Buah keluak chicken by Malcolm Lee of Candlenut (Courtesy of Malcolm Lee)

Raising awareness about Indonesia’s wealth of spices and foods remains a challenge.

Indonesia has an unflinching determination to seek recognition from UNESCO for the country’s spice trail as world cultural heritage.

However, according to Negeri Rempah Foundation chairwoman Kumoratih Kushardjanto, there has always been a lack of manuscripts about Indonesia’s food and its past glory in shaping the world through its spices.

Therefore, she intends to start a writers club for food journalists to boost publications about the country’s spice trail to draw more people’s interest to learn about the traces of civilization left by the trail that connected Southeast Asia, the source of spices, with the Middle East and Europe.

In a talk during Tempo Media Week at the National Library in Jakarta on Dec. 7, 2019, she said the club members could join Jelajah Negeri Rempah (Spice Land Tour), the foundation’s signature tour to explore the spice trail to study the great stories of Indonesia’s wealth of spices, including the lesser-known ones, such as camphor, an aromatic spice endemic to Barus district in Central Tapanuli regency in North Sumatra.  

Long before the first Europeans arrived in the archipelago in 1512, camphor, locally known as kapur barus, was heavily traded by foreign nations such as Egypt and China, according to Guide to Geography, an ancient map written by Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus who lived in Egypt in the 1st century AD.   

In 2020, Negeri Rempah will go to Maluku, known as the Spice Islands, to make a four-day pilgrimage to spots that German-born botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius once visited in Ambon during the era of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

Rempeyek-inspired kaffir lime and peanut cracker by Peter Lloyd of Sticky Mango (Courtesy of Peter Lloyd)

His biggest contribution was making written records about flora and fauna in Maluku for 50 years, including his masterpiece work, Herbarium Amboinense. This book showed that the Spice Islands had nutmeg, mace and cloves — three commodities that drew the VOC and other foreigners to the East Indies, now known as Indonesia. It also documented 1,200 types of plants that Rumphius found in Maluku in the late 1600s.    

Unlike Rumphius, local people orally shared stories about spices and food. This poses a problem, because when they pass away, the stories are gone. It is not easy to trace the inheritors of these stories.

“In Ambon, we will note down again what Rumphius documented. We indeed need to learn a lot about the writing tradition from the West,” Kumoratih said, adding that the tour would be guided by biologist Sangkot Marzuki, the chairman of the Indonesian Science Academy (AIPI).

Indonesia Gastronomy Network chairwoman Vita Datau, who also spoke at the talk, agreed with Kumoratih, promising that next year she would begin to write her experiences as the head of the Tourism Ministry’s Culinary and Shopping Tourism Acceleration Team.

“I want to take leave to make a book about all the things I have got and fought for when I attended food congresses. If I don’t document it, many might not know about it so they cannot learn from it. I will also share how to make a network in the culinary world,” she said.

Vita said she would also make a website, www.vitadatau.com, where she would upload all the materials she had presented at congresses across the globe in the last three years so that the public could learn from it.     

Her stories will include the moment when her team managed to convince the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) to accept Ubud in Bali as the prototype for the development of gastronomy tourism during the World Forum on Gastronomy Tourism in Spain in 2017.   

A lack of publications about food literacy in Indonesia is one of the reasons why many people in the country are not aware that local food and spices are still admired worldwide.

London-based restaurant Sticky Mango chef Peter Lloyd, who is known for creating modern interpretations of Southeast Asian cuisines, came to Bali this year to explore Indonesia’s rich culinary heritage in Indonesian Cooking Masterclass mentored by celebrity chef Degan Septoadji.   

“We introduced him [Lloyd] to local chefs. We asked them to teach him to make five national dishes that are easy to cook,” Vita said.

After returning to London, Lloyd launched an 11-course “Taste of Indonesia” tasting menu in October 2019, which includes chicken satay with peanut sauce from Madura, East Java and suckling pig with green bean and crispy shallot salad from Bali.   

Studying history: Negeri Rempah Foundation volunteers visit Kacang Butor village in Belitung in Bangka-Belitung province, taking note of the great stories of pepper explained by a local farmer in Belitung, known as the main producer of pepper in the country. (Courtesy of Negeri Rempah Foundation)

Another foreign chef who also promotes Indonesian spices is Malcolm Lee, owner of Singapore-based Candlenut,
the world’s first Michelin-starred Peranakan restaurant.

Lee is a big fan of kluwek (black nuts), the main ingredient in Indonesia’s traditional dishes, such as rawon (black nut beef soup) from East Java and sup konro (rib soup) from South Sulawesi. In his restaurant, two of his signature dishes are buah keluak fried rice and buah keluak ice cream, with kluwek, which he imports from Indonesia.     

Vita said the chef fell for kluwek when Indonesian culinary expert William Wongso asked him to taste rawon at a food stall during his visit to Indonesia with World Street Food Congress founder KF Seetoh.

For her, Indonesia’s spice trail deserves recognition as world cultural heritage from the UNESCO World Heritage Committee because the country’s spices have spiced up the world and shaped the culinary world as it is today.  

“For me, the spice trail is also a campaign to move people to learn to understand Indonesia’s diversity,” said Kumoratih. “The spice trail should also be seen as a gate that allows cultural exchange to happen. If there was no trade of spices, there would be no religions in Nusantara.”