Cradle of Flavor
Indonesian Spice Cake (Spekkuk)
I inherited this fascinating Indonesian culinary compendium from my friend Ramon. He and I have a funny background. When we met I was working in the art world and he was working in the culinary world, and then at some point our careers switched and all of a sudden he was working in the art world and I was working in the culinary world! He was offloading of a few of his cookbooks and this was one of them. I would say at least six books in my collection came directly from Ramon cleaning house. Thanks Ramon!!!
I really love Indonesian food and we are so lucky in Los Angeles to have a few fantastic Indonesian restaurants that have exposed us to their fabulous and colorful flavors. Although I have never traveled to Indonesia, I have had a few Indonesian cross-overs in my life:
My dad worked in the travel industry his whole career & has been so lucky to travel all over the world (every continent except Antarctica, and countless countries), but when asked where is his favorite place he’s ever traveled to, he almost always says “Bali, Indonesia”. Needless to say, it’s been on my list since he returned from that trip decades ago.
As a young kid, and then again in college I played in Gamelan ensembles. Gamelan is the music of Indonesia, and if you’ve never seen it performed, you have a treat lined up for you. It is an all-percussion orchestra, and it’s just as fun to play as it is to listen/watch. My college gamelan ensemble was especially memorable, I learned under Daniel Schmidt who hand-built most of the Gamelan sets that exist in the Bay Area today!
When I was in culinary school I discovered a recipe for “Indonesian Fried Rice”, it is a magical recipe that I still use to this day and even though it has few ingredients & simple cooking methodology, its flavor is unique and complex each time I eat it. I keep the recipe as a note in my phone — where I originally wrote it down — You never know when you’re going to need to whip a good rice recipe out of your pocket.
Indonesian Fried Rice My friend Daisy took me to a dinner in Ojai in 2014 and the meal was prepared by an Indonesian chef. The setting was lovely, and the food was out of this world incredible. One thing that was served was a simple Sambal (a chile-based sauce) called Sambal Tomat (if you click on the link about the dinner, in the last photo that is me serving myself Sambal Tomat). I spent months after this dinner trying to perfect my own version of this sauce, and now have a recipe for it that I love (Even though I’m allergic to tomatoes).
Sama Sama Dinner in Ojai A year or so after the Ojai dinner, I traveled to Amsterdam for the first time and had a Risjsttafel meal in Amsterdam. Inspired by that meal, and my previous run-ins with Indonesian food, I decided in June of 2016 to host a dinner party with entirely Indonesian dishes — everything except the Rice, Sambal Tomat, and Satay Sauce I had never cooked before.
Images from the Indonesian dinner I made in 2016: Beef Rendang, Indonesian Fried Rice, Ayam Goreng (Indonesian Fried Chicken), Sambal Tomat with store bought shrimp chips & garlic chips, Gado Gado with Peanut Satay Sauce. I once catered a party for my friend Alexandra and made only dumplings. As you all know I don’t really like nuts, but she requested I do a peanut sauce for the spring rolls. Not knowing where to begin, I decided to use Yotam Ottolenghi’s Satay Sauce recipe hidden within his Gado Gado from his book Plenty which I had made before. The sauce was the real hit of the party, and if ever I am tasked with making any kind of peanut sauce, this is the only one I will make (for now).
Cradle of Flavor by James Oseland is a really beautiful book for you if you REALLY want to dive deep into Indonesian cooking. The book starts with an Indonesian Folk Saying:
If you don’t know it, you can’t love it. Tak kenal maka, tak sayang.
This saying really resonates with me, but I feel it is also expressing, you cannot say you don’t like something until you’ve really tried it. I would assume that outside of Indonesia / Southeast Asia, & perhaps the Netherlands, you won’t find a large concentration of people from Indonesia. So if you’re faced with trying Indonesian food for the first time, you should do it! You never know how the flavor is going to strike you like it did for me the first time I tried it… and each time after that.
This book is as much a love letter to Indonesia, and the people that worked with James Oseland to teach him these recipes, as it is a dictionary of Indonesian flavor. After a riveting introduction to how he was turned on to Indonesian cuisine and culture, you are graced with nearly 100 pages of unique ingredients, cooking methods, and equipment you may need to begin cooking like an Indonesian home chef. It isn’t until page 119 that we see a full recipe!
The cooking techniques section is not to be missed and includes everything from Stir-Frying to Relaxing. Yes. Relaxing is an essential cooking technique and one that most of us forget about.
So, why, you may ask, did I only cook one recipe from this book?
For starters, this book isn’t going anywhere. I want to come back to it and give it the true honor it deserves and cook some of the Indonesian dishes I love that I don’t know how to cook (we marked 9 total recipes just at our first run through that we want to make).
Second, it’s been a stressful time for me at work. The week we pulled this book off the shelf I couldn’t really envision cooking much anything “new” just due to my level of exhaustion. But when we were invited to dinner at a friend’s house and she told us she was making Thai & SE Asian dishes for dinner, I thought — ok I can make a dessert from this book that will pair well with that meal. These friends are not dessert people, but this cake seemed like the perfect option.
The Indonesian Spice Cake is very similar to what we know as a pound cake, but is filled with a floral warming aromatic blend of spices that really elevate what can sometimes be a heavy and sweet dessert. The cake was light and fluffy, not too sweet, and went perfectly with our first pick of the season Strawberries & some Coffee or Vanilla ice cream from the depths of our friend’s freezer. I want to remember this cake for future gatherings because I feel it would be the perfect end to many meals in the future. The recipe requests you cook it in a tube pan (Which I did), but I wonder how it would do in a sheet pan or even as little cupcakes!
We’ll have to return to this book soon to make more of the incredible recipes within.
Love & Happy Spatulas,
Alyssa
So yummy!