Andaliman: The Hidden Spice of North Sumatra
In the highlands that circle the majestic Lake Toba, grows an exotic spice unknown to the world. Cultural isolation and biological constraints protect the species from wider adoption.
Sakdiah Ros (47 years old), a Javanese woman who was born and raised in Deliserdang, a Muslim-dominated regency in North Sumatra, remembers her experience attending a Bataknese wedding ceremony in Medan twenty years ago. What she remembers the most was the food served.
Originating from the highlands surrounding the majestic Lake Toba, the Batak is known for its unique cuisines which are considered repulsive for most Indonesian Muslims. The Batak eat the stir-fried porks and dog meat (known as saksang) and in many cases stewed with its blood (gota). In Karo highland, the Batak eat grasses that have been partially digested in a cow’s rumen (pagit-pagit). “I couldn’t eat them,” says Ros.
Of course, these cuisines were not those served in front of Ros. These were for the Christian Bataks and served on the first floor of the building where the wedding took place. The organizer has set up a separate menu for Muslim guests on the second floor. There, Ros received beef rendang, a popular cuisine of Muslim communities in Sumatra. But before the beef reached on her plate, it was first placed in black buckets and then picked up by Bataknese women in their bare hands. Ros tried her best to be a polite guest but “honestly, I feel that it is quite strange,” she says.
But despite her awkward encounter with Batak culture, she likes one spice unique to Batak: the andaliman (Zanthoxylum acanthopodium). Back in her home, she uses andaliman to cook “arsik”, a Bataknese fish cuisine. Arsik tastes sourly fresh and savory at the same time. It is completely different from other Sumatran dishes that use common spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, or star anise.
“Andaliman smells really good,” said Ros. She guessed that the spice is used by the Batak to moderate the smells of the dog’s blood and the grass in the cow’s rumen. But Kormina Sihombing (69), a Bataknese woman from Toba but has spent most of her time in Medan, says the spice is used mostly for taste and aroma of the menu. “To neutralize the smells, we use utte jungga,” she says, referring to a citrus species native to the Toba highlands.
Andaliman is truly the soul of Bataknese cuisines, says Sihombing. “I use it to cook arsik, gotta, Tinombur (Bataknese sambal), and Naniura (marinated raw fish),” Kristina Purba (33), a Bataknese woman in Medan, says that every Batak family has andaliman in their fridge. “Especially in new year holidays like this,” she says. The Bataks store andaliman in mineral bottles to maintain the aroma and keep them fresh.
Andaliman has a lemon-like aroma, warm peppery flavor, and creates tongue-numbing sensation. People from outside North Sumatra commonly misidentify the spice as the Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum piperitum), its closest relative from China. But the andaliman plant flourishes exclusively in the Batak highlands. Other variants do grow in other parts of Asia such as India, Vietnam, and even Serbia. However, according to US National Plant Germ Plasm System, the pepper is mainly used for medicines and not for food. Only the Batak uses this spice in almost all of their cuisines. Thus, it is also called “the Batak pepper”.
The enchanting aroma of andaliman has not only attracted non-Bataknese people like Ros, but it has also lured some scientists to study the exotic spice. Some studies have shown that it contains anti-oxidant and antimicrobial compounds. Some have also tried to identify key compounds for the aroma, aiming that one day it could be extracted as a natural flavor for food. All these show the spice has a prospect for sustainable use (bioprospecting).
But one mystery remains: it is absent from other cuisines in the rest of the Indonesian islands. The aroma and medicinal properties of andaliman is as enchanting as the nutmeg in Banda. But unlike the latter which induced European sea explorations, andaliman remains hidden in the Toba highlands. The barriers to wider adoption are both cultural and ecological, experts say.
Cultural Isolation
The description of andaliman as the cultural symbol of the Batak was described in the book “The History of Sumatra”, written in 1783. The author, William Marsden, described his personal correspondence with a British naturalist, Charles Miller, who reported the existence of andaliman in Batak cuisine during his visit to the Batak community who lived in the southern part of Lake Toba in 1772.
“I met with nothing remarkable here excepting a prickly shrub, called by the natives Andalimon, the seed-vessels and leaves of which have a very agreeable spicy taste, and are used by them in their curries.” (Miller 1772)
Miller was one of the few Europeans who had contact with the Batak people. As he wrote the impressive andaliman, stories of cannibalism had been frightening most other seafaring Europeans. It is recorded that Henry Lyman and Samuel Munson, two American missionaries, were cannibalized in 1834. Purba says most modern Batak know this story very well. A monument was built for these “martyrs” in Lobu Pinang, North Tapanuli.
Stories like this had defeated explorers’ curiosity to come to Toba land. According to Pulotu, a database for Pacific Religion developed by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, this fierce reputation and the mountainous nature of the Batak’s territory has isolated their culture until the second half of the 19th century. Perhaps this is the reason why andaliman was not as popular as nutmeg among seafaring Europeans.
Today, this practice has long been abandoned but some Indonesians in Jakarta still hold the wrong assumption. On the contrary, the Batak people are welcoming. When organizing a wedding for her son, Sihombing asked her Muslim neighbor to lend her front yard to serve the food for Muslim guests. The Bataknese people also treat everyone equally, says Ros. “I saw the bosses eat the same food like their inferiors,” says Ros.
Imam Ardhianto, an anthropologist from the University of Indonesia, thinks that it is the difference in religions that preserved Batak cuisines. Andaliman is not very popular among the majority of Indonesians because it is associated with the Batak cuisine, and by extension with pork and dogs — foods that are prohibited by Islam. This is a situation exemplified by Ros experience at the wedding.
Although Ros could eat arsik, religion still acts as a “cultural barrier” that prevent Indonesian Muslims from using Andaliman in their cooking. Ardhianto cited David Graeber’s theory “culture as a creative refusal” which explains why frequent contact between two different societies strengthens the culture of each group as a form of refusal.
Religion is also the reason why Batak cuisine in the parts south of Lake Toba, a place visited by Miller and has been mostly converted to Muslims, has been “distorted” by the cuisines of the neighboring Muslim kingdoms such the Malay and the Minang in West Sumatra, said Ardhianto.
“The groups that really conserve Austronesian cuisine are the Batak in the parts north of Lake Toba who are mostly Christians. Christianity accommodates their ancestral culinary practices because it does not ban the eating pork and dogs,” he said.
According to Ardhianto, other important factors that conserve the originality of the Batak cuisine are cultural institutions such as wedding ceremony, funeral, and others cultural meeting which always involve food. These occasions are still practiced by the Batak people even though they have migrated to Indonesia’s big cities such as Jakarta.
The ecology of Andaliman
In 2010 Indonesian Census, Batak numbers exceeded 8 million people, creating a huge demand for andaliman for more cultural occasions. And unfortunately, the nature of andaliman tree could not meet the demand of the growing Batak population. Benedicta Lamria Siregar, a Batak scientist in HKBP Nommensen University, says that it is very difficult to widely cultivate andaliman due to biological constraints.
According to Siregar’s research, the germination of andaliman seed which is very difficult and time-consuming. Farmers take 21–99 days to germinate andaliman seeds, and this has hampered mass production. To date, Batak farmers rely on wild andaliman seedlings to cultivate andaliman in their home yard. A study on andaliman’s habitat characteristics was also conducted by Cicik Suriani at the University of Medan (Unimed). It shows that the observed andaliman shrubs mostly grow in highly specific elevation (1161–1526 m above sea level).
These biological characters limit the production of andaliman which explains why the spice is rarely seen in Indonesian traditional markets. This also makes the price of andaliman quite expensive compared with other Indonesian spices. To buy one kilogram of andaliman, one needs to pay Rp. 260.000. This is nine times more expensive than coriander seeds (ketumbar), a commonly used spice in Indonesia.
Looking at this problem, Decky Junaidi, a botanist at Cibodas Royal Botanical Garden, tried to investigate which factors influence andaliman’s growth. By setting up experiments in Toba highlands, he found that andaliman grows better in steep slope (around 40o inclination) than those grown in plain area. “During the survey, we did not find any naturally grown Z. acanthopodium in plain and opened habitat,” wrote Junaidi.
He then explains that a steep slope allows andaliman to receive incomplete sunlight during daytime. ”For agricultural application, shading treatment to some extent is needed to cultivate the species in farmland. Thus, it could be planted intercropped with higher trees that can provide shading in the cultivation area,” he wrote.
But his finding is only the beginning of gathering ecological data for andaliman. Junaidi calls for more ecological studies on the andaliman to support the conservation and sustainable use of the spice. Unless we put attention to the matter, it will be forever hidden in the Toba highlands.
