According to legend, when the plague arrived in the city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java, the sultan ordered his citizens to cook sayur lodeh and stay at home for 49 days. The plague has ended. And so began a practice that continues today.
Sayur Lodeh is a simple vegetable curry made up of seven key ingredients and a base of spicy coconut milk. Nutritionists who have studied the dish point out the health benefits of additions like galangal, which is said to have anti-inflammatory qualities. They assumed that such a dish, made from readily available seasonal ingredients, made it perfect for quarantine.
But the most important thing about the sultan’s command to cook the sayur lodeh was that it was a call for social solidarity. An entire city cooking the same thing at the same time creates a strong sense of solidarity.
“Like many aspects of Javanese beliefs, the goal is to avoid unhappiness,” said Revianto Budi Santoso, architect, teacher and student of Javanese heritage. “Avoiding disturbing things has priority over the individual achievement of something. Javanese people believe that when there are no obstacles, life takes care of itself. “
Javanese food as a whole is rich in symbolism. For example, nasi tumpeng is a mixture of meat and vegetables crowned by a tower of yellow rice in the shape of a cone. The presentation of the dish is supposed to reflect the order of the world under God. Nasi kuning is an aromatic yellow rice dish thought to bring blessings to new homes and businesses. And the turmeric drink never takes its name from the Javanese word meaning “prayer for health” and claims to promote calm.
Sayur Lodeh extends this linguistic and numerology symbolism. Each of the seven key ingredients that are added to a coconut milk base – melinjo (an olive fruit), melinjo leaf, chayote (a type of squash), long beans, eggplant, jackfruit and tempeh – has symbolic meaning that is derived from the sound of its syllables.
Like many aspects of Javanese belief, the goal is to avoid unhappiness
In Javanese, the wungu of terong wungu (eggplant) means purple, but also something like “to wake up”; while the lanjar of kacang lanjar (green beans) is equivalent to “blessings”. Gather the seven items and you get something closer to a spell.
The sayur lodeh cooking ritual is an example of slametan, a type of community rite that anthropologist Clifford Geertz has identified as a central feature of Javanese culture. A striking feature of Slametan is its fatalism; sayur lodeh is executed without expecting it to really work.
“It is interesting to note that the sayur lodeh is not an individual thing,” said Santoso. “It is a response to a misfortune that seems to dominate everyone. It is an effort to mitigate, as much as avoid, something that is probably inevitable. “
For an outsider, one of the attractive things about the magic of sayur lodeh’s story is how magical it is. The ingredients are a list of things that every Javanese villager is likely to have available to them. The preparation of the dish is simple: you put all the ingredients in a saucepan, then you hang it on the fire. In the past, cooking began after two royal heritages – a spear and a sacred flag, supposedly made of materials taken from the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad – paraded in the streets. Nowadays, it’s more like an ordinary meal. Besides the linguistic and numerology complexity, there is a practical side, if not a deep one, which makes this Slamentan in an attractive way opposite.
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If the sayur lodeh is simple to perform, its origins are complex. Some scholars believe that the tradition dates back to the height of civilization in central Java in the 10th century, where the lodeh allowed residents to take refuge in safety during the massive eruption of Mount Merapi in 1006. Historians of food such as Fadly Rahman dated sayur lodeh from the 16th century after the Spanish and Portuguese introduced long beans to Java. Others have argued that it is an “ancient tradition” that was invented in the 19th century: at the turn of the 20th century, Yogyakarta intellectuals were at the heart of Indonesian national awakening, a period where many national myths have been variously discovered, celebrated and created.
If nothing else, the legend of sayur lodeh was amplified in the early 20th century. The most famous example comes from 1931 when, during the reign of Sultan HB VIII, Java suffered from successive waves of bubonic plague for more than two decades. But the documents also show that the sayur lodeh was prepared to respond to the crisis of 1876, 1892, 1946, 1948 and 1951. To further complicate matters, over time, the sayur lodeh became popular throughout the archipelago Malay. It quickly becomes difficult to isolate why, when and how the dish evolved.
Food historian Khir Johari believes that such questions are irrelevant.
“When we look at the history of food, the temptation is to try to join dots in order to end up with a monocentric history,” he said, “but there can be more than one creative center.”
“The Chinese community of Peranaken in Singapore serves sayur lodeh as a sort of yellow vegetable stew with which you eat. lontong (compacted rice), “he said,” while Javanese Singaporeans make a white lodeh without turmeric. “
Indonesians are now starting to realize the health benefits of our traditional foods
For Johari, the transformation of sayur lodeh as it spread through the patchwork of cultures that make up the Malaysian archipelago illustrates the interaction between food, social customs and the environment. While the lush farmland surrounding Yogyakarta provides the vegetables that enable villagers to cope with plagues and volcanic eruptions, the region is dominated by the main maritime hubs where quarantine meant forcing newly arrived travelers to isolation. It seems likely that Javanese sailors were responsible for the popularization of the dish outside of Yogyakarta: soups, pots and curries like sayur lodeh become deeply practical when they are stuck on a ship.
And the dish continues to evolve. In today’s hyper-urban cities of Southeast Asia, sayur lodeh has been rediscovered as a health food. It has also become a heritage dish that attracts the attention of a rapidly growing middle class: for the Instagram generation, the rich colors of sayur lodeh lend themselves to comparison, competition and eye-catching images.
“When I first opened my shop, people were drinking jamu for social media:” Look how I am in touch with my culture, “that sort of thing,” said Nova Dewi Setiabudi, manager Suwe Ora Jamu café in M Bloc, one of the trendy districts of Jakarta. “But now Indonesians are starting to realize the health benefits of our traditional foods; we don’t always realize the medicinal benefits of ingredients like bay leaves, lemongrass and galangal. “
Outside of Yogyakarta, sayur lodeh may have lost its exact meaning, but it is still recognized as a dish that is somehow more than food. “Lodeh is a simple food,” said Nova, “but there is a great philosophy – wisdom – behind it. The key is the fresh ingredients. “
For now, Jakarta’s changing eating styles have little to do with the popularity of the dish in Yogyakarta. When an instruction to cook sayur lodeh because of Covid-19 was recently shared in the city via WhatsApp groups, allegedly from the current sultan of Yogyakarta, the majority of residents took it to heart, people preparing the dish and sharing it with their neighbors. Yogyakarta has been transformed in the past 20 years, with the rapid construction of hotels, shopping centers and a new airport, but the need for rituals and comfort has remained unchanged. In fact, technological advances in communication have worked to emphasize the continued primacy of older emotional reflexes.
However, no one in Yogyakarta is really sure whether WhatsApp messages come from the Sultan or not. The palace told a local newspaper that this was not the case, but this denial is not believed by everyone. While Yogyakarta is an anomaly in Indonesia, an autonomous kingdom within a republic, the current sultan wishes to be considered as a modernizing figure and seems to want to distance himself from the superstitions attached to the dish. His reluctance to recognize the tradition could be explained in terms of political risk: in the context of the current pandemic, public health officials fear that the millions of people who will probably travel through Indonesia at the end of Ramadan in may not unintentionally carry Covid-19 with them. Although confirmed cases in Yogyakarta are still very low, it would not be good for sayur lodeh to appear at the center of the Sultanate’s response to the crisis.
However, although one can sympathize with this logic, this does not mean that the local enthusiasm for sayur lodeh is out of place. The people of Yogyakarta responded to the crisis as they always did: by cooking sayur lodeh. And it did not matter to them whether the command came from the Sultan or not. Now they are waiting 49 days.
Recipe
Preparation time: 15 minutes | Cooking time: 20 minutes | Servings: 4
Ingredients:
50g melinjo
100g of melinjo leaf
200g of chayote
100g long beans
1 purple eggplant
1 jackfruit
1 piece of tempeh
100 ml coconut milk
Spices:
6 shallots
3 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
1 tablespoon salt
Sugar to taste
1 red pepper
3 green peppers
1cm of galangal
1 bay leaf
Preparation of vegetables:
Peel the chayote and cut it into cubes
Cut the long beans into 2 cm pieces
Cut the eggplant into cubes
Peel and chop the jackfruit
Preparation of spices:
Garlic puree, shallots, coriander, salt and sugar
Cut the red pepper and the green pepper
How to cook:
Bring the coconut milk to a boil, stirring in the spices
Add the galangal, jackfruit, chayote, melinjo and long beans until cooked
Add the melinjo leaves, chilli, eggplant and tempeh until cooked
Culinary roots is a series of BBC Travel connecting to rare and local foods woven into the heritage of a place.
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