Mie goreng Period BOrigin theory CVerified

How a noodle that crossed the sea became a local dish

Mie goreng is Indonesia's stir-fried noodle. Wheat noodles are fried with sweet kecap manis (a sweet soy sauce) and local spices. Where nasi goreng, which shares the second half of its name, is a rice dish, this one is built on noodles.

Wheat noodles were brought here from across the sea. The people who carried them were Chinese migrants from southern China. Settlers from around Fujian brought the noodles of their homeland, and the Chinese way of stir-frying them, into coastal cities such as Batavia and Medan. The local words for noodle, mie and bami, are borrowed from the Hokkien bakmi, meaning meat noodle, and even that borrowing traces the route by which they arrived.

The stir-fried noodle did not stay as it had come. Set against the sweet soy sauce and spices of these islands, the Chinese chow mein was gradually remade into a local taste. The deciding note was kecap manis, the sweet soy sauce: in nineteenth-century Java, Chinese migrants brought soy brewing with them and sweetened the sauce with palm sugar. Once that sweet soy clung to the noodles, the dish took on the look of an Indonesian plate. What had been served at stalls in Chinese quarters crossed the line of its origins and became an everyday food eaten across the towns. A noodle that came from elsewhere, over a long stretch of time, became an Indonesian dish, and that passage is folded into mie goreng.

On the broad outline, the accounts largely agree: mie goreng arose when Chinese stir-fried noodles were remade in a local taste. The dish is placed as an extension of bakmi, the Chinese-style noodle dishes that arrived with Chinese noodle culture. That the very word for noodle comes from the Hokkien bakmi likewise points to southern-Chinese migrants as its source.

What is not clear is when that remaking happened. One reading holds that localization was already under way in the eighteenth century, within Peranakan society, where people of Chinese descent and locals had intermingled. Another sees it taking hold in the mid-nineteenth century, when Hokkien migrants arrived in large numbers and noodle stalls spread through the coastal cities.

Of these two periods, the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, the nineteenth-century one has support from another direction. Kecap manis, the sweet soy sauce that gave the dish its decisive flavor, was itself made in mid-nineteenth-century Java by Chinese migrants, as a study tracing the history of soy brewing relates. There is also a report from 1900 that records the soy sauce (kecap) of the Dutch East Indies. If the very seasoning that remade the noodle belongs to the nineteenth century, it is natural to see the localization advancing then too. Even so, the possibility that the stir-fried noodle was already being localized in eighteenth-century Peranakan society has not been ruled out.

As for a record of the dish itself, there is a household cookbook published in the Dutch East Indies in 1902, Catenius-van der Meijden's Nieuw volledig Oost-Indisch kookboek. Its chapter on Chinese dishes includes a stir-fried noodle under the name bahmi gorèng. Chinese noodles are mixed with pork, shrimp, bean sprouts and the like, fried in a large pan, and finished with a little ketjap, as soy sauce was then spelled, and some bouillon; nothing is said about using the sweet manis kind. By the start of the twentieth century at the latest, then, the Chinese stir-fried noodle had made its way into a household cookbook of the Dutch East Indies as a dish seasoned with soy sauce. Whether older records exist in other cookbooks or newspapers is not yet known. What this one book shows is only that the dish existed by then; it does not decide whether localization began in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth.

Which is right, or do the two overlap gently? No records have been found that would narrow the beginning to a single date. When an everyday food came into being leaves little trace unless someone sets out to write it down, and mie goreng is no exception. What is certain is that a noodle carried across the sea took root in these islands over several centuries, and that its beginning cannot, for now, be fixed to a single year.