DIY History | Transcribe | Iowa Women’s Lives: Letters and Diaries | Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

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Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

Page 081

90. addition to being A STOMACH. But once is quite enough if there happens to be an obstreperous digestive canal or a stomach reposing somewhere in the historical background. Once may be even too much. but it is worth it. The "rice staffel" is not just any meal; it is no one food; neither is it a single dish. It is an event in the lifetime of an individual; like being born; or getting an A.B.; or being interred. After having made the momentous decision to partake of the rice-taffel for your noon meal, a deep, flat bowl-like dish the size of a dinner plate is placed before you on the table. A queue of brown-skinned Javanese men - perhaps thirty or forty - line up kitchenward and snake toward your table, each bearing an immensely large bowl or platter piled high with delicacies, in his arms. The first bearer offers you rice. You are supposed to heap a generous amount from his bowl into yours - for this is the backbone of the meal so to speak. The condiments and relishes you are offered by the other twenty-nine or thirty-nine waiters are mere trimming. The selection of weird oriental dishes is beyond naming and beyond description. A multiple variety of hors d'ouvre are carefully balanced at your left side and you choose at your will from each of these platters to add to your own bowl. By the time it is well topped off it is fairly respectably sized and a somewhat heterogeneous affair. And this constitutes your meal - a rice-taffel. Small wonder that my stomach rebelled and developed

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90. addition to being A STOMACH. But once is quite enough if there happens to be an obstreperous digestive canal or a stomach reposing somewhere in the historical background. Once may be even too much. but it is worth it. The "rice staffel" is not just any meal; it is no one food; neither is it a single dish. It is an event in the lifetime of an individual; like being born; or getting an A.B.; or being interred. After having made the momentous decision to partake of the rice-taffel for your noon meal, a deep, flat bowl-like dish the size of a dinner plate is placed before you on the table. A queue of brown-skinned Javanese men - perhaps thirty or forty - line up kitchenward and snake toward your table, each bearing an immensely large bowl or platter piled high with delicacies, in his arms. The first bearer offers you rice. You are supposed to heap a generous amount from his bowl into yours - for this is the backbone of the meal so to speak. The condiments and relishes you are offered by the other twenty-nine or thirty-nine waiters are mere trimming. The selection of weird oriental dishes is beyond naming and beyond description. A multiple variety of hors d'ouvre are carefully balanced at your left side and you choose at your will from each of these platters to add to your own bowl. By the time it is well topped off it is fairly respectably sized and a somewhat heterogeneous affair. And this constitutes your meal - a rice-taffel. Small wonder that my stomach rebelled and developed