The Living Pantry

The plants and trees of the Borneo rainforest have their own grammar of flavour. Indigenous communities have cooked with these leaves and fats for generations. What chemistry calls glutamate, and the Japanese call umami and amami, the rainforest knew long before either had a name for it.

This cuisine uses no dairy. The indigenous peoples of Borneo did not keep cattle for milk, and had no need to. The body of every sauce, the richness of every cooked dish and the emulsion that holds a glaze together all come from Engkabang butter, the rainforest’s answer to the dairy other cultures developed.

Below are the elements of the Sarawak pantry I have learned to cook with. They are the foundation of the food. The rainforest arrived at them long before science gave them names.

Engkabang butter

Shorea macrophylla, recently reclassified as Rubroshorea macrophylla; family Dipterocarpaceae, Red Meranti group.

Professor Gerard Bodeker told me this story at the press launch in Kuala Lumpur, and I have kept it ever since. Dato Dennis Ngau, Chairman of the Sarawak Tourism Board, is Kayan, one of the Orang Ulu communities of Sarawak’s upriver country. He remembered eating rice with Engkabang butter as a boy: a simple staple that gave him the strength and nourishment to cope with the jungle’s changing weather. His memory is rooted in the very landscape where the Engkabang tree fruits, and that is where this entry starts.

The Engkabang tree fruits only once every three to five years, and sometimes not even then. Its illipe nuts are gathered from the riverbanks and dried in the sun or over smoke. They are pressed in the traditional Pitan, a wooden oil press still used across Sarawak, and the golden oil is poured into bamboo tubes to cool and set. That is how the Sarawak rainforest makes its butter.

It tastes faintly of cocoa, woody and nutty, with a lemak richness on the tongue that no dairy butter quite matches. It is solid at room temperature and melts the moment it meets heat, just as cocoa butter does, and that is no coincidence. Its fatty acids are close enough to cocoa butter’s that fine chocolate makers use it as a cocoa-butter replacer.

In every Serumpun dish, Engkabang butter does what cream and dairy butter do elsewhere: it emulsifies, gives body and holds a sauce together. The risotto above shows it, the venison course at Osaka, finished (mantecare) with Engkabang. The French Borneo BBQ glace in the next section uses it too. The tree is endangered. The butter is precious.

Daun Bungkang

Syzygium polyanthum, known elsewhere as daun salam.

Mina Thrang taught me both Daun Bungkang and Ipa’ Kayu. She is Kelabit, from the Bario highlands of northern Sarawak, a master forager who learned to read wild plants from her mother and grandmother. The rainforest is our supermarket, she says. She cooks the indigenous way in demonstrations at Lepau Restaurant in Kuching and at gatherings such as the Sarawak HEARTH and the Food Over Fire Festival, keeping the old ways alive as city life slowly wears them away. Both leaves in the entries that follow came to me from her.

Daun Bungkang carries umami in its chemistry. Its glutamic acid content is close to six per cent by weight, which puts it among the world’s natural sources of umami. Add the leaf to vegetables, meat or fish and the dish tightens and the savoury comes through clearly.

I used it the same way in all three Serumpun chapters. The beef at Kuching, the venison at Osaka and the lamb at Mulu were each aged and rested, then cured with Daun Bungkang for twenty-four hours. The finish comes from Iban cooking, where the leaf goes mostly on game and older animals to loosen tough muscle. On all three it did two things: it deepened the umami already in the meat, and it softened the muscle for the plate. I used the same Iban method on all three proteins, in a kitchen’s terms.

Kasam (Pekasam)

Indigenous Sarawak fermentation: protein, coarse salt, toasted rice and time.

Dato Sri’ Karim, Minister of MTCP (Sarawak’s Ministry of Tourism, Creative and Performing Arts), introduced me to Kasam at our second meeting, in his office in Petrajaya, Kuching. I had only read about the technique. He explained it as something people still do. This entry starts with that conversation.

Kasam, also called Pekasam, is the Iban way of fermenting fish, boar or beef in coarse salt and toasted rice. Plain rice is dry-fried until dark and pounded to a coarse powder. It is rubbed onto the salted protein, which is packed airless into a guci or tempayan, sealed and left to age. Lactic acid bacteria turn the starch in the rice to acid. The acid preserves the protein and breaks it down into the amino acids that taste of deep umami. Kasam, unlike vinegar pickling or salt curing, gets its character from time: two weeks at the least and one to three months if you can wait. Kasam Ikan preserves river fish such as Empurau, Semah and Toman, and after fermentation the scales soften enough to eat. Kasam Babi, or Pekasam Babi, is the wild-boar version, much prized in Iban longhouses. Kasam Ensabi uses the same technique on mustard greens.

At the Kuching Finale the beef had Kasam as well as the Daun Bungkang cure. The leaf worked on the muscle and the ferment brought the seasoning, two indigenous methods on one cut. The salt another kitchen would have reached for never went on the plate.

Ipa’ Kayu

Manihot esculenta: the leaves of the cassava plant.

From Mina Thrang, like the Daun Bungkang above.

Ipa’ Kayu gets its flavour from handwork. The leaves are squeezed and twisted to draw out the bitterness, then pounded to bring up a green sweetness (what the Japanese call amami) with an earthiness under it. Knowing how to work the leaf for the table is the inheritance. Sarawak cooks have always paired it with salted fish or shrimp paste.

Gula Apong

Unrefined Nipah palm sugar, Sarawak.

Gula Apong is unrefined sugar from the Nipah palm, grown and tapped along Sarawak’s coastal estuaries. It keeps what refining strips out: minerals, amino acids, vitamins, and a gentle sweetness that never spikes. It tastes less of sugar than of caramel and earth. The Nipah palm regenerates, and the sugar reaches the kitchen much as the rainforest gives it, with very little done to it on the way.

Questions answered

What is the Living Pantry?

The Living Pantry is James Won’s record of the indigenous Sarawak ingredients at the foundation of Serumpun Sarawak’s cooking: Engkabang butter, Daun Bungkang, Kasam, Ipa’ Kayu and Gula Apong. It is written for cooks, students and anyone curious about Borneo’s indigenous larder.

Why does this cuisine use no dairy?

The indigenous peoples of Borneo did not keep cattle for milk. The richness, body and emulsion that dairy gives elsewhere come from Engkabang butter.

What is Engkabang butter?

Engkabang butter is the fat of the illipe nut from Shorea macrophylla, recently reclassified as Rubroshorea macrophylla. The tree fruits only once every three to five years; the nuts are dried, pressed in a traditional wooden Pitan and set in bamboo. It tastes faintly of cocoa, melts like cocoa butter, and the tree is endangered.

What is Daun Bungkang used for?

Daun Bungkang (Syzygium polyanthum) carries umami: its glutamic acid content is close to six per cent by weight. Following an Iban method, James Won cured the beef at Kuching, the venison at Osaka and the lamb at Mulu with it for twenty-four hours to deepen the umami and soften the muscle.

What is Kasam?

Kasam, or Pekasam, is the Iban way of fermenting fish, boar or beef in coarse salt and toasted rice, sealed in a guci or tempayan for at least two weeks and ideally one to three months.

How can I add to the Living Pantry?

The pantry is still being named. If you know a leaf, a seed or a practice that is missing, write to connect@chefjameswon.com.