S

tevie Wonder'€™s '€œJust the Way You Are'€ is the song I very much wanted to sing to the foods and flavors I grew up with in Semarang because on a recent visit, I found most of them have gone a'€™changing.

The way they are now prepared is not as original or traditional as in the past. The hands that used to prepare them were no longer there.

The dear old lady selling the most delicious gudangan babat (steamed vegetables with grated coconut dressing, sweet and spicy deep-fried tempeh and deep-fried offal) at dawn on a small bridge on Jl. Sebandaran died long ago and so had her daughter who had replaced her.

In their place now is the wife of her son, whose cooking is no match for her mother-in-law or her grandmother-in-law. Surely, the old lady had passed on the recipe to her own daughter, but I am not sure whether this young lady got the recipe right.

Brother Liem'€™s asem-asem daging (beef in spicy sour soup) in front of the Loyola Catholic high school doesn'€™t taste as deliciously vibrant as it did when he first started his business in the late 1970s and was the cook himself.

Now in his 70s, the Chinese-Indonesian, affectionately known as Koh Liem, is no longer cooking. His business has grown from a food stall to a restaurant, albeit a modest one. His kitchen is now run by his employees.

A particular item I dearly miss is pepes telor kodok (spiced, grilled frog eggs wrapped in banana leaves). Unlike frog eggs sold by others, his frog eggs were purely eggs, never mixed with frog offal. I treasured their dry, savory, rich, smoky taste and delicate consistency. Alas, '€œthere will be no frog eggs anymore'€, Koh Liem told me, '€œThe supplier has passed away.'€

As I walked down the old streets of the city'€™s Chinatown, I found that Phien Tjwan Hiang, a famous Chinese restaurant on Jl. Gang Pinggir, is no longer around.

That restaurant produced many memorable, unforgettable Chinese dishes delivered on foot by a male employee carrying the food in big metal containers with a yoke on his shoulders to the doorstep of patrons living nearby.

As I came closer to the Tay Kak Sie Chinese temple on Jl. Gang Lombok, I was in for another letdown. Its famous Semarang-styled Chinese spring rolls aren'€™t as delightful as the ones I used to eat as a child.

Now that they produce hundreds of rolls every day, maintaining consistency in taste may be a challenge. Moreover, the rolls are free from pork lard, which was perhaps not the case in the past, as they have now extended their clientele.

Another famous establishment, Soto Bangkong (Javanese chicken soup mixed with rice) at the Bangkong intersection on Jl. Brigjen Katamso, too, was disappointing.

I expected savory chicken broth, but got bland water colored brown with light sweet soy sauce instead, a far cry from the dish I used to eat as a child.

To make the soto tasty, I had to take side dishes and season it with ketchup while a friend poured satay broth into his soto bowl. The restaurant, it seems, has grown complacent and merely coasts on its decades-old reputation.

As I delved further into the city'€™s culinary fabric, I could turn the tale into a stream of Proustian culinary nightmares as if the good old days left nothing worthy of praise anymore.

As I found some solace in the rediscovery of the unchanged, albeit only a few, plus some exciting finds I stumbled upon, which, for now, I want to keep to myself, it fell to me to reflect on the foods of my childhood.

Every time I savored them, I always found them magical and even fell into rhapsody over them. They always had my unspoken passion. But they were once so everyday, so familiar, so readily available that I took them for granted. I thought they would always be there and remain the same throughout the years.

So, I feel a deep sense of loss when confronted with the opposite. I could not love them any more. I always cherish and celebrate the flavors they so memorably instilled in my palate and my heart.

As modern, fast food eateries started to populate this old city of mine, I feel that any day now my childhood foods of yore could leave me forever. The aura surrounding them is beginning to pall.

And, as the experience of them, a tremendous blessing from the now bygone era, is becoming distant and formless, I realize that I need to let the irreplaceable rest and venture forth into the unknown where serendipitous surprises may be waiting.

'€” Arif Suryobuwono