by Heidi Munan
Traditional cakes anyone? This description of cakes, written in 1521, has to be traditional!
When Pigafetta’s expedition reached Brunei, the King sent gifts to the crew: ‘…cakes of various kinds, made only of rice. Some were wrapped in leaves and were made in somewhat longish pieces, some resembled sugar-loaves, while others were made in the manner of tarts with eggs and honey…’
The first ‘cake’ on the list is easy to identify. This is glutinous rice cooked in leaf-lined bamboo tubes, the kind of delicacy we know as lemang. Sugar-loaves were conical, with a blunt pointed top, I am not aware that anyone still makes round, fairly tall cakes nowadays. What about the ‘tarts made with eggs and honey’? Just guessing, this was probably a steamed rice flour confection.
Unfortunately, our Portuguese friends didn’t ask for recipes. They simply gobbled up those cakes, a welcome feast after weeks at sea. The rations on board European ships in the 16th century consisted mainly of salted beef and hard, dry tack variously called ship’s biscuit or cabin bread.
Southeast Asian sailors brought along stores of rice, though they too carried dry tack as a standby when the grain ran out: ‘Papua Bread’.
A.R.Wallace, a careful observer who did record recipes, gives an interesting description of sago production in Papua. The process is similar to what we can observe in the sago lands of Sarawak, though the final product was different: instead of the dry ‘sago pellets’ we know from the Rajang delta, the Papuans baked ‘sago slabs’, in specially made clay moulds.
Each slab was about three-quarters of an inch thick, and about six to eight inches square, not unlike a slice of bread. Wallace enjoyed the Papua Bread when it was freshly baked, with butter, as a novel kind of breakfast toast. When properly dried, he assures his readers, Papua Bread would last for years. It was the ideal provision to take on long sea journeys. The sailors had to dip the ‘bread’ in water or soup to soften it slightly, and then it was, well, not as good as rice but better than nothing!
In Sarawak, the general word for ‘bread’ is ‘roti’. This includes flat-breads, cooked on a hot surface, a skillet, or inside a heated earthenware jar. The bread most of us eat at breakfast, roti paun, is a late-comer in the field. It can only be cooked in an oven, and the oven was not a traditional cooking appliance in the Southeast Asian kitchen of long ago.
So, here’s an interesting question: when did the oven, an insulated cavity heated from below where foods can be baked in hot air, first come into common use in our part of the world?
Our traditional cakes are not baked in an oven, they are either deep-fried in oil or steamed over boiling water. The kueh bahulu, an egg-raised mix baked in a heavy brass mould embedded in charcoal embers, is a near approach to actual baking, but it’s still not an oven.
Ovens of various kinds must have come into Southeast Asia with the Portuguese, and later the Dutch. These good folk were used to eating bread, loaves of wheat flour dough leavened with sourdough, yeast, or soda, as part of their daily diet. But as the centuries rolled along, the secret – if it ever was one! – leaked into the public domain. Kitchen helpers had obviously done the mixing, kneading and baking in Mjinheer’s kitchen, and the kitchen helpers were local lads. There was nothing to stop them from starting a little bakeshop down in the bazaar and selling this exotic delicacy to the general public. To distinguish it from the cabin breads and flat breads, it was generally known as ‘roti bantal’, pillow bread, or ‘roti paun’.
A soft, slightly sweetish bread called ‘roti Hainan’ is still popular around here, especially when served as a charcoal-grilled toast with butter and kaya. The Hainanese were known as excellent cooks in their homeland; those who ventured into the colonial realms of Southeast Asia often found employment in the kitchens of the ruling class. Bread-making was the cookie’s daily task – and if the cookie was Hainanese, he soon added his own little twist to the standard recipe.
The oven our Hainanese cookie used was European-style, a well-insulated chamber of brick, with an iron door. One of these could still be seen at Fook Hoi in Kuching in the 1970s. Today’s oven, used by a housewife, a cookie, a baker or a professional patissier, is fired by gas or electricity.
As creative cooks have discovered, the oven can be used to adapt a few traditional cake recipes. Take the original layer cake (‘plywood cake’), made without the addition of food colouring. The many golden-brown layers did indeed look like a stack of plywood.
An earlier, steamed version of ‘layer cake’ consists of rice flour and coconut cream. This was often made of variously coloured parts. So one enterprising housewife put two and two together and decided to add colouring to the batter of her next baked layer cake. I’d love to know who the inventor of this modern Sarawak icon was! Today, an oven of some sort is found in almost every kitchen. Mama is usually the baker, but even children are learning to make buns or bikkies. We can all enjoy the luxury of eating cakes fresh from the oven!
Sources
Antonio Pigafetta’s Account of Brunei in 1521, tr. D.E.Brown, Brunei Museum Journal 1974, Vol.3 no.2, pp 171 – 179
Wallace A.R.: THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO, MacMillan & Co., London 1869, pp 290 – 291
Heidi Munan is an established writer on all matters Sarawak from beads of Borneo to its sartorial heritage. Her book Food Heritage of Sarawak: A Cultural Perspective, first published in 2012, is currently undergoing an update. Look out for it on bookshelves soon.
