Thousands of islands and hundreds of peoples, cooking with spice pastes ground fresh, a sambal at every meal and rice as the meal itself.
Indonesia is an archipelago of thousands of islands and hundreds of peoples, each with its own language and its own way of cooking, brought together as one country only in the twentieth century. What is called Indonesian food is really many kitchens — Minang, Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, Minahasan and a great many more — that share rice, coconut, spice pastes and sambal, and argue about everything else.
The islands were at the heart of the spice trade: cloves and nutmeg grew in the Maluku islands and, for centuries, almost nowhere else. They drew traders from India, China and Arabia, then the Portuguese, and then the Dutch East India Company, whose grip on the trade became, over time, Dutch colonial rule over most of the archipelago. That rule brought plantations and forced cultivation, remembered for hardship, and left traces on the table — pastries, the rijsttafel, a few borrowed words — until independence, proclaimed in 1945. Chilli, now at every meal, is itself a newcomer, most likely carried from the Americas by European traders in the sixteenth century.
Faith shapes the table too. Islam spread through the ports over several centuries, and most Indonesians today are Muslim, so most kitchens cook without pork. Hindu Bali and the largely Christian Minahasa, among others, cook it gladly. Chinese communities, settled along the coasts for centuries, brought tofu, noodles and soy sauce, which became kecap — and dishes from bakmi to lumpia that are now simply Indonesian.