The Andaliman Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI, executive director of strategy at ad agency McKinney in Los Angeles. She writes her own newsletter on marketing and culture, which you can read here.

Anita here. Indonesia has 17,000 islands. The furthest West (and North) large island is Sumatra, a long strip of land about the size of California built from volcanic eruptions. On that island is a stunning volcanic lake twice the size of Lake Tahoe called Danau Toba, and in the center of Danau Toba is Samosir, an island formed from a cinder cone, home to approximately 110,000 Toba Batak people.

The Batak people are famous for their houses, with roofs built in an inverted arch shape, their edges soaring with decorative motifs of bulls and breasts and geckos. Marco Polo wrote about them on his spin through the region in the 1200s and they’ve had a fearsome reputation ever since. They’re also notorious for their spicy cuisine, which stands out even in for an archipelago where every meal is served with at least one kind of sambal, or hot sauce. 

Batak houses in Ambarita village

Batak buildings with a signature roof and the symbols of protection (the gecko) and fertility (four breasts)

A Batak dish with andiliman peppers and local vegetables.

Why is this interesting?

What makes Batak cuisine famously spicy is a specific kind of pepper called Andaliman, or Batak pepper. Fragrant and citrusy, with a numbing and tingling sensation on the tongue, it’s mixed mostly in a sambal with green chili to be served with barbecued fish and pork, as well as a saucy fish dish called arsik alongside other local ingredients like torch ginger. And, if you like spicy food, it is addictively delicious.

If you’re a fan of China’s many cuisines, the tingling may have caught your attention. The Batak pepper is a relative of the Szechuan pepper. These are not chilis, rather extra strong peppercorns that cause a tingling, numbing sensation that the Sichuanese call mala. This tingling sensation is caused by a chemical, hydroxy-alpha sanshool, that is unique to this genus of plant.

Arsik, a Batak fish dish cooked with andiliman peppers and torch ginger

The first time I encountered this addictive sensation was at a Szechuan restaurant in Hong Kong, and I was hooked. But the peppercorn itself was banned from import to the US until 2005, leading to many a Szechuan restaurant in the US without the signature mala flavor, and to this day, many Szechuan restaurants in the US don’t have the level of mala that Szechuan cuisine deserves. (According to Gold Thread, it’s because exported peppercorns are overly heat-treated.) Little Pepper, a Szechuan restaurant in Queens, reunited me with true malaflavor, as did Danny Bowien’s Mission Chinese and its fiery Chongqing chicken wings and numbing mapo tofu.

I never expected to find this sensation on a trip to the Batak highlands. Yet in market stalls with dirt floors and plastic stools, I was captivated by a fresh brightness on top of the numbing sensation of the Andaliman chili, just as I had been many years ago by the mala sensation at a high end Szechuan restaurant in Hong Kong. As my trip continued, I doused many a barbecued lake fish in the light green sauce, eating until I could barely feel my tongue. Hole in the walls were best for this, with peeling green paint, no menu except a few words painted on the window, and plastic stools pulled up to rickety tables. 

In today’s post-Bourdain world, where more and more corners of the food world are documented for TikTok and TV, it wasn’t just the numbing sensation that captured my imagination, but the sense of discovery. Reexperiencing mala in the highlands of Sumatra, without any plans to and in the context of curries and sambals, was a life-affirming surprise. (ASVV)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)

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