laron.” I find this passage especially interesting because I recently ate part of an ant’s nest for the first time when I was down in Banyuwangi. And the method he describes for catching laron is one that my mother in law used when she was younger growing up in the desa.
The local food item that Raffles seems to like most are the sweets. “They excel in a variety of preparations of pastry and sweetmeats (particularly of the kétan), of which many are by no means unpleasant to an European palate.” It seems that glutinous rice cooked with coconut milk is a timeless treat. But then his opinion turns less favorable, as he gets to the local salad known as rujak: “Rújak is prepared from unripe mangos and other fruits, which, being grated, receive the addition of capsicum and other spices, and thus constitutes a favourite dish with the natives, though very disagreeable to Europeans.” I’m guessing he never tried rujak cingur which is made from a cow’s snout.
But he really keeps his powder dry for that most divisive of substances - trasi. “Trási or blåchang is prepared in many situations along the northern coast… It is prepared from prawns or shrimps… The shrimps being taken are strewed with salt, and exposed to the sun till dry; they are then pounded in wooden mortars, dressed, and formed into masses resembling large cheeses…. The putrescent fluid remaining after the expression strongly impregnated with the odour of the shrimps, is evaporated to the consistence of a jelly, and affords a favorite sauce called pétis.”
Although our fridge is always stocked with it, I myself am not a fan of petis. But I don’t know that I would go so far as to call it a “putrescent fluid.” Anyway, my main takeaway from Raffles’ review of Indonesian food is that he wasn’t a big fan and, like many white people in the years before and since, he especially struggled with sambal. His loss.
I think it’s fascinating how much dietary preferences on Java haven’t changed that much in 200 years - rice, vegetables, chicken, fish and gulai when available eaten with sambal. He also describes the making of krecek, or stewed beef skin, which is delicious in rice porridge cooked in coconut milk. As in Raffles’ day dairy products have yet to make inroads with local consumers. It’s also curious that he doesn’t mention the food to be overly sweet, which is a defining characteristic of Central Javanese cuisine today. That makes me wonder if sugar only began to be incorporated into Javanese cooking in mass quantities when the Dutch forced cultivation of big sugar plantations later in the century.
But the least justifiable omission from this 200-year-old Yelper is that he failed to mention perhaps the greatest culinary treasure Java has to offer: the simple perfection of a good bowl of soto.
Author photo.
