Eka Kurniawan Project

And we caused the clouds to overshadow you, and we sent down manna and quails upon you.
– The Koran 2:54

Photo by Rev Dan Catt, Some rights reserved.

Initially Maharani had hoped to find a new recipe at the city museum, but this was what she found:

A long time ago, a Bugis fishing ship sank in a storm in the Atlantic. There was only one survivor, a young man with leather pouch filled with spices, who had been rescued by a Portuguese merchant ship. They provided him with the plainest of European food, which sent him rushing into the kitchen where he took over as undisputable master of spices. That evening the tongues of all the ship’s occupants tingled, experiencing a sensation that their ancestor had never encountered.

Among all the history books and other volumes, only one Spanish encyclopedia, published in 1892, mentioned that man’s name, despite his significance to the history that followed. He has been forgotten by history, but to him we owe thanks for sending the traders of the West our way, along with the rats smuggling themselves on the Spanish ships, which came for the direct purchase of more of the aforementioned spices. This was the beginning of the greed of Europe, and the Dutch followed with their huge company.

Actually, the Dutch who eventually dominated the Spice Islands never really mastered the cooking spices they desired so badly. As we shall see, the dramatic rebellion of Diah Ayu is truly proof of that.

***
Maharani was not skilled at cooking and felt cursed by a husband who cooped her up in the kitchen and sometimes in the bedroom. Now she was impressed to find that she lived in a nation that God has created as a heaven for all growing things.

And practically everything that grew could be eaten. I say almost because some things could make you deathly ill if you ate them, but could heal you if you were dying. These were difficult secrets, only know to a handful of people whose ancestors had handed them down from generation to generation.

Starving to death would be the most outlandish thing one could do in a place like this, even though that frequently happened. Edible fruits abounded in the forests, and even leaves could be eaten, along with stems and sap. There were fields planted in crops. There were rivers and lakes where the fish reproduced faster than people; not to mention the vast waters of the ocean. And wild animals that seemed as tame as doves. All one had to do was toss something, and it would grow where it landed; if this were not a dream, then it was heaven.

It was in this place that people like Alfred Russel Wallace were astonished at the thousands of species, both alive and dead. It was here that people like Eugene Dubois mixed with those who had live. But among people of that sort, of course, there were also the traders who would immediately begin calculating how much profit was to be made from a country with such a treasure trove.

***
For years, Maharani only knew about producing children and preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now she knew that the Dutch had stayed here more than three centuries.

They established businesses before taking over kingdoms. They sent governor-general, who distributed their bureaucratic machines to all nooks and crannies of the country: residents, assistant residents, and controllers. They subdued minor rulers, making them into territorial regents, and these regents held sway over district chiefs and the district chiefs over sub district officials or village chiefs. The Dutch also controlled the Chinese traders who purchased rights to collect taxes for the auctioning of many commodities: spices, livestock, salt, and even opium.

That is the way business was done in those days. You had to plant what they wanted and not plant what they did not want. We also built long roads, laid down railway tracks, and built harbours because that is what they wanted. Along with all this came: the post office, the telegraph and eventually gaslights, the telephone and newspapers.

Outside of this machine of colonial bureaucracy, there were private sector Europeans who owned plantations and native slaves.

All of this created a great stage upon which a seething rebellion by the natives would unfold. Heroes were born and heroes died. We know of many of them, and we put paintings about them on the wall of our schools. Among them was a woman who carried on the rebellion without a spear of sharpened bamboo. She was Diah Ayu, and she fought her battle from her own kitchen.

***

Maharani knew of only a few recipes and spices. Most of these she had memorized from magazines. Now, she was impressed that a woman could become a hero just by mastering cooking spices.

Who was this woman? She was a famous cook, and a patriot admired by children. What we know of her legend, most of it learned in elementary school, are actually inconsequential nonsense.

It is hard to tell how the storytellers came to their elaborations. The stories they told now seem to have came as much from their heads as from accurate and substantiated data. In these legends, the figure of Diah Ayu was made strange, melancholy and pitiful. It could be suspected that these were efforts to expunge her from history, so that what little would remain of her would be an untrue image of the woman herself.

Following are some of the errors to be gleaned from the legends. She was sold by her father to a Dutch plantation because of her beauty. That is not true. She could not be said to have been beautiful, although the Dutchman did sleep with her enough to have produced two children by her. The fact is that actually she was purchased because of her extraordinary ability to combine spices, her skill in cooking, and her habit of producing delicious food.

Another erroneous belief about her follows. She stealthily taught other servants in the household how to read and write, and these servants taught the servants of neighbours, so that the servants of the Dutch became smart. They organized an uprising that took place on one unforgettable Thursday. That is not true. Diah Ayu was illiterate. But it was true that she was teaching the other servants. What she actually taught them were kitchen secrets: how to process cooking spices properly.

***
For the Dutch families living in the colony, having a skilled cook was not only an asset for the family, but also a matter of prestige. They could show off their cook’s skill at dinner parties. That is why strange things happened to native woman who were skilled in handling spices; they were often bought and sold and even kidnapped. Even so, their status in the colonial family was little more than that of a concubine, and a good cook would never be allowed to leave the house no matter what.

There were several reasons why this came about. First, the Dutch women, just like their men, thoroughly enjoyed the undreamed of affluence they experienced in the colony. They became lazy creatures, passing time on the verandahs of their homes looking out over tea plantations, while flipping through fashion magazines sent directly from Paris. Second, if a Dutch woman did try learning some special recipes, she was sure to fail if she tried to use them. This is reflected in the efforts of Mrs. Catenius van der Meulen, who traveled around to the homes of the owners of famous cooks recording their recipes in volume after volume. The book looked impressive, but she overlooked the fact that there were secrets untold never included in her tomes.

Diah Ayu was one of the keepers of such secrets. She could make the most sumptuous food, and the secret was in the spices. Certainly it is not an overstatement to say that in these islands there are just so many things that can be eaten. Here a banana stems, there a coconut cluster. Even grasshoppers and ants could be cooked and served up at the dinning table, much as snails and frogs were served. What is clear is that nobody in this country ever had to pray for manna, such as the children of Israel got from God.

But care had to be taken: there were secrets hidden in the abundant luncheon menu. The fruit seed used to prepare the crispy chips could kill you within seven days if mixed with vinegar and salt. These secrets were hidden in the kitchen, in the hands of the women who processed the spices and boiled the tubers. Among the concoction that tasted so delightfully like the food of gods, were combinations that worked as miraculous remedies, while others were deadly and merciless killers. And only the cooks who prepared them could tell the difference.

Finding all this out embarrassed Maharani greatly, because she knew her family took no pride in the way she cooked. It was becoming clear that the city museum would not yield any recipes that would help her improve her reputation as a cook.

***
Now, Maharani realized that it was Diah Ayu’s astonishing knowledge of how to process spices that enable her to undertake such an uprising.

She could create strange concoctions that could render a man permanently impotent: she succeeded in doing this after having borne two children for her Dutch master. She then emboldened herself to process dangerous combinations of spices that could kill a person most completely. She chose guests of her master’s family as her victims. Of course she did this carefully and stealthily by lacing the vegetables with the lethal concoctions. And to prevent suspicion, she made sure to formulate concoctions that would take a week or two after being ingested to complete their deadly tasks.

Her working methods were extraordinary, and took as many victims as a battle on the frontlines of a war. Within a year she had killed fifty-two Dutch colonists. At least that it what the newspapers reported concerning “the suspicious natural death” occurring in and around Batavia. It is possible that one or two of the deceased may not have actually been among her victims, but it would be exceedingly difficult to determine an exact figure.

What eventually made her rebellion so terrifying was the fact that she was teaching other servants her culinary secrets, and these servants were passing on what they had learned to still other servants living in their neighbourhoods in the brief moments they were able to encounter each other. Very quickly, the secrets of the cooking spices, which had been previously known only to select group of people throughout generations untold, became the knowledge of almost every cook in town. It was Diah Ayu who had turned the spices into weapons of death, and it was also she who organized all of the cooks so that on one specific Thursday they undertook their culinary rebellion. They killed their masters all at once; but not with a kitchen knife, with mushroom sauce.

That was the worst day ever in colonial history, when 142 full-blooded Dutch citizens died all in one day. This happened in 1878.

***
How the story of Diah Ayu ended is fairly well known, and there are not many errors of any significance in the telling of that aspect of her life. What is clear is that there was every reason to eradicate her memory from mainstream history and to delegate her and her deeds to misleading mythology. Those reasons would appear mostly chauvinistic, but that is just the way it has turned out.

It certainly is true enough that there are women (and men) who have used such methods. Mixing arsenic into food, for example, and then fatally poisoning someone. But Diah Ayu’s methods were so meticulous; mixing ordinary cooking spices that everyone was familiar with on a daily basis to bring about a seemingly natural death. That may be the primary reason for attempts to cover up the real history of the cook, Diah Ayu, to the point that little but legend and myth remain.

Today history exposed the kitchen secrets and placed them in Maharani’s hands. She went home from the city museum with the knowledge of how to murder her husband at their dining room table. She would be free of the curse of the kitchen and the bedroom as well. As soon as possible.