Perkedel

 

You’ve seen them. If you’ve spent any time in Indonesia, you’ve seen them the way you’ve seen your own mother’s hands: so often you stopped noticing. Golden-brown potato patties, sitting in the glass display case of a warung in Tegal, sweating a little under the lights, waiting for someone to point at them and say yes, that one, and that one too. Mashed potato, seasoned, shaped, fried. That’s all. A child could tell you what it is.

Ask that child where it comes from and you’ll get a shrug. From here, the child will say. From Indonesia. From Grandma.

And that is the strange part, the part that should make the back of your neck prickle a little. Because perkedel is not from here. Not originally. The historian Fadly Rahman traces it back along a trail of colonial eating habits, a trail that runs straight through the rijsttafel, that elaborate banquet where local dishes were served with Western table manners on top like a starched collar. This humble thing, this dish nobody thinks twice about, once sat on the tables of the colonial elite.

So how does a thing like that get from there to here? How does something that started out foreign end up feeling like it was always yours?

Well. Let’s go back a ways.

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Europeans began arriving in the archipelago in the sixteenth century, and they kept arriving right through the nineteenth. They brought ships and guns and ledgers, sure. But they brought other things too, things that didn’t show up on any manifest. They brought their appetites. Western food culture came ashore right along with the cannons.

You have to understand that the Dutch East Indies was a place of lines. Lines between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, us and them. And in a world drawn that carefully, food was never just food. It was a signal, a flag run up a pole. You could tell a great deal about who a person was by what was on their plate and how they ate it.

Pipit Anggraeni, in her study at Universitas Negeri Malang, puts it plainly enough: etiquette and diet were a kind of visual language, a way of showing European identity. The Europeans of Batavia and the other colonial cities ate meat and soup and drank wine, and they did it with the right forks in the right hands. It was theater. Every dinner was a performance, and the audience was everyone who was not invited to sit down. The whole point was distance. Keep it wide, and keep it visible.

The cookbooks of the mid-nineteenth century even drew the line in ink. Hollandsch eten. Dutch food. And on the other side of the page, Inlandsch eten. Native food. Two words, one wall.

Now, could a person on the wrong side of that wall get a look at what was cooking on the right side? Not easily. Access was unequal, and it was guarded. That knowledge moved mostly among the priyayi, the native elite, and through the “household schools” like the Meisjes-Vervolgscholen. It was a narrow door, and not many were let through it.

So when perkedel first shows up in this world, understand that it wasn’t innocent. It wasn’t just a recipe. Class rode in on its back. So did culture. So did all the old unspoken rules about who belonged at the table and who carried the plates.

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The dish began as frikadel, or frikadeller, and here’s a funny thing: it wasn’t even properly Dutch. It belonged to a wider European tradition, seasoned minced meat pressed into patties and fried. But in the Indies it slipped into European households and found its place beside the rijsttafel. Windiany, Nawa, and Supriyono record it there, settled into colonial domestic life and elite dining like a guest who’d been coming so long that nobody remembered the invitation.

Anggraeni counts perkedel among the European influences on the food of the Indies population between 1901 and 1942. Those were the years when the two worlds pressed closer together, closer than the wall was ever meant to allow, and some of that pressing happened inside the houses themselves. In the kitchens.

Remember that. The kitchens.

Because here is where the story turns.

Meat was expensive. That was the problem, the small hard fact at the center of everything. A dish built on ground meat is a dish for people who can afford meat, and most people could not. So somebody, somewhere, standing over a pot with a problem, made a decision. Swap the meat for potato. Crack in an egg to hold it all together so it wouldn’t fall apart in the hot oil.

We don’t know her name. We never will. But indigenous cooks did this, and they did it with skill, and it was not a small thing. They took the European dish in their hands and changed what it was.

The name changed too, the way names do, worn smooth by a thousand mouths. The f in frikadel softened into a p. Perkedel. In some places, bergedel. Say the old word enough times, in enough kitchens, over enough years, and it becomes something else. Something yours.

It wasn’t the only dish that went through this. Take semur. It comes from the Dutch smoor, and when it passed into native kitchens, the slow, patient cooking over low heat, meat and spices and soy sauce, grew into a whole family of dishes. The ingredients wandered, too. Not just meat anymore. There’s even semur jengkol now, which the original Dutch cooks would surely have found unrecognizable, and possibly alarming.

Do you see what was happening? These weren’t people meekly accepting a gift from their rulers. They took the food. They bent it, cut it, remade it to fit their own needs and their own tongues. And the cooks who worked in colonial households, who saw the dishes up close, who learned them with their own hands, carried that knowledge out the back door and into the wider world. It traveled through the girls’ household schools. It traveled through Malay-language recipe books. It traveled through food stalls, the way smoke travels: quietly, and everywhere.

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But a recipe changing is only half of it. The other half is harder to see.

A food isn’t truly yours until you decide it is.

Rahman points to the moment it happened, or one of the moments. In 1951, a Sundanese-language recipe book sorted the dishes with that faint European scent, the semur and the perkedel, into a category that must have felt very simple to the person who wrote it. Our cooking.

Just like that. The wall came down, at least on that page.

Independence came, and the process kept rolling. In 1967 came Mustika Rasa, a project begun under Sukarno, a great gathering-in of dishes from across the country, all of it declared part of Indonesia’s culinary wealth. And there they were again, semur and perkedel, standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest, now wearing the name of the nation.

Think about that road. Frikadel to perkedel. Meat to potato. A dish that once belonged to the men on the veranda, and now belongs to everybody. To the child at the warung. To the grandmother frying them by the dozen on a Sunday morning.

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And here is the last thing, the quietest thing, the thing that lingers.

The meaning changed along with the recipe. The colonial traces that once clung to perkedel didn’t get scrubbed off in some dramatic moment; they just faded, slowly, the way a stain fades in a cloth that’s been washed ten thousand times. Today when people look at perkedel, they see a side dish. That’s all. It sits on the household table, it waits in the warung case, and it carries nothing of what it used to carry. Nobody flinches. Nobody remembers.

Maybe that’s the true lesson of the dish. What a thing is isn’t fixed by where it came from. It’s decided by the hands that make it, and by what they choose to put in the pot, and by whether the people who eat it look down at the plate and say, without even thinking about it:

Ours.

Perkedel may carry a European trace somewhere deep in its bones. But the kitchens of the archipelago have had it for a very long time now, and in all that time they have made it into something else entirely.

Something that doesn’t feel foreign at all.