Broodje Indische Kipsaté

Some dishes arrive in the Netherlands by ship, and some by family. Broodje Indische kipsaté arrived by both. I first understood it not in an archive but at a kitchen table where the satésaus, the peanut sauce, was guarded more fiercely than the silver. The chicken could be ordinary, the roll could be from the corner baker, but the saus had to be right: dark, nutty, salty-sweet, with enough sambal to tap the table and wake it up.

The name already tells you the journey. Broodje means a small bread roll. Indische points not to India, but to the former Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, and kipsaté is chicken satay, skewered meat whose name travelled through Malay and Indonesian kitchens before Dutch lunchrooms tucked it into bread. But let me tell you a secret: the sandwich is not a lesser version of saté. It is the Dutch weekday solution to an Indo-Dutch memory, portable, messy, and entirely serious.

The trick is to keep the chicken juicy and the sauce loose enough to soak the bread without drowning it. Peanut sauce thickens as it stands, like a scholar becoming stubborn in old age (for obvious reasons), so you thin it with warm water until it falls from the spoon in a ribbon. Then comes atjar, pickled vegetables, for acid, cucumber for coolness, and fried onions for crackle under the teeth. Hou het altijd simpel. A good roll, good sauce, hot chicken, sharp pickle. History and cookery, they cannot be separated, but lunch still has to be ready before everyone gets cross.