Author Sri serves up Indonesian food to the world
Bruce Emond, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Sri Owen never set out to make her mission a greater awareness of Indonesian food, a culinary cause to put it on par with other contributions to international cuisine.
An English literature graduate, she moved with her British husband, Roger, to the UK in the late 1960s, working for the BBC's overseas Indonesian radio service. But she brought her own love of food with her, cooking up the meals of her West Sumatra homeland and other parts of Indonesia for guests to her home.
"As soon as I arrived in London and started inviting people round to eat my food, I realized they liked it, and that was long before I had learned all that I know now about English and other Western food," Sri, now a resident of the UK for more than 40 years, said from her Wimbledon home.
One of the guests was a literary agent who asked her to put down in words the largely unknown recipes, spices and cooking methods of the Indonesian archipelago.
She took up the offer in 1976 with The Home Book of Indonesian Cookery, reprinted as Indonesian Food and Cookery. Almost 30 years on (I picked up a rather dog-eared copy for Rp 15,000 at a secondhand bookstore in Kuningan, South Jakarta), the book still makes an excellent, informative read, brimming with tips and colorful anecdotes accompanying many of the recipes.
In the ensuing years, many other authors have written about the food of Indonesia, especially Balinese cuisine, but Sri remains the pioneer, the first to provide a source for the exhaustive compendium of dishes.
It was just a start in her cookbook writing career: Among other works, Sri wrote Indonesian and Thai Cookery (1988), Exotic Feasts (1992), The Rice Book (1993), Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (1994), Noodles: The New Way (2000) and New Wave Asian (2002).
Along the way, she took to running cooking demonstrations and workshops, and expanded her own culinary horizons through travel in other parts of Asia and Europe. It has been, she notes, a fascinating journey, ones of twists and turns leading to new discoveries about different food cultures.
She selects Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery as her best and most satisfying book (she also "puts a word in" for Healthy Thai Cooking (1997)".
"My husband Roger agrees with me. We spent four months traveling to parts of Indonesia I had never seen before, and I went back to my birthplace for the first time in about 50 years, so it was a wonderful experience."
Food had always been important to her (she credits her grandmother as a particular influence), but the task of dissecting and refining its significance in writing about it has brought new meaning.
"I've always loved good food, though I've only really thought about it since I started to write books. For a while in my childhood, food was scarce; I've never taken food for granted. In good times and in bad, we thought of food as something that was grown in nearby fields and gardens, so what we ate was fresh and seasonal."
Although Indonesia does not have a history of great chefs in the traditional Western definition of haute cuisine, Sri said culinary reputations are attained at a simpler, more personal level.
"What we have is a large number of good cooks. All of them cook a variety of everyday dishes, but many also become expert in one or two dishes and become known in the neighborhood as the people you go to when you have a big party and want to impress your guests."
Still, she sees a lack of respect for the skills entailed in putting together a good meal.
"We don't, unfortunately, rate cooking very highly, we tend to take it for granted. it's something that a middle-class housewife usually pays someone else to do," she said.
"On the other hand, cooking is quite a popular hobby, even among boys and young men; my father was an enthusiastic cook, and a very good one. Though most home cooking is done by women, there has never been such rigid gender division in Indonesia as there is, or used to be, in the West."
Many Asian dishes have become mainstream in Western capitals in recent years, with greater travel to the region, migration of Asians and changing tastes. Indonesian cuisine has also made inroads, with satay now as well known as the kebab, nasi goreng (fried rice) served up from Sydney to Curacao and a bottle of chili sauce a must for those who like to get their tastebuds fired up.
Even so, Sri agrees that Indonesian food has yet to gain the popularity abroad of the old mainstay of Chinese cuisine or fast- emerging Thai dishes.
"Partly I think it's because fewer people visit Indonesia than visit Thailand, and largely because Thai people are good at running restaurants and Indonesians generally aren't. And though Indonesia contains about half the entire population of Southeast Asia, relatively small numbers of them migrate ..." she said.
"It seems to me that where Thais take their culture abroad with them, and expect foreigners to appreciate and enjoy it, Indonesians are shy of revealing their culture (or cultures) to the world at large. Even in the Netherlands, where there is a large Indonesian community and a lot of interest in the country and its ways of life, the generation that really knew and understood Indonesian food has largely died out."
Sri is someone with the basic grounding and acquired knowledge to tell the difference, say, between a real soto, from whatever region, from an inferior chicken broth; her website includes an essay picking apart rijstafel, assumed by many to be Indonesian food but today more often a hodgepodge of inferior dishes.
In her opinion, does any Indonesian dishes cut the mustard as truly great international cuisine?
"Frankly I can't think of any single dish that I would rate among the world's finest. But I think Indonesian food as a whole deserves to be taken seriously, partly because it contains some very good dishes -- rendang (chunks of beef simmered in coconut milk and spices), for example, which has no parallel in any other food culture that I know of -- but mainly because in its cooking methods and use of flavors it has a distinct style and accent which I know from experience appeals to people everywhere."
She calls the food of West Sumatra "very special", evident by the Padang restaurants found on seemingly every street corner in the country, but also notes the excellent regional dishes of Central and West Java, Sulawesi and parts of southeastern Kalimantan.
"By and large, good food is found where there is a tradition of city life and some sort of court, usually that of the local sultan. As in Italy, every region is proud of its own food and likes to disparage that of its neighbors. I am not going to pretend, however, that you can eat well wherever you are in Indonesia; particularly on small islands, the food can be abysmal, even the seafood, which ought to be excellent."
She is not "nostalgic" for street food -- "I judge it by the same standards as restaurant and home cooking" -- she is pleased that Indonesian food gets a look-in at the food courts now found in many office buildings and malls in major cities.
"I don't see that anything need be lost by taking Indonesian food upmarket, though there is a danger of being self-consciously clever or fashionable. I have certainly had excellent warung (sidewalk stall) food in return visits to Indonesia, and I'm glad to see the tradition thriving and being incorporated into the food courts."
What has been the most satisfying part of her career?
"Not the writing, as such, though I enjoy writing. The greatest satisfaction is from testing a recipe until I know that it works, then hearing someone say, when the book is published, I made that dish the other day for a party, and the recipe worked perfectly and everyone thought it was delicious! Then I feel I have done something to repay the training I was given as a child and the effort I've put in since, and (I hope) to make sure my country's traditions will survive to other times and in another world."
Although Sri has decided to give up her cooking demonstrations and workshops, there is at least one more book left to write.
"I want to write a big book that will contain just about everything I know about Indonesian food and will also summarize my life history and my life's work. I think that will be it," she said.
"After that, I'll perhaps turn to something else."
More information on Sri Owen is available from her website www.sriowen.com.