Beef

Beef in Java comes from animals which anyone would instantly recognize as cows. In Sumatra, however, it comes from buffaloes. Perhaps this is one reason why Sumatran recipes often require cooking times of several hours, to make the meat tender; or perhaps the thoroughness of the cooking is simply to make the dish keep better. Javanese food, as a rule, is cooked very quickly indeed. In any case, almost all Indonesian meat dishes require the meat to be sliced or cut up thin before cooking starts, and a weekend joint—in the English sense—is quite unknown. The cuts of meat that you buy in the market are in any case different from those found in Europe, and most of them, as far as I know, have no special names. When you go shopping in the pasar, you simply pick up or point to the piece that you want, or discuss your requirements with the seller. The cuts that are mentioned here are those that I have found, from experience, are the most satisfactory from British butchers’ shops.