Proto-rendang (pre-chili merendang proto-layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

What is treated here is not the fiery rendang known today, but the local preserved food that came before it. The point here is to read apart two things that have long shared a single name.

The main ingredients of this older layer were beef and coconut milk, both long established in West Sumatra. Cooks darkened meat using only what the land itself provided. The chili pepper, carried in from the New World, had not yet joined them.

What held the dish together was long, slow dry-cooking. The meat simmered with coconut milk over low heat until the liquid cooked away and it turned dark and dry. In Malay this process of cooking down until the moisture is gone is called merendang, and its product is rendang; the root marandang means to cook slowly until the liquid evaporates. Drying the meat this way also made it keep and travel well. Minangkabau society had a custom called merantau, of leaving home to live elsewhere, and with it a need for food that could be carried and stored. The older layer takes shape where that need met the handwork of dry-cooking.

In its setting, too, this layer was not court cooking. It was an everyday preserved and travel food, made in the homes and communities of Minangkabau society. It called for no special equipment and was complete with local cooking alone.

In the written record, the firm lower bound for this layer rests on the appearance of the words merendang and rendang in the Malay manuscript Hikayat Amir Hamzah (early 16th century, c. 1500). The upper bound around 1520 marks roughly when the New World chili reached Indonesia and the dish began shifting toward its fiery form. The age of the technique and the genre can be confirmed within this span, but the manuscript does not tell us that a specific chili-laced recipe existed at that point.

A seemingly simple question, how old is rendang, actually holds two separate clocks. Two opposing views bear on it, neither settled, and both are presented here as coexisting readings.

One is the continuity view, which holds that a local preserved food, the merendang layer, existed before chili arrived. Its clue is the age of the word merendang itself. The Malay manuscript Hikayat Amir Hamzah (early 16th century), reaching back to the Malacca Sultanate, contains the line merendang daging kambing, to dry-cook goat meat, and the food historian Fadly Rahman cites this passage as the earliest mention. Here merendang appears early as the word for the handwork and rendang for its product. Beef and coconut milk are both local ingredients, and the age of the genre and technique stands as a matter apart from any New World crop (Journal of Ethnic Foods 2020, and others).

The other is the discontinuity view, which cautions that the age of that technique name does not by itself mean the fiery rendang of today is equally old. What Hikayat Amir Hamzah records is only the name of the handwork and its product, not a chili-laced blend or a specific recipe. Chili was a New World crop, entering this region by way of the Portuguese after the fall of Malacca (1511), and the fiery form of present-day rendang took shape after that. Moreover, the earliest text to write down the word randang directly in a Minangkabau context is J. L. van der Toorn's Minangkabau-Malay-Dutch dictionary (1891, as noted by Gusti Asnan). Between the technique name in the pan-Malay manuscript and the texts that record the specifically Minangkabau fiery rendang lies a gap of more than three centuries. For this reason, even where the technique name is shared, the pre-chili layer and the later fiery form should be told apart as distinct stages of formation (Journal of Ethnic Foods 2020, van der Toorn 1891, and others).

Set on separate axes, the two views are less a contradiction than a pair that hold together. The age of the genre and technique (continuity) and the fact that the fiery form can only postdate the arrival of the New World chili (discontinuity) run on different clocks. The former is the older layer, the one that stands on local ingredients without any chili. The fiery form is another story; here we treat only the difference, the merendang layer made without chili.