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My Father’s Gado-Gado Recipe Is the Key to My Indonesian Heritage
“Recreating his recipe from my memory feels like finding a key to a secret door.”
One of my first memories in the kitchen is of my father cooking peanut sauce. I would settle on one of the stools at the kitchen island after school, and watch him. He’d be stooped over the stove, stirring a sauce pot of what looked like thick brown goo, a tub of Skippy peanut butter and a can of coconut milk open on the counter beside him. He’d then pour the fragrant, slightly burned-smelling liquid, into a styrofoam bowl filled with rice, lettuce, fried tofu and cucumbers. This is gado-gado, an Indonesian vegetable salad topped with peanut sauce.
My father is half-Dutch, half-Indonesian, of two worlds, not quite belonging to either. Born in Jakarta, his family relocated to Leiden when he was still young, a university town near Amsterdam, famous for its tulip fields. But his father feared another Stalin-like dictator coming to power in Europe, so he hauled the entire family to Eerie, Pennsylvania when my dad was in elementary school. After a tour in Vietnam and college in Pittsburgh, he eventually settled in Seattle where he attended graduate school. He met my mother there, a white woman of German and Irish descent, but they separated before I was out of diapers.
