Sambal Goreng Hati

During my manuscript year in Fez I learned a useful scholarly lesson in a kitchen, not an archive: spices do not travel as ideas. They travel in hands, in ships, in marriages, in notebooks, and sometimes in the stubborn memory of a family that has crossed an ocean. That is the doorway for sambal goreng hati, not a Dutch polder doorway, but an Indisch one, where the Dutch table learned to make room for heat, coconut, palm sugar, and the deep iron taste of liver.

The name already tells you nearly the whole method. Sambal is the chili mixture, goreng means fried, hati is liver. In this family of dishes, the paste is fried first until it darkens and smells rounded rather than raw, then loosened with santen, coconut milk, until it becomes a sauce that clings. But let me tell you a secret: the liver is not the difficult part. The difficult part is stopping yourself from bullying it. Liver wants a hot pan, a short visit, and then the shelter of the sauce. Cook it too long and it becomes punishment food, for obvious reasons.

This is an Indo-Dutch celebration dish, the kind that sits beside rice, atjar, seroendeng, eggs, beans, and other small plates in a rijsttafel, rice table. I prefer to keep it a bit more relaxed, in the Dutch way: one good pan, a paste made properly fragrant, and liver browned just enough to stay tender. History and cookery, they cannot be separated, but supper still has to arrive on time.