The Soul
Kitchen

But convenience has a quiet danger: not that it changes the kitchen, but that it can make us forget what the kitchen once carried. Before recipes were stored in phones, they lived in hands. Before a timer announced that something was ready, a cook listened to the oil, watched the colour of the bumbu, and knew by its fragrance when the rawness had gone. Knowledge moved from an elder to a child who stood nearby, apparently helping and very often stealing something fried.

Nasi liwet is the quiet centre of a kampung table. It does not need to shout because the fragrance arrives first: coconut milk warming with daun salam and lemongrass, slipping through the kitchen before the plates are ready. Soon sambal terong, pepes pindang, tempe, and kerupuk gather around it as though the rice sent invitations.

The first time Alban tasted my sambal terong, he found it late at night beside mendoan in the refrigerator. Eggplant is his favourite vegetable, so he mistook it for an innocent one. The next morning he reported, with the gravity of a survivor, that he had eaten the spice from hell.

The white thread in tempe binds bean to bean. Memory does something similar. It joins a market in Vienna to a kitchen near Muria, a Friday sauce to my father’s laughter, and a green lunch parcel to the hands that woke before mine. Separate moments become one story.

In Javanese, the close word is lawuh. In everyday speech, iwak also has a wider life than its neat translation suggests. It can mean fish, but it can also refer to animal flesh prepared as lauk. Depending on the family and the region, the joke stretches further into phrases such as iwak tempe or iwak peyek. Tempe may therefore be promoted to fish without ever learning to swim. Language, like a home cook, uses what it needs.

Pecel Pakis Colo belongs to Desa Colo in Kecamatan Dawe, high on the slopes of Mount Muria in Kudus. The damp mountain edges and riverbanks suit edible fern, and the young curled shoots—ental pakis—are gathered before they toughen. Blanched and covered with bumbu pecel, they make a breakfast whose address can be tasted.

Traditional markets also carry the saying tuna satak, bathi sanak—lose a little money, gain a relative or friend. It reflects a Javanese idea of trade in which profit is not counted only in coins, but also in trust and lasting relationships. The regular customer returns because the food is good, of course, but also because the seller remembers a face, adds one small piece to the parcel, and asks after the family.

Open an Indonesian spice drawer and it may look as though the forest, garden, and old harbour have agreed to share one shelf. There are roots stained gold, bark curled into quills, seeds waiting to be toasted, leaves kept in the freezer by cooks who live far from home, and one jar of shrimp paste whose lid should be checked twice before travelling.

The Javanese expression witing tresna jalaran saka kulina means that affection grows through familiarity. It could have been written for jamu. Beras kencur is easy to love on the first meeting. Pahitan may require several appointments, honest conversation, and possibly a sweet drink afterwards.

Nao is eight years old now, but one of my favourite memories belongs to when he was only one year and something—old enough to know what he wanted, too young to recognise that five o’clock in the morning was a controversial time to request it.

I hope these pages become stained, annotated, corrected, and argued with. A perfectly clean cookbook may be beautiful, but it has not yet been invited fully into the family. Write the name of the aunt who adds more kencur. Note that your market sells saltier teri. Circle the sambal that made somebody cry, and be kind enough to record whether the tears were emotional or entirely caused by chilli.