Expat cookbook authors putting women and children first

Maria Kegel, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

They're out to make a difference for those in need.

Jenny de Montfort and Claire Cooper, both from the UK, have spent months compiling and testing 60 recipes from around the world, contributed by friends in the Jakarta expatriate community and well-known restaurants here. But their labor of love is not meant only for the kitchen.

They've included stunning photographs of everyday scenes in Jakarta or other areas of Indonesia, which make it suitable for the coffee table as well.

The title of the book is easy enough to remember: Gado Gado ala Bule.

"We're the bule," de Montfort quipped, referring to the local term for Westerners. "And gado-gado is a mix. In Indonesian it's a food dish, but it also means 'whatever'," she said.

"It was very much stressed that we wanted to do something sophisticated, recipes you actually want to do, where you'd think 'I'll cook that tonight'," Cooper said.

The entire proceeds from book sales go directly to Yayasan Balita Sehat, an early childhood and well-baby center on Jl. Puri Sakti in Cipete, which operates various programs to improve the health, nutrition and education of children under five, as well as help mothers increase their earning power through training and small enterprise schemes.

De Montfort said that if the book were a success, it would make a considerable difference to those who go to the clinic.

"And that was why we've had so much unconditional support and help," she added. "People could see if they helped it could go a long way to making a sizable contribution."

Production costs have been covered by the advertisers, enabling the book's entire sale proceeds to go directly to the cause.

Written in versions for both the English and Indonesian markets, the book features a photograph on the left side of each page, while on the right is a recipe paired with a clever illustration drawn by pal Gillie Turner or local illustrator Hari Mulyanto.

The photos and recipes are all set on a background of original graphics, made by local graphic designer Roy Widjojo, whom Cooper acknowledged as helping to make their concept a reality.

"We're not designers, we're not professional book producers, we just had an idea. We wanted something different and stylish, where the recipes were important but they weren't the be-all and end-all," she said, adding that the book was not meant to be the definitive guide on how to cook or how to get by in Jakarta.

Recipes are grouped into categories, with starters on yellow pages, vegetable dishes on green, main courses on terra-cotta and puddings on purple.

"The idea was to produce a pretty book that people would enjoy reading and also feel they could do the recipes because they thought, 'that's a recipe from someone I know and not just something that's been hyped up in the book'," Cooper said.

Several local restaurants that were approached for sponsorship were also asked to contribute recipes, "to boost the book, so it wasn't just all expat recipes; people would look at it and think 'whoa, I've got a recipe from the Dharmawangsa here, or from the Mandarin Oriental!'," Cooper said.

In addition, The Dharmawangsa wrote the book's foreward, and their chef de cuisine, George Jardine, went through all the recipes with them to make sure they were balanced and suitable.

Having one book in English and the other translated into Indonesian gave people options, Cooper and de Montfort said.

Timing has also played an important part in the book's launch, held on Thursday at Aksara Bookstore in Kemang, with both de Montfort and Cooper hoping the book would make it onto people's Christmas lists for the folks back home.

The book was a joint idea as much as it was a joint effort, with de Montfort explaining that Cooper had been the one doing work with the baby clinic, while she wanted to raise money for it.

"We were talking about food, goodness knows why we were, and then we thought, 'recipes, what a brilliant idea!'," de Montfort said.

Friends were enlisted in the search for the best recipes to publish and Cooper said they received a tremendous response from them.

"It could be because friends had lived as expats in countries or who had parents or grandparents who were foreign, and then they would give us something like their grandmothers' best lamb from New Zealand," Cooper said.

Turner, who is a cartoonist and designer, was called on next and de Montfort said she had come up with some great caricatures.

Cooper said that they had wanted to make it an "Indonesian book", a celebration of their time in Jakarta, but, featuring recipes from around the world, the trick was how to bring it all together under an Indonesian theme.

"So this is where the idea of photographs came in as you can't try and take clever photographs of a fish. Homemade recipes do not look very sophisticated," she said.

But there are no photos of Monas, or other typical landmarks one sees in Jakarta or associates with Indonesia.

Instead, a becak (pedicab), items for sale on Jl. Surabaya, fishermen in Sunda Kelapa Harbor or a tranquil scene from a lagoon at Kepulauan Seribu (the Thousand Islands) are just a few of the pictures that were taken by professional as well as good amateur photographers.

But as de Montfort and Cooper found out, the project, which started back in Easter, was more than meets the eye.

"As when (testing) the salmon recipe: You'd assemble the ingredients and suddenly you'd think, 'something's wrong here', and you'd realize -- there's no salmon," Cooper said.

The women found the recipes from the restaurants did not come in conventional recipe format and were not made in proportions for a family.

"They were complete mumbo-jumbo, which probably works for chefs as they have their own language, but oh my God, the amounts were completely wrong," Cooper said.

"They're all done in big quantities and you can't just downsize them; it doesn't work, you have to start again," de Montfort added.

Their hard work has more than paid off, and they credit the many people who stood by them to help their project succeed.

"We needed help and we got it: We were desperate for other people's goodwill, understanding and patience and it really has come to fruition," Cooper said.

The book is available at Aksara bookstore, or can be ordered by e-mail at ccooper@rad.net.id or jdemontfort@centrin.net.id.