Bakabana

Suriname

Illustration

by Suriname

Javanese, 1890 to 1939, the layer with no Guyanese equivalent. After decades of Indian indenture and heavy lobbying from Surinamese planters, the colonial government permitted a first experiment with Javanese contract labour in 1890, initiated by the Dutch trading company Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij for its Mariënburg plantation. Recruitment was run by commercial emigration agencies paid per worker enlisted, agencies documented as having misrepresented the journey, claiming it would be short, the work easy, and migrants would return wealthy; some recruiters are recorded as having claimed to have "bewitched" people into signing. A first group of 94 people, mostly from Surakarta, departed 21 May 1890 aboard the Prins Willem II, arriving that August; a second, larger group of 612 followed in 1894, 48 dying in transit. From 1917 shipping moved to direct Java to Suriname routes; the final ship, the Kota Gede, delivered 990 people in 1939. Across the whole period, approximately 32,960 Javanese arrived, overwhelmingly from Central and East Java, roughly 90% ethnically Javanese with smaller Sundanese and Madurese minorities. Contracts ran five years; around a quarter exercised repatriation rights, and the remaining roughly 24,000 stayed permanently. This is the direct origin of saoto, nasi, bami, bakabana and the galangal-and-salam-leaf seasoning tradition that has no parallel anywhere else in the atlas, and it is the single fact that justifies pairing Guyana and Suriname.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Bakabana

Brought over by the same Javanese indenture wave as saoto, adapted for local ingredients from the late 1890s

Ingredients

2 half-ripe plantains, sliced lengthwise into quarters
150g self-rising flour
1 tsp sugar
260ml sparkling water or lemonade
as needed oil, for deep-frying
235g, salted peanuts, for the pindasaus
6 tbsp ketjap manis, for the pindasaus

Method

Slice half-ripe plantains lengthwise into quarters and dip in a light batter of self-rising flour, sugar and sparkling water or lemonade, chosen specifically to keep the batter light rather than heavy.
Deep-fry in hot oil until golden.
Serve with a peanut sauce, pindasaus, itself built on ketjap manis, tying the dish directly to Indonesian satay technique carried over by the same community.

What a modern chef changes

Dehydrated plantain, fresh-ground pindasaus, tighter fry

Method

Dehydrate a portion of the plantain briefly before battering, concentrating its natural sugar so the fry caramelises the surface more deeply without the fritter itself turning greasy.
Build the pindasaus with peanuts toasted and ground fresh in the spice grinder rather than from a jar, blended to a genuinely smooth emulsion in the high-power blender, then passed through a chinois for a sauce with none of the graininess a hand-mashed version can carry.
Fry in small batches at a slightly higher, more tightly controlled temperature than a domestic hob usually holds, so the sparkling-water batter's structure sets before it can absorb oil, the same principle the original recipe's choice of a carbonated liquid was already reaching for.

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