Pasar Saliwangi

Park your bike just outside the market. You will meet a man who single-handedly runs the small parking lot with high efficiency. Later when you want to leave, just give him your keys. He will ask you which direction you want to go to and proceed to get your bike out and arrange it accordingly.

Next to the parking lot is the banana place. All kinds of bananas, you name it. They sell it by the stem. Last time I went there, I bought a stem of arm-long, unripened byar banana for Rp. 7000,-. They make excellent banana chips.

Across from the banana place is where the retailers of Tasikmalayan garment industry operate. They loudly remind your of your love for your loved ones and insist that to prove your love, you must buy bras, child clothing, jeans, blouses, overalls, shorts, see-through lingerie, or whatever it is they are selling.

Grocery shops with sachets of household products dangling like colorful curtains dominate the northern side of the market while greengrocers colonize the street in front of them. On the pavement, the greengrocers spread out specimens of local vegetables, most of which are nonentities in English vocabulary. Everything from kangkung to ganyong. From godhong so to gadung. They sometimes even have pondoh, the softer part of coconut stalk. Freshly uprooted ground peanuts, cassavas, and sweet potatoes are among the regulars.

Locate the northern entrance. It should be easy as it lies next to the only VCD vendor in the market. That’s where the loud langgam Banyumasan comes from. Right on the entrance you will find a woman selling pelas yuyu; finely ground freshwater crab mixed with lightly spiced grated coconut and steamed in small banana leaves wrappings. A heavenly delicacy that can be brought down to earth in exchange for Rp. 1,000,++ a dozen. Yes, a dozen.

Next to her is the buntil seller. Another traditional masterpiece consisting of a mixture of spiced grated coconut and dried teri, wrapped in boiled cassava, papaya, or talas leaves. Talas leaf-buntil is getting rare this days. The soft texture of talas leaf beats cassava and the slightly bitter papaya leaf by a mile.These ball-like delicacies are then served with spicy coconut milk sauce that is eye-catchingly yellow-reddish in color. Rp. 500,++ each. Rp. 1,000,++ for three pieces. Tax free.

Walk further and you will enter the realm of traditional cakes and sweets sold in tampahs, flat circular tray made from plaited bamboo. Most are cassava based and then topped by white, freshly shred coconuts; cethil, cenil, inthil, growol, and gathot. Cethil is colorful and chewy bite-sized sweet made from tapioca flour, I think. Cenil is made from the same base and share the same chracteristic but the color is almost always black. The coloring comes from the ash of paddy stalk. Don’t frown, it’s good. Inthil is brownish and grainy. Growol and gathot have become a rarity. Both are made from roughly chopped gaplek, that is sun-dried cassava for those of you who are not familiar, and have distinctive sweetish taste. Sometimes you can find oyek here. I don’t know what it is made from, but elder citizens remember it lovingly as substitute of rice in times of famine. Other sweets and cakes with national reputation like cucur, apem, lopis, klepon, and gandos are also available. For Rp. 500,++ they will quickly fix you any of those sweets. Wrapped in banana leaves, as always.

As for you pecel-lovers, you’ve just died and gone to pecel heaven. Banyumasan pecel, especially the one sold in Stasiun Kroya or in small market places such as this, prides itself for having the most variety of vegetables in Javanese culinary landscape. Forget those pathetic Jogjanese pecels, including SGPC Bu Wiryo, that only use spinach, carrot stick, cabbage, and bean sprout. A full-fledged Banyumasan pecel usually consits of kangkung, spinach, cassava leaf, godhong so, longbean, half-ripe papaya sticks, papaya leaf (optional), curing, klandingan seed, kecipir, kembang turi, melinjo stem, bean sprout, and the signature item, kecombrang. Aside from providing color in a mainly green setting, the red petals of kecombrang brings about a distinctive tangy aroma that differentiate this pecel from those of other regions. The concoction is then liberally topped by hot-sweet, but mainly hot, peanut dressing. I’m suffering from hunger pangs just writing this.

Still in the same aisle, you can find tempe (fermented soybean cake) and its variants; mendoan, ranjem, and dages. Unlike their Jakartan brethren, the local tempe is not sold in slabs. It is wrapped individually in banana leaves in triangle or rectangular shape. In some areas like Gandrungmangu or Kawunganten, you can even find tempe wrapped in jati leaf. This, I suspect, not only adds a natural edge to it, but also greatly enhances the taste, as opposed to plastic wrapping.

Mendoan is a larger but much thinner kind of tempe. It’s about the size of a notebook. Due to its ubiquitous nature, mendoan has retained iconic status in Banyumasan cuisine, which is rather strange because in contrast to tempe, mendoan is not versatile. The only way I know of preparing mendoan is by dipping it in batter and then frying it half done. Avid practitioners of mendoan-eating insist that instead of being crispy, a proper fried mendoan should be flexible enough to be rolled like newspaper before being consumed.

While tempe and mendoan are made from peeled soybean, ranjem and dages are made from leftover of food processing industy. Ranjem, known as gembus in many other areas, is made from ampas tahu, leftover from tofu-making. The pressed-liquidless soybean is fermented with god-knows-what fungus into light greyish cakes. Dages, on the other hand, is made from different leftover.

Despite the fact that I’m a big dages fan since childhood, I haven’t been able to shed light into dages-making until recently. An aged dages-seller near my place confided that dages is in fact made from bungkil kelapa. When they made coconut oil in the old days, the grated coconut is fermented and then pressed to produce the base oil. The leftover of the pressing process is what we called bungkil. That explains the grittiness and coarse texture when you sink your teeth into a slab of dages. So, dages is the close cousin of the forbidden tempe bongkrek, another variant of tempe made from the same material but different fermenting agent. Both dages and ranjem, especially dages, are considered unfit for serving houseguests due to their cheapness. A slab of ranjem, roughly the size of four packs of cigarettes goes for Rp. 300,++, while dages goes for even less. Their severe lack of nutrition also earns them the status of ‘food that makes you stupid’. Mothers used to say to their children: Don’t eat too much dages, you will be stupid. As for me, it’s stupid if you don’t eat enough of dages. Stir-fried dages with cheyenne chili-pepper, peeled pete, and shrimp is simply to die for. Not to mention the thinly-sliced, batter-coated dages deep-fried in low fire. It’s like nothing you ever tasted before. Better than the much more pricey keripik paru. The texture, the taste. Oh, my.

Turn left at the end of the aisle and brace your self for the best aquatic lives Cilacapian waters has to offer.There is a boat landing nearby so most of the marine lives presented are still fresh. Live, prancing shrimps. Saltwater crabs with their claws secured by bamboo-peel. The entire parade of oysters and other mollusks. Squids of various sizes. Oddly enough the largest of squids, the sotong, is priced at only Rp. 6,000,++ a kilo, while the smaller egg-squid can reach up to Rp.12,000,++. The predominant fish being sold is blanak, layur, tengiri, tongkol, dawah, and kerapu depending on the season, all ranging from Rp. 9,000,++ to Rp. 15,000,++ a kilo, also depending on the season. There are also the yellow fin and other shallow water fish of which I know nothing about. You can get lembutan at Rp. 5,000,++ a kilo. Lembutan is an assortment of small fish not larger than your index finger. The best way to serve this particular fish is to have it deep fried in low fire to perfect crispiness. Lunjar is only available during rainy season. It’s of similar size with lembutan but live in rivers and ricefields.

Next to row you will find the processed fish section. Diverse range of salted fish. From the tiny teri, to large whole jambal. My favorite in this section is the gapitan. Basically gapitan is fish, any fish, clamped by a bamboo stick and then briefly grilled in charcoal fire. The grilling is so brief that although the exterior is dry, gapitan meat is still juicy inside. The charcoal also adds the smoky scent the gapitan is known for. The most commonly found gapitan is made of cuts from larges fish like cucut or stingray that would be unappealing should they be sold whole. Sometimes there also gapitan made from medium sized whole fish, usually tongkol. The sight of neatly stacked gapitan always pleases the eye. And the taste pampers the soul.

My god, I’m hungry.