Indonesian food quiz

A dish name is an ingredient plus a method

This is the rule that pays for itself. Learn nine ingredients and four cooking methods and a menu you have never seen becomes readable, because Indonesian dish names are almost always built the same way.

The fourth method is kukus, steamed. After that the only names left to learn are the dishes that are called something else entirely: rendang, sate, gado-gado, soto, bakso. The menu lesson takes those one by one.

Three words for rice

English has one word and does not notice. Indonesian splits it into three, and using the wrong one is immediately odd rather than wrong.

padi the plant standing in the field
beras the raw grain in the sack
nasi rice that has been cooked

The field itself is a sawah. And nasi is doing more work than 'rice' in English: nasi is most of what a meal is here, which is why sudah makan nasi? can stand in for 'have you eaten'.

Four words that decide your meal

Bungkus. It means to wrap. Said on its own it means take away, and it is the answer to makan di sini atau bungkus? Your food comes back in paper with a rubber band around it.

Pakai. The verb to use, doing the job of 'with' on any order: pakai sambal, nggak pakai es, nggak pakai bawang. The textbook word for without is tanpa. It is correct and it is not what you will hear.

Pedes. Spicy, written pedas and said pedes across most of Java. If nobody asks you about chilli, assume the answer is yes, because the scale is calibrated to people who have been eating it since they were four.

Kenyang. Full, and only ever about a stomach. A full bus is penuh. Saying saya penuh after a meal gets you the look you would expect.

What the book says, what you'll hear

What the book says: Saya ingin memesan nasi goreng tanpa cabai.
What you'll hear: Nasgor satu, nggak pedes ya.

Everything that can fall out of the sentence has. The verb is gone, the pronoun is gone, nasi goreng has been shortened to nasgor, and ya on the end does the politeness that saya ingin was carrying. This is not sloppy speech. It is the default, and the full version would sound like you were reading a form out loud.

Getting the bill

You call the person over first. In Java that is Mas for a young man and Mbak for a young woman; in Bali you will also hear Bli and Mbok. For anyone older, Pak and Bu are always safe.

Mbak, minta bon ya. 'The bill, please.'
Bu, hitung ya. 'Add it up for me.'

Bon came in from Dutch and is still the everyday word for a bill in a small place. Minta is 'to ask for', and it is one of the highest-value verbs in the language: minta air putih, minta sambal, minta garpu.

Sudah makan?

A neighbour who barely knows you will ask sudah makan?, and it is not an invitation. It works the way 'you alright' works in English, and the honest answer is sudah 'already' or belum 'not yet'. Say belum and food sometimes follows, so say it knowing that. Both words are doing the work of tenses, which is a job Indonesian never gives to the verb.

If there is something you cannot eat

Saya alergi kacang. 'I am allergic to peanuts.' Kacang covers peanuts, beans and nuts together, and it is worth memorising as a block because peanut sauce is under gado-gado, beside sate, and stirred into more things than a menu admits.

Saya tidak makan babi. 'I do not eat pork.' In most of the country nobody will have put it in front of you anyway; in Bali, where babi guling is a speciality, it is a sentence worth having ready.

Where this goes next

The lesson on ordering food builds the whole exchange from the greeting to the bill, and the market lesson covers what happens when you buy the ingredients instead.