Rendang
Simo Srinivas
Rendang
1. A Southeast Asian dish of beef or other meat slowly cooked in coconut milk and spices until tender and dry.
2. Malay, rendang: shady, leafy, umbrageous.
Notes
This recipe is so simple you can prepare it anywhere. Even (or especially!) in your grandparents’ ramshackle old house in the kampung. You can buy your ingredients at any major supermarket in Kuala Lumpur, but I recommend renting a car, driving deep into the jungle, and raiding your grandparents’ garden. They won’t notice, and they’ll be so happy to see you.
Ingredients
2 kg beef short ribs or other meat
4 cups coconut cream
4 cups pure water
1 packet toasted coconut
Cooking oil
Spices
1 cup tamarind pulp (toss seeds)
Greedy handfuls of: cloves, star anise, cardamom, and cracking curls of bark hacked from your grandfather’s cinnamon trees
Several stalks of lemongrass, snapped and pounded
Several bunches of kaffir lime leaves, torn from their stems and sliced thin
Salt to taste
Palm sugar to taste
Spice Paste
8 shallots
8 cloves of garlic
More lemongrass (toss green parts)
Ginger and galangal roots ripped from the earth, about 5cm each
Handfuls of dried chilies (toss seeds)
Directions
Gather your spices. Be extravagant. Be wild. Hew your grandfather’s spice trees. Ransack your grandmother’s spice cabinet.
Rough-chop and grind up the spice paste ingredients. Be merciless. Be wasteful. Let fall the excess; stand barefoot amid the skins and shreds and seeds and peels.
Heat your cooking oil in your grandmother’s stew pot. Add the spice paste, the cloves, the star anise, the cardamom, the cinnamon. Add the meat and the lemongrass, the cream and the pulp. Add the water, the leaves, the coconut, the salt, and the palm sugar.
Simmer until the meat is tender and most of the liquid has evaporated. Hours will pass. The kitchen will get steamy, and you will get thirsty. Ignore your thirst but think longingly of the bottled water you poured into the pot. It surrounds you now as vapor, while you are as dry as bark.
Stir.
You can’t leave the kitchen. Your grandmother’s stove is unpredictable, and the rendang might burn.
You can’t leave the kitchen. The seeds you tossed to the floor have taken root in the pads of your feet. Your feet have taken root in the tile.
Cut the heat. Lift the lid. Observe the color of the meat. It is the color of teakwood, the color of your new skin.
Sway gently in the humid breeze beside the spice trees that were your grandparents.
About the author:
A child of immigrants from Chennai and Penang, Simo Srinivas now lives in Colorado with their spouse and two standard-issue tabby cats, far away from their favorite Malaysian restaurant. Their work has appeared in The Archive of the Odd, Decoded Pride, and Punk Noir Magazine. When not writing about all things weird and queer, Simo can be found on the trail intently counting pikas. Follow them on Twitter @srinivassimo.
