In a previous story, we wrote about the mysteries of preparing a massive turkey in northern Japan for Japanese guests invited to an American, home-style Thanksgiving dinner. In that article, we also described how we averted diplomatic disaster after discovering a roast suckling pig as the centrepiece of the buffet at an American consulate’s 4th of July reception in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation.
This time, here is a tale about the realities of diplomatic dining – and the inventiveness that must sometimes be brought to bear on the culinary arts in special circumstances.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my wife and I were stationed in Surabaya, Indonesia. Interesting but out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track city – even though it is just an hour’s flying time from the tourism hotspot of Bali. Kurt Weill fans may know the song, Surabaya Johnny, and longtime international travellers may possibly recall an old ticketing trick known as the Surabaya turnaround, making the city the supposed destination point on an international trip so as to maximise distance allowances even as it minimised cost. And literature fundis may recall that back in the writer Joseph Conrad’s time, Surabaya was Southeast Asia’s big time.
Back then, the city bustled with commodity brokers, export and import houses, shipping offices, and a polyglot mix of Javanese, Madurese, other Southeast Asians of many other ethnic backgrounds, as well as Chinese, Dutch and other European settlers and business figures – and not a few chancers – all eager to make their fortunes in the East.
In fact, its port had been active since at least the 1200s, and one of the few actual tourist highlights of the city was a visit to the old port. With some luck you could capture, in just one photograph, stevedores carrying heavy burdens on their shoulders as they loaded or unloaded those two-masted, inter-island Bugis schooners with their loads of rice, copra, teak, raw rubber, spices, and many other commodities – as well as passengers to the outer islands.
In the harbour tumult there was a constant stream of ox-carts, and bakkies, and sometimes one could even see a low-flying plane overhead, heading for the nearby airport. The net effect of all this was virtually the full history of transportation in just one image.
Actually, my father managed to capture that sight in a photograph when he came out for a visit. We had gone down to the port for a look and we stopped the car on the quayside for a few minutes to allow him to savour the organised chaos all around us. His photograph of the scene hangs on one of my office walls, even now.
By the time we arrived there, Surabaya had, in contrast to Conrad’s time, seen some better days. The city was a bit down-at-the-heels and in need of more than just a fresh lick of paint. Even so, there were unexpected surprises like a hotel, now named the Majapahit, left over from its colonial past when it was the Hotel Oranje. It had been part of a big chain of inns all over Southeast Asia, built by the Sarkies family, energetic Armenian hoteliers, back in the late 19th century. Majapahit was the name of an ancient empire that had ruled much of Java and beyond – presumably the new owners wanted to draw upon such early grandeur for their new prize.
The still more famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore had been part of that same chain, and it had been a landmark in that city for generations. The hotel’s Palm Court and Long Bar were the birthplace of the Singapore Sling, and (possibly) the song, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. More darkly, the hotel’s basement had been where the Japanese military police, the “Kempeitai”, had tortured their prisoners during World War 2 while the city was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Navy. The eerie sounds of the hotel’s structure creaking at night were said to echo the moans of the tortured souls from that time.
We once stayed in the Raffles Hotel’s grandiose Joseph Conrad Suite, with multiple bathrooms, lounges and bedrooms, furnished in teak wood wall panels and intricately woven rattan furniture. All of the Sarkies family’s hotels throughout the region were built on basically the same blueprint. There was a large centre garden courtyard, a capacious dining room with marble floors and potted palms where one inevitably partook of a “tiffin curry” lunch, and its extravagant guest rooms. In our Raffles suite there was a claw-footed bathtub easily three metres long and deep enough to teach a small child how to swim.
But back to our saga of elegant dining in Surabaya. Because the city was a melting pot of populations and a port shipping the region’s commodities to the waiting world, there were all kinds of cuisines available. During our time there, a French restaurant opened for business, offering a thoroughly respectable bouillabaisse served with properly crusty baguettes. After a bit of searching we even found a baker who made really good rye bread for home deliveries.
At one downtown intersection, on the second-floor roof garden of an old commercial building, there was a venerable Chinese restaurant with all manner of dishes and specialities like hot pot, and everywhere there were people there was street food (for the brave and adventurous), local dishes sold from push carts. These included rendang (a Sumatran spicy beef curry-like dish), bak mie goring (fried noodles) and bak mie kuah (noodle soup), bak so (a savoury soup with dumplings and little meatballs, chicken, beef or lamb/goat satay, nasi goring or fried rice, opor ayam (spicy fried chicken in sauce) as well as my personal favourite, steaming dishes of soto ayam – a ginger chicken stew or thick soup. (The woman who cooked for us in our home made her version of the dish that was sufficiently famous among our acquaintances, that before coming over for the evening, some guests would even ask if that was what was on the menu for the night.)
Towards the end of our time in Surabaya, as the Christmas season drew closer, my wife determined we should have an authentic, albeit non-religious, Christmas lunch for friends – including foreigners and Indonesians of all religious persuasions. She drew up a menu that naturally would include local dishes such as that famous soto ayam as the first course, as well as a roast turkey with all the trimmings. (Readers may by now have noted that turkey is a continuing thread in our engagements with the culinary universe.) It was easy enough to source things like potatoes and sweet potatoes, the various vegetables to be served, and, somehow, we even found tinned cranberry sauce, once our foraging expeditions began in earnest.
But there was one item that turned out to be not so simple to source among the many culinary delights of the Malay Archipelago. And that was what was supposed to be the centrepiece for the entire enterprise. That, of course, was an actual turkey. Now a turkey is, as Benjamin Franklin had asserted in 1787 – in the midst of the Constitutional Convention that was going to decide the fate of the nation – a noble bird. Moreover, he had tried to get it recognised as the American national bird instead of the bald eagle. Franklin had argued strenuously that that bird was a disgusting creature that fed on carrion and other animals’ leftovers. Clever readers will notice that, nonetheless, the bald eagle is America’s national bird, appearing on the Great Seal and making many appearances in the iconography of the country. Admittedly, a bald eagle in full flight is more majestic than a turkey, although who, really, would want to eat a bald eagle?
The name of the bird itself is a bit of a delusion. Among the early English colonies in North America, the early settlers settled on calling that ubiquitous native bird the turkey when they first encountered it because of its imagined origins in Turkey.
Meanwhile, throughout much of Europe its name derives from the Dutch word, kalkoen, which is a shortened version of its earlier appellation, the Calcoensche haan, so named for the Indian city of Calicut, for the bird’s imagined origins from South Asia. In modern-day Indonesia, the turkey retains its earlier Dutch name of kalkun or kalkoen (using the older Dutch-style orthography), or, sometimes, an ayam belanda, meaning Dutch chicken in the local Bahasa Indonesian language.
Ok, so the creature has a local name – or two or three of them. That meant it should have been easy enough to find one for sale. In that event our perspicacious, intrepid cook scoured the city’s traditional marketplaces, or pasars, but she came up totally empty handed. Not an ayam belanda was to be found at any of the stalls.
More drastic interventions were clearly necessary. So, off I went to the modern grocery store, downtown, Toko Galael, a branch of an even bigger version of the outlet in the nation’s capital city, Jakarta, where many foreigners did their shopping. Not so many foreigners in Surabaya back then, but it was clearly our best hope. This was a store whose owners were, after all, pretty resourceful. They had a full display of half-sized bottles of various French wines where the bottles, if you looked carefully, bore stickers on them with the name of a popular tropical cruise ship on them and the warning: “Not for resale.” But not an ayam belanda was to be found, however.
This was getting more serious as the date of the party drew near.
Kafka’s kalkun
Now, at this point in our story, is where real diplomatic skill and resourcefulness came into play. A plan was hatched. What if we purchased three of the biggest, plumpest chickens on sale at Toko Galael, as opposed to the scrawnier versions usually available in the local markets, and stuffed them? (We tended to think of the local chickens as the halt, the lame and the old who had finally been unable to escape the butcher’s block. Not surprisingly, they tended towards the chewy unless they were slowly simmered for a day or so). To address the lack of our intended ayam belanda, we decided we could stitch the three birds together with some poultry thread, then slowly roast the resulting ménage à trois for a satisfying meal. This creation would regally fill our big serving platter in the absence of an authentic kalkun, and the end result would come very close to our eagerly sought after, real turkey. Well, sort of.
Instead, what actually happened was right out of the theatre of the absurd in the shape of a Charlie Chaplin misadventure. As the birds cooked to a luscious golden brown, those three chickens slowly pulled together, driving the combined six legs upward towards the heavens – in unison. The result had morphed into an avian version of Gregor Samsa’s arthropod in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Inevitably, the responses of our dinner guests were rather different from what we had expected in appreciation of our inventiveness. “Quick, quick, take that hideous monster back into the kitchen. I’ll carve it there instead of at table side,” I whispered to our cook. Still, there was one benefit to this madness – everyone who wanted a drumstick could have one, and the bird, or birds, really, did taste very good after all that slow roasting, seasoned Indonesian-style. As we say in Bahasa Indonesia, “ayam itu, enak sekali” – or finger-licking good.
But after that I resolved that next year, whether for Thanksgiving or Christmas, I would somehow wrangle a turkey from a butcher or grocer in Singapore and have it air-shipped to Surabaya, or maybe ordered months in advance from the main branch of Toko Galael in Jakarta – or perhaps, in extremis, order one from the small commissary on the grounds of the US embassy in Jakarta. We could figure out the transportation arrangements and costs once we had actually secured the promise of a bird. It would be the least we could do to obtain an ayam belanda as the traditional main dish for our festive dinner.
But then, as the diplomatic life would have it, the following year we were in the US for immersion training in the Japanese language, instead of living in Surabaya, and turkeys were easy to come by in suburban Washington, DC. Thereafter, in Japan, turkeys were easy enough to come by at the military commissaries on the various US military bases around the country. But how that worked out for us is the story we have previously told.
Next time in our culinary adventures, we shall explore our adventures with the flesh of the poisonous fugu fish – and other exotic delights – offered to us by hosts, eager to please us. DM