Gado-gado Period COrigin theory CVerified

Gado-gado is an Indonesian dish of boiled or steamed vegetables, served with hard-boiled egg and tempeh and dressed in a sweet-savory peanut sauce. It has long been eaten in the markets, at the street stalls, and in the homes of Jakarta and western Java. Its very form, an assortment of ingredients tossed together on one plate, is echoed in its name: a Betawi word meaning 'to eat without rice' is held to be the source.

The peanut at the heart of today's gado-gado is a crop of the Americas. According to a study of Indonesian cooking and the peanut, it entered Indonesia in the early seventeenth century, brought by Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese traders, and within that same century Chinese growers were cultivating it along the coast of Java and around Batavia. No record from the period that fixes the year of its arrival has yet been confirmed. The thick sauce of roasted, ground peanuts that dresses today's gado-gado belongs to the time after the peanut had taken root in Java's fields.

A dish called gado-gado, however, was written down before there is any sign of a peanut sauce. By 1864 at the latest, a cookbook published in Batavia, Kokki Bitja, lists a 'Sajoer Gado-gado': boiled vegetables under a sauce of coriander, cumin, pepper, fried coconut, terasi (fermented shrimp paste), chili, candlenut and more, ground fine and simmered in coconut milk. There is no peanut in it. Nor is there in the gado-gado of a cookbook published in Yogyakarta in 1898, or of a Netherlands Indies cookbook from 1902: both dress the vegetables with sauces of coconut, candlenut, tamarind and the like. The 1902 book does give a peanut sambal (a ground, fiery relish) and fried peanuts elsewhere in its pages. The peanut was in the kitchen; it simply was not in the gado-gado sauce.

Boiling vegetables and dressing them is itself an old way of eating in Java: the boiled-vegetable salads known as pecel and urap are long-established local foods, on everyday tables from early on. The 1902 cookbook calls boiled vegetables under the sauce of its chicken pecel either 'pètjèl-sajoran' or 'gado-gado', a usage that sits well with the view that gado-gado grew out of local vegetable dishes like these.

Gado-gado with a peanut sauce appears in Mustikarasa, a cookbook published by the Indonesian government in 1967. Fried peanuts are ground with chili, palm sugar, terasi and garlic, simmered in coconut milk into a sauce, and poured over boiled and raw vegetables, tofu, tempeh and hard-boiled egg. At what point before then the peanut sauce entered the dish has not yet been established.

One well-turned story has long been told about where the name gado-gado comes from. Portuguese freed slaves who settled in the village of Tugu, near Jakarta, are said to have thrown together whatever vegetables were on hand, a heap that looked rather like livestock feed, and so, the tale goes, the name derives from gado, the Portuguese word for cattle.

But the path the word has actually taken, as traced by the dictionaries, does not line up with the story. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Wiktionary place the origin of gado-gado in a reduplication of the Betawi and Javanese gado, that is, nggadho, 'to eat without rice.' It has no genealogical link to the similar-looking Portuguese gado; the two merely happen to sound alike. The livestock-feed story is a later reading of meaning into that coincidence.

Setting the name aside, there are several accounts of where the dish itself came from. What they share goes only this far: it began from the local boiled-vegetable dishes of western Java, of a kind with pecel and urap. Where they part is over who made it into gado-gado. Some tell of a food the local people had long eaten developing of its own accord; others of Chinese residents of Betawi reworking pecel to suit their own taste; still others of the food of the Portuguese-descended settlers of Tugu casting its shadow. For the last two, no source has yet been confirmed that shows it happened.

The name itself is in print by 1864 at the latest. It appears as 'Sajoer Gado-gado' in the sixth edition of Kokki Bitja, a cookbook published in Batavia that year; whether earlier editions carry it has not yet been checked. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1924 report of the Netherlands Indies public health service, but the name was already in that cookbook sixty years before. The gado-gado of 1864, though, was a dish with a spiced sauce simmered in coconut milk, and a second gado-gado in the same book was dressed with grated coconut. Neither contains peanuts. A Sundanese–Dutch dictionary of 1913 likewise describes gado-gado as cabbage, tubers, egg, bean sprouts and the like with a broth poured over, and says nothing of a peanut sauce. How old the name is and how old today's peanut-dressed plate is are separate questions.