THE GIFT OF FOOD
Chef explores Indonesia
“You could wear lemon grass as a perfume,” says author Lara Lee. Mingling with other aromatic ingredients — chilies, garlic, shallots, ginger and makrut lime leaf — it forms the heady fragrance of Indonesian food.
With an array of dishes of different colours and textures on the table — soft soups and noodles, sticky glazed satay skewers — “it's always a feast.”
So too is Lee's first cookbook, Coconut & Sambal (Bloomsbury, 2020), a sensory banquet laid with the landscapes, communities and foods of the Indonesian archipelago.
Based in London, England, where she runs the catering company Kiwi & Roo, the Indonesian and Australian chef spent six months researching the book in 2018. From spring to fall, Lee travelled from the west coast of Sumatra to Kupang, Timor, in the east, her father's hometown.
A trip that would have been life-changing before the pandemic seems even more magical now.
“Following her nose,” Lee started in Bali at the Ubud Food Festival, where she networked with Indonesian cooks who suggested destinations and sources.
Having grown up in Sydney, Australia, with limited access to Indonesian culture, Lee felt she had much to learn before stepping on “home soil.” Food was a natural place for her to start connecting with her heritage, she says, because of the strength of her childhood memories.
Her Indonesian grandmother, Margaret Thali (who she called Popo), lived with them when Lee was a child.
Using the leftover rice from her Australian mother's lamb chop dinners, Popo's nasi goreng was a weekly staple. Lee remembers her grinding peanut sauce into a paste for drizzling over gado-gado or, Australian-style, serving with sausage rolls.
“(Food) was the easiest gateway into learning about my culture and identity and who I am. From there, so many other things followed in terms of understanding what Indonesia is and how Indonesians treat each other,” says Lee.
Through travelling and cooking in Indonesia, Lee gained a deeper understanding of how regionally diverse the cuisine is.
The country's motto is “unity in diversity” (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), which took on new meaning as she began to learn more about the culinary history: why particular ingredients are used in certain areas but not others and how important food is in Indonesian society.
The gift of food may be the gift of love the world over, but in Indonesia, “it's to the nth degree,” says Lee.
From the moment you visit someone's home, you're presented with a platter of colourful, one-bite sweets called jajanan pasar (“market snacks”).
During her travels, she learned to pace herself so she could fully participate in this “always-be-eating-culture” — whether attending a meeting or hanging out, there was invariably food.
“Eating is just such a pleasure in Indonesia, so that was really lovely to recognize and to become a part of that spirit as well,” says Lee. “People are really giving you food all the time because that's their way of expressing how pleased they are to see you.”
As regionally diverse as the cuisine is, there are key elements found in any Indonesian kitchen — a commonality Lee drew on for the book's title, Coconut & Sambal.
“You'll always find sambal on the table,” she says. There are thousands of varieties, including Bali's raw sambal matah and the nationwide favourite, sambal ulek, which is made with boiled chilies ground in a cobek and ulekan (mortar and pestle), seasoned with vinegar, oil, salt and pepper.
Likewise, coconut is a constant. Treated with a no-waste philosophy, the sugar, meat and water are used in cooking; the husks add fragrance to fire; and the shells are repurposed as utensils.
Through illustrating the Indonesian pantry and the universal use of ingredients such as chilies, garlic and lemon grass, Lee says she hopes to highlight the cuisine's ease and accessibility.
“I wanted to show that there are certain elements that unify the cuisine: the pantry, the sambals, rice, the coconut. But there are a lot of diverse dishes, which makes it so exciting,” says Lee.
“I could be blindfolded and taste a dish and I could say, `Ah, that uses daun kemangi (lemon basil). So I would say that might be from Manado, which is in North Sulawesi.'”