I wanted to re-discover the food from my childhood
Chef Lara Lee tells ELLA WALKER about her debut cookery book, Coconut & Sambal, which is alive with the fabulous flavours of Indonesia
LARA LEE adores cooking. “Even in isolation, it’s the thing I love to do,” she says. “I want to cook all the time. It’s such a nice way to pass the time, because you’re creating something so sensory, when there’s nothing else going on.”
So if cooking is wearing you down, visit her Instagram page for an instant shot of smileinducing brightness (her colourful outfits are enough to take your mind off everything, for a moment at least), and dinner motivation thanks to her #coronacooking video series. And that colour and enthusiasm is distilled in her debut cookbook too – Coconut & Sambal.
The London-based chef and caterer grew up in Australia, where her father moved from Indonesia, aged 22. “Food for us was really central,” says Lara.
“We would sit down as a family and eat dinner together. That was really special for us.”
Her grandmother, Margaret – “who would cook these incredible Indonesian dishes” – lived with them for a few years when Lara was little, filling their home with food and flavour, and platters decorated with intricate flowers she’d whittle from carrots and tomatoes. Lara would watch her in the kitchen, “cooking amazing feasts” for hours on end. Lara took the influence of her grandmother’s cooking and her family’s love of food into adulthood, but admits she hasn’t always been an amazing cook: “At university, I really liked scrambled eggs, and tinned tuna on toast!”
She says it was a “slow burn. You leave home and eat badly for a few years, then rediscover that actually, cooking is something you really, really enjoy.”
Lara eventually quit a career in IT sales, launched a street food stall with a friend, serving “an epic Antipodean steak sandwich”, retrained at Leiths cookery school, and launched catering company, Kiwi and Roo, with her friend Fiona Hannah. More recently, writing Coconut & Sambal gave her the opportunity to actually visit Indonesia to hunt down recipes and dishes and “rediscover the food of my childhood – and part of that was rediscovering the cooking of my grandmother and of my aunties.” She spent several months, getting to grips with the zingy, punchy flavours of Sulawesi, to the more Chineseinfluenced tastes of Medan in North Sumatra, asking family and people she met along the way to share their recipes, and direct her towards any good cooks in town. A taxi driver in Pedang, Pak Budi, even took her to meet his mother and his family cooked with Lara, “teaching me everything they knew – and that was not an isolated incident”.
It was “remarkable” she says, how many people were generous with their dishes. “They were really happy someone wanted to give a voice to those recipes.”
She also ate some truly spectacular dishes, from a marinated suckling pig roasted over the branches of the coffee tree (which inspired her Balinese roasted pork recipe) to rendang, one of Indonesia’s the most famous dishes.
Throughout her adventures though, sambal remained a staple. “Every family has their own sambal recipe,” says Lee.
“In the West, we might use salt and pepper to season our food, but in Indonesia, they’ll use sambal.”
Akin to a chilli relish, Lara says the condiment is so important it’s one of the three cornerstones of the Indonesian table, along with rice and kerupuk (“like a prawn cracker – when you eat it, it stimulates the appetite”).
Aside from the food though, Lara wanted to “capture the colour and the vibrancy of Indonesian life and culture. So many of us just imagine idyllic beaches and lush rainforests but “there’s a much bigger story to Indonesia than the tourist postcard,” she says.