“Just give me fried rice and egg, with sambal and krupuk and a glass of beer! There’s no rice cake, pork satay, no spiciness anywhere. No shrimp paste, fried grated coconut, milkfish, and tofu with petis sauce. Lapis cake, ondeonde, no cassava or bakpao, no sticky rice, no Javanese palm sugar…,” lamented Wieteke van Dort in a song that she wrote in 1977 after she had to leave Indonesia with her family due to the anti-Dutch sentiment. At first, the Surabaya-born singer and actress found her new home, Netherlands cold and its food unappealing. To her Indonesian palate, rice was still the best. The song, titled Geef Mij Maar Nasi Goreng, went to become a classic hit in Netherlands, tugging at the heartstrings of its inhabitants whose ancestries and roots…
