All About Food

What is it about chinese Indonesian and food? To celebrate my grandmother's 92nd birthday, my auntie threw a little lunch gathering for our extended family. My auntie invited her cousins; all aunties and uncles I have never really known were there, deeply engaged in jovial conversation about traditional food they used to eat when they were children. I sat politely in the corner, as a representative of my generation, trying to follow the dialogues that happen in mix street Javanese and Indonesian.

My dad's family came from a small town in central java, and his cousins all lived in neighbouring towns. As chinese Indonesians, their taste buds grew with the mixture of local (read: Javanese fondness of everything sweet) and home cooking. They shared the same love for food, traditional tahu telor, bakmi jawa, mie tek tek, urap, asem asem jawa, lo mie, kepiting tarakan, lotek, and many other things I never knew. They spoke longingly of vegetables that had dissapeared, only to have one auntie said, "Hey... I could find that in a market near my house!" In which the conversation shifted to comparing markets in different parts of Jakarta. There were talks of shiitake, soft shell crabs, watercrest lettuce, different type of noodles... My parents' generation not only know how to enjoy food, but also prepare the best dishes to suit the tongue. This generation is fluent in many aspects of food because it is such an integral part of life. They; and I, too for that matter, would not know how to live otherwise.

At a different gathering last night, my friend's German husband fondly told me that he was slowly learning to understand his wife's love for food. His Indonesian words vocabulary currently consist of words like fish, chicken, pork, beef, vegetables, soup, crackers to name a few. He said that whenever there was more than 3-4 people hanging out, food would definitely be a topic, and of course no event is complete without eating. As we were talking about that, his mother in law walked past with a big plate of Ayam Bulungan. See??

I began to wonder, what would my cousins and I talk about 20 years from now. When we have a similar gathering to cath up on lost times, would we speak longingly about the food of our generation? Would we speak about food preparation also? Or would we be talking about restaurants instead because we no longer cook?

My mouth goes watery just writing about this. I want soft shell crab crumbles in my hand as it caresses my mouth before it goes into my stomach. Yummm...