Tasting Life

Devi Asmarani ,  The Jakarta Post - WEEKENDER   |  Wed, 04/22/2009 7:09 PM  |  Living & Learning

When I was about 10 years old, living in the town of Poso in Central Sulawesi, there was a family in a cabin behind the Christian school I was attending who – for reasons I never really understood – liked to invite me and another friend for meals.

Lunch was simple, usually consisting of plain rice, telur dadar (omelet) and some sort of vegetable, but the couple, who appeared to be childless, was sweet and unintrusive, unlike other grown-ups I knew then. I felt secure around them.

They would sit at the dining table in the dim, low-ceilinged room, eating and watching us approvingly as we polished off the meal. Sometimes the husband would pick a fruit off a cacao tree in the front yard for us.

“Do you want some chocolate?” I remember him asking the first time.

I thought it was the Superman brand of chocolate bar we kids adored so much at the time. Instead, he cut a cacao pod in half for us to taste the sweet and tangy white pulp that enwraps the bean.

I still feel certain affection for the couple, even though I never really knew their names and don’t even remember their faces.

More than 20 years later, on a trip to write about the sectarian conflicts in the town my family lived in for three years, I drove past my abandoned school. My heart ached a little when I thought about what might have happened to them during the violence.

To this day, the sight of cacao fruit or a bite of home-cooked telur dadar takes me back to that little shack behind my school.

Food, like music, has a way of staying firmly in our memory, linking taste buds and emotions. Perhaps the most famous literary expression of the involuntary memory phenomenon is in Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea.

Maybe because of my love for food, and because I grew up exposed to different culinary traditions in several parts of Indonesia, I often have moments like this.

There was a sweet snack I loved as a child made of corn mush wrapped in husks in small, tamale-looking bundles, except it was mildly sweet with a coconut flavor.

I didn’t see it again for years until a few months ago in a snack store. I was so excited, and when I had a bite it transported me back to those days at the beauty salon where I used to munch on it while waiting for my mom to get her hair done.

But the best culinary experience was always found in people’s homes. I used to relish dining at other people’s homes because their meals seemed more interesting than ours (even if it was just an omelet), though this must be a case of the grass being always greener on the other side.

When I was about six in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, our next-door neighbors once shared an unusual but wonderful soup they had for dinner. Its main ingredient was cassava cooked in clear broth, and it was surprisingly good and hearty. I have yet to find another cassava soup to match it, although it remains one of my cravings.

I also have sought to learn more about food from books and magazines, mentally tasting them and experiencing those I found in my reading.

Growing up I read a lot of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fictionalized biography series on those rough years living with her pioneer family in America’s Midwest in late 1800.

More than the adventure itself, it was her vivid descriptions of traditional American fare such as corn bread, cured ham and maple sugar that I was addicted to. My mouth watered as I read passages with mentions of food, even though I had not seen any of the dishes for myself.

Before my first taste of sushi, I had no doubt that I would like it just from what I had read about it. When I finally bit into my first piece about 21 years ago in Los Angeles, it tasted exactly how I thought it would. And I loved it!

I like food so much that often I get annoyed when people don’t share my enthusiasm, or when they dismiss a whole food group – like fish or duck – or a cuisine – such as sushi or Indian – even though they had never tasted them or because their childhood experiences with the food were less than memorable.

I once met a woman who claimed to be a foodie, but when I told her about a popular soto Padang place that sells the tasty West Sumatran beef soup, she cut me short.

“I don’t eat soto,” she declared.

“What do you mean, you don’t eat soto Padang?” I asked her, puzzled by the decisiveness of her remark.

“I don’t eat soto, any kind of soto,” she said without giving any justification.

I was as surprised as I would have been if she had told me she had just had a sex change. I had never met an Indonesian that would write off the entire assortment of soto, which I consider one of the country’s culinary gems.

There are numerous kinds of soto dishes in Indonesia and one can be so different from another, from the choice of ingredients to the flavor. Surely there’s something that could please her palate. I wondered how she could even consider herself a lover of food with this kind of attitude.

But I guess to each his own.

As for me, give me pickled herrings or stinky tofu any day. I’d rather have a bad dining experience than not have an experience at all.

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