The first book to reveal the undiscovered jewels of Southeast Asian cuisine.
Just when you thought you knew everything about Asian food, along comes James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor. Oseland has spent two decades exploring the foods of the Spice Islands. Few can introduce us to the birthplace of spice as he does. He brings us the Nyonya dishes of Singapore and Malaysia, the fiery specialties of West Sumatra, and the spicy-aromatic stews of Java. Oseland culled his recipes from twenty years of intimate contact with home cooks and diverse markets. He presents them here in easily made, accessible recipes, perfect for today’s home cook. Included is a helpful glossary (illustrated in color in one of the picture sections) of all the ingredients you need to make the dishes and where and how to buy them. With Cradle of Flavor, fans of Javanese Satay, Singaporean Stir-Fried Noodles, and Indonesian curries can finally make them in their own kitchen.
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From Publishers Weekly
Oseland, who has lived in Singapore for 20 years, hopes to help people who haven't had the benefit of a trip to West Sumatra or Kuala Lumpur to discover those places' scents and tastes. Oseland devotes close to half the book to explaining ingredients, techniques and eating traditions as well as relating anecdotes from 20 years of roaming the islands and picking up the natives' cooking wisdom. Many ingredients will require special trips to ethnic markets, though Oseland allows for some substitution or omission of difficult-to-find items like fresh galangal or daun salam leaves. The first chapter covers sambals, every meal's essential spicy accompaniment, as well as other small dishes like the fiery Sweet-Sour Cucumber and Carrot Pickle with Turmeric; he follows with slightly more familiar street foods and snacks such as satays and gado-gado, then rice and noodles in all their guises, from simple, heavenly steamed rice to the zingy Malaysian Penang-Style Stir-Fried Kuey Teow Noodles. Oseland's instructions are detailed, and he makes a convincing case that with a little time and care, the best of these complex, interrelated cuisines can be enjoyed thousands of miles from their origin. Maps and color photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
James Oseland’s writing has appeared in Gourmet, Saveur, and Vogue. He has been traveling to Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia for twenty years. He lives in New York City.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
66 of 71 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cradle of Flavor -- an epic trip through culinary terra incognita
November 18, 2006
Format:Hardcover
IT'S not entirely clear to me if it's because of the San Francisco Bay Area's great cultural diversity - or in spite of it - but there's no denying that more than a few of us (and not just self-professed foodies) suffer from Jaded Palate Syndrome. The most obvious symptom: A pronounced grumpiness and malaise around lunchtime. We've become so accustomed to finding everything from East Indian to Ethiopian cuisines, all as close as the nearest suburban mini-mall, that the region's signature pairing of whine and food should be: "OK, amuse me. Show me something really new."
And into the breach steps the intrepid James Oseland, with a masterful introduction to a rich, intensely vibrant cuisine that has yet to find more than a token presence in the United States. With "Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking From the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore," Oseland, the editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, lays out a vast map of hitherto uncharted culinary territory. The book is not an addition to an existing canon of literature. Rather, for any non-Indonesian chef it will more than suffice as both the first and last word on the subject.
How could an area as vast and populous as the Malay Archipelago escape notice for so long? As one Indonesian acquaintance told Oseland on his first trip to the region more than two decades ago, "We're the best-kept secret in Asia. Too few of us are living abroad to share our cuisine." If you've tasted any food from the region at all, it was most likely cosmopolitan, Chinese-influenced fare from the city-state of Singapore and not the home-style cooking typically found in the far provinces of Indonesia.
"Cradle of Flavor" is more than the sum of its parts. It is a compendium of exotic recipes, but it is also a short course on how the many cultural streams at play here - Chinese, Thai, Dutch and Indian among them - came to intersect in the kitchens and alley food-stalls of Indonesia. And the book works as what -- for lack of a better term - we'll call anecdotal ethnography. Food is culture. It's impossible to read a chapter without coming away with some understanding of the rhythm of everyday life in Indonesia.
While the instructional passages are authoritative and straightforward, they're interwoven with a cultural portrait that's intensely personal. It begins with Oseland's first journey to Indonesia at age 19. His extended stay with an aristocratic Jakarta family would include, among other things, a bout with dengue fever and a portentous meeting with a screen-star-turned-fortune-teller who informs him that he is fated to keep returning to Indonesia for the rest of his life. You've got to love a cookbook author who would begin a chapter titled "Fish and Shellfish" with an eyewitness account of the great exodus of Muslim fundamentalists streaming through the port of Ambon after the Bali bombings of 2002.
Oseland is the sensible, streetwise friend any American visitor would want as a guide through the open-air markets of the region. Indonesian cooking techniques are neither exotic nor particularly demanding (except, in my case, reducing coconut milk, something I am about as likely to master as Tuvan throat-singing). But the ingredients are another story. The greatest challenge facing the novice cook is procurement, not processing. "Cradle of Flavor" includes an encyclopedic and obsessively detailed section on ingredients - how to evaluate them, where to buy them, how to handle them, how to store them. For those of us who don't know our lemon basil from our lemongrass, this should save untold expense and frustration on forays through the local Asian supermarket.
The focus here is on classic home dishes. The 100 recipes - from condiments to cocktails - have been carefully selected with the success of the American non-professional chef in mind. In other words, you will not need to acquire specialty kitchen gadgets or send halfway around the globe for ingredients in order to master an Indonesian feast that's both authentic and delicious.
David Plotnikoff
sushimonster - at - emeraldlake.com
And into the breach steps the intrepid James Oseland, with a masterful introduction to a rich, intensely vibrant cuisine that has yet to find more than a token presence in the United States. With "Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking From the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore," Oseland, the editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, lays out a vast map of hitherto uncharted culinary territory. The book is not an addition to an existing canon of literature. Rather, for any non-Indonesian chef it will more than suffice as both the first and last word on the subject.
How could an area as vast and populous as the Malay Archipelago escape notice for so long? As one Indonesian acquaintance told Oseland on his first trip to the region more than two decades ago, "We're the best-kept secret in Asia. Too few of us are living abroad to share our cuisine." If you've tasted any food from the region at all, it was most likely cosmopolitan, Chinese-influenced fare from the city-state of Singapore and not the home-style cooking typically found in the far provinces of Indonesia.
"Cradle of Flavor" is more than the sum of its parts. It is a compendium of exotic recipes, but it is also a short course on how the many cultural streams at play here - Chinese, Thai, Dutch and Indian among them - came to intersect in the kitchens and alley food-stalls of Indonesia. And the book works as what -- for lack of a better term - we'll call anecdotal ethnography. Food is culture. It's impossible to read a chapter without coming away with some understanding of the rhythm of everyday life in Indonesia.
While the instructional passages are authoritative and straightforward, they're interwoven with a cultural portrait that's intensely personal. It begins with Oseland's first journey to Indonesia at age 19. His extended stay with an aristocratic Jakarta family would include, among other things, a bout with dengue fever and a portentous meeting with a screen-star-turned-fortune-teller who informs him that he is fated to keep returning to Indonesia for the rest of his life. You've got to love a cookbook author who would begin a chapter titled "Fish and Shellfish" with an eyewitness account of the great exodus of Muslim fundamentalists streaming through the port of Ambon after the Bali bombings of 2002.
Oseland is the sensible, streetwise friend any American visitor would want as a guide through the open-air markets of the region. Indonesian cooking techniques are neither exotic nor particularly demanding (except, in my case, reducing coconut milk, something I am about as likely to master as Tuvan throat-singing). But the ingredients are another story. The greatest challenge facing the novice cook is procurement, not processing. "Cradle of Flavor" includes an encyclopedic and obsessively detailed section on ingredients - how to evaluate them, where to buy them, how to handle them, how to store them. For those of us who don't know our lemon basil from our lemongrass, this should save untold expense and frustration on forays through the local Asian supermarket.
The focus here is on classic home dishes. The 100 recipes - from condiments to cocktails - have been carefully selected with the success of the American non-professional chef in mind. In other words, you will not need to acquire specialty kitchen gadgets or send halfway around the globe for ingredients in order to master an Indonesian feast that's both authentic and delicious.
David Plotnikoff
sushimonster - at - emeraldlake.com
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
By InDNJ
Format:Hardcover
I was originally quite skeptical about this book. I mean this is an American guy who's writing recipes from Indonesia, what could he possibly know? After borrowing the book from a local library, reading it, trying a couple of recipes, and then deciding to buy it from Amazon, Well.. I guess A LOT!
I was born and raised in West Sumatera, Padang to be exact (this city is mentioned a lot in the book). I got shipped out of Indonesia to the U.S. in my early teenage years. I wasn't interested in food or want to learn to cook then. I took it for granted that I wouldn't miss anything and get used to the American food. It was not until I arrived in the U.S., got homesick, and craved for sambal and rice on a regular basis, that I realized how hard it was to create or get a taste of home. Most Indonesian restaurants here were either Javanese (which is different from spicy West Sumatra's food) or "Americanized". When my mom died, all hopes of learning to cook food I grew up with was gone. Whenever I felt homesick, I'd cook Indonesian food based on recipes found on the web, blogs, and little bits of knowledge that I picked up on my annual visit home. But nothing seemed to taste the way I remembered. That was until I tried recipes from this book. Everything smells and tastes almost exactly as they are supposed to be. The book goes into a lot of details explaining how to handle the ingredients and the step-by-step cooking process, which definitely makes the difference in my cooking. I use this book all the time now, and follow the instructions to the T. The only thing I don't do is adding sugar when cooking main courses. I see a couple of reviews complaining that there aren't many pictures in the book. While that's true, it's not exactly a deal breaker. To get an idea of what the dishes look like, google for images, that should help.
I was born and raised in West Sumatera, Padang to be exact (this city is mentioned a lot in the book). I got shipped out of Indonesia to the U.S. in my early teenage years. I wasn't interested in food or want to learn to cook then. I took it for granted that I wouldn't miss anything and get used to the American food. It was not until I arrived in the U.S., got homesick, and craved for sambal and rice on a regular basis, that I realized how hard it was to create or get a taste of home. Most Indonesian restaurants here were either Javanese (which is different from spicy West Sumatra's food) or "Americanized". When my mom died, all hopes of learning to cook food I grew up with was gone. Whenever I felt homesick, I'd cook Indonesian food based on recipes found on the web, blogs, and little bits of knowledge that I picked up on my annual visit home. But nothing seemed to taste the way I remembered. That was until I tried recipes from this book. Everything smells and tastes almost exactly as they are supposed to be. The book goes into a lot of details explaining how to handle the ingredients and the step-by-step cooking process, which definitely makes the difference in my cooking. I use this book all the time now, and follow the instructions to the T. The only thing I don't do is adding sugar when cooking main courses. I see a couple of reviews complaining that there aren't many pictures in the book. While that's true, it's not exactly a deal breaker. To get an idea of what the dishes look like, google for images, that should help.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I am an Indonesian who moved to the US 2 1/2 years ago. This book has fulfilled my craving for Indonesian food. It has easy to follow recipes, descriptions of ingredients, where to find them and how to store them. I totally recommend it.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book
I've owned this book since 2007 or so and cooked most of the recipes in it. Do not be put off by the reviews that complain there aren't enough photos -- go online if you want a... Read more
Published 5 months ago by T. Bojko
4.0 out of 5 stars
Authentic recipes but lacks brevity.
The recipes seem authentic and there is plenty of variety. But the author is extremely wordy providing way more information than is necessary (does he really need two lengthy... Read more
Published 21 months ago by C. Garness
4.0 out of 5 stars
I would give this 5 out of 5 but I love cookbook with pictures
I have been recommending this book to many foreign foodies who are interested to learn about Indonesian cooking. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Pepy
5.0 out of 5 stars
OUTSTANDING cookbook
The writing and descriptions in this book are crystal clear. Very elegant and educational, it really describes how to cook the food perfectly - rather than just a quick list of... Read more
Published on September 22, 2009 by Brett Borders
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Real Treasure
I bought Cradle of Flavor based on the credentials of the author and on the glowing reviews that this book was a definitive work on Indonesian / Malaysian cooking in English. Read more
Published on October 3, 2008 by Eileen Westgate
5.0 out of 5 stars
Plenty for almost everyone
James Oseland captures the essence of Malaysian and Indonesian food very well in this book. Each chapter starts with an nicely written account of an experience in this world of... Read more
Published on July 10, 2008 by Grows Asian Veggies
5.0 out of 5 stars
great intro to Indonesian cooking
I've cooked many recipes from this cookbook, and it's been great. The food is delicious, and the instructions are clear. Read more
Published on May 25, 2008 by LizB
5.0 out of 5 stars
Passion for the palate
I'm a chef and have been fortunate to travel somewhat extensively to the three countries whose cuisines are covered in this book, particularly Indonesia. I love this book. Read more
Published on April 16, 2008 by Chad
2.0 out of 5 stars
NO PICTURES!!!
How can you fall in love with food if theres no pictures????? i got persuaded to buy this book fron the bookcover but inside it lacks color the recipes might be great but if you... Read more
Published on March 25, 2008 by newagebaby2008
5.0 out of 5 stars
An artful and indepth look into Singaporian, Malaysian, and Indonesian...
The author provides wonderful ancedotes for each of the recipes that truly inspire the Western cook. Read more
Published on September 2, 2007 by C. Larson
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