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Coconut & Sambal is about one of the world's great cuisines, yet one that is barely documented in English.
Indonesia consists of seventeen thousand islands and more than 300 ethnic groups, which means it is not one cuisine but hundreds. It is also where the entire spice trade began. Nutmeg and cloves originally grew only on the Banda Islands, and Europeans sailed around the world to get hold of them. In 1667, the Dutch traded away Manhattan for one of these islands in order to secure their nutmeg monopoly, which says something about what the spices were worth.
Sambal is the foundation, and like kimchi it is not one thing but hundreds. Raw or fried, with shrimp paste or without, with tamarind, lime leaves or dried fish, and every region has its own. The book begins with them for that reason.
Then there is coconut in every form, milk, cream, oil, grated and toasted, alongside kecap manis, galangal, lemongrass and candlenut.
The most instructive dish is rendang from West Sumatra. The meat is cooked in coconut milk until the milk splits and the meat eventually fries in the oil it has released. It takes hours and there is no shortcut, but the technique changes the way you think about slow cooking.
Lara Lee is Australian with Chinese-Indonesian heritage and wrote the book after travelling through the country to trace her family's food. The more than 80 recipes are home-style and based on ingredients that can actually be found.
The book was named one of the cookbooks of the year by, among others, The New York Times, The Guardian and National Geographic.
Number of pages: 288
Number of recipes: More than 80
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 9781526603517
Language: English
First published: June 2020
