Mixed with memories
By Anastasia Edwards
Published: September 13 2008 03:14 | Last updated: September 13 2008 03:14
In 1942, when she was seven, Sri Owen hugged her grandmother for the last time, as she, her parents and three younger sisters prepared to flee her native Sumatra in the wake of the Japanese invasion. “My grandmother’s last words to me were, ‘Remember, my beloved granddaughter, when you grow up, don’t marry a foreigner,’” writes Owen in Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food, her 15th cookbook which will be published next week. “She meant, of course, someone from another island.”
Perhaps Owen’s grandmother, who died soon after this, already sensed the wanderlust that would eventually lure her granddaughter into choosing “permanent exile”, an exile that helped make her into one of the most important voices in Asian food today.
Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food, perhaps unsurprisingly given its name, is Owen’s most personal cookbook yet. It is the memoir of a bright, ambitious girl coming of age during modern Indonesia’s achievement of independence, a social history of a country that is both the world’s fourth-largest and one of Asia’s most geographically and culturally heterogeneous. It is also a comment on how important the foods we have eaten at a formative time can be – many of its 120 or so recipes describe Owen’s first encounters with the dishes she writes about.
Owen’s book tells of student days in Yogyakarta, Java’s cultural and intellectual capital, when she longed “to escape, at least for a while, the confines of tradition and genteel poverty by leaving Indonesia and seeing how the rest of the world lived”. She dreamt of travelling to England, home of her beloved Jane Austen.
After meeting a witty Oxford graduate named Roger Owen, and persuading her father to allow her to marry him, Sri told her husband-to-be a “half-truth” about herself – that she couldn’t cook. “I don’t remember now quite why I said this,” she writes. “Perhaps I looked forward to someone else performing the daily task in the kitchen, or perhaps I wasn’t sure if he would like my Indonesian food.”
They were married in Indonesia in 1962, and, prompted both by the fact that Roger’s housekeeper was such a poor cook and that they had an international circle of friends who enjoyed cooking for each other, Sri soon found herself espousing the role of home cook and hostess and in the process gaining the reputation as a “first-rate cook”. In this short but intense period on her home soil, she would gain a knowledge of key ingredients of Indonesian cookery that would serve her well. In 1964, after her husband’s contract in Indonesia was up, the couple sailed for England. It would be 17 years before Owen returned to her country, in 1981, to introduce their two sons to her family.
Towards the end of a successful career with the BBC Indonesian Service in London, Owen “succumbed to her inner voice and the repeated entreaties” of the literary agent John McLaughlin, a friend of her husband’s from Oxford, to write a cookery book, and in 1976 her first book, The Home Book of Indonesian Cooking, was published. It led to her meeting her most important mentor, the late food writer and scholar Alan Davidson (who died in 2003), to whose memory Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food is dedicated.
Davidson was the author of The Oxford Companion to Food, and a hallmark of his thinking about food, and one which has influenced Owen’s own writing, is the concept of “foodways” – or the total of all the food habits in a community or culture. Foodways are, of course, constantly evolving.
When I arrive for lunch on a recent Sunday, my voluble, welcoming hostess shows that Indonesian tradition and authenticity can live on even in the modern, western kitchen. She has prepared bebek betutu (“traditional long-cooked Balinese duck”), the classic dish of Bali, where she and Roger spent their honeymoon, and an updated version, panggang bebek dengan kuah bayem (“thirty-minute duck breast with spinach sauce”). She has used the same marinade, or bumbu, for both. Despite its 18 ingredients, which include many spices that the kitchens of most enthusiastic home cooks would contain, as well as a few – such as terasi (shrimp paste) and tamarind water – that are well worth seeking out, the process is simple: the ingredients are blended together, and then simmered briefly. The chicken has marinated overnight, and the duck breasts have simply had the bumbu spooned over them before going into the oven.
Last October, Owen underwent quadruple bypass surgery and finds herself “getting tired more quickly” than she used to. Roger’s assistance, however, helps to reduce the physical strain of cooking so she can research her books and carry out occasional professional engagements. In his newest incarnation, he will also be co-editor for her next big project, The Oxford Companion to Southeast Asian Food.
Our lunch successfully demonstrates that traditional does not have to mean time-consuming and underlines Owen’s belief that the best Indonesian food is made at home. With dessert, she demonstrates yet another facet of her attitude towards Indonesian food; experimental dishes in which she follows her instincts to create meals that, though not necessarily traditional, still capture something of the spirit of Indonesian cooking. Her kaffir leaf ice-cream, for example, is fresh, cleansing and citrussy, a vibrant celebration and isolation of an ingredient that usually plays a supporting role.
Owen bemoans the lack of promotion for Indonesia’s cuisine in its own country. “The Indonesians are quite embarrassed to serve their food,” she says. “People who cooked were traditionally considered very low,” she explains.
“Catering schools are springing up throughout the country but the chefs prefer western food, which they think is more prestigious than Indonesian food.” At a banquet Owen attended in Indonesia, at which the ministers of tourism and food were among the guests, “they served us lunch and again it was western food, and I was supposed to talk about Indonesian food!”
‘Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food’ (Pavilion, £25) is published on September 15
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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