People remembered detailed menus of meals eaten over fifty years ago,
would recite with energy and care each ingredient and each stage of preparation.
This clustering of memories around practices of cooking and eating was
obviously linked to food's symbolic power and daily importance. At times lists
of foods cooked and prepared seemed to be assertions of specialized knowledge,
displays of privileged familiarity, or recitals of sheer tedium, as when Ibu
Kilah recalled "Then, the only food [the Dutch] ate was potatoes, potatoes, always
potatoes, potatoes with this, potatoes with that . . . potatoes, potatoes,
potatoes non-stop . . . with steak."98 Food talk was a shared idiom, a shorthand
to conjure up adaptations and differences muted and sharpened by what one
swallowed. To say that a Dutch family "ate rice" was to identify them approvingly
as acclimatized to the Indies (andlor as having some Javanese blood).
Genduk Ginem recalled that one of her totok Nyonyas had "become Javanese,"
as evinced by the fact that she "rarely ate potatoes."99 For Ibu Rubi to recount
that the Ambonese soldiers ("black Dutch") for whom she had once worked
slaughtered chickens by crushing their necks under their feet was to offer proof
of their uncultured ways