Why I Wrote This Book

It is essentially a home-cooked cuisine, every household producing a unique version of any one dish. Since recipes were not written down and followed, the oral tradition of passing them down from one generation to the next played an impor-tant role. It was only after the post-independence rise in literacy that the first Indonesian cookbook was published. Mustikarasa (The Crown of Taste), published by the Department of Agriculture in 1967, contains two thousand recipes sent in by women’s organizations from across the country.