Spicy Hot Food Series: President Obama's Indonesian Childhood

Spicy pad Thai, recipes below

This is the last in a series of post on spicy hot flavored foods. In Dutch colonial Indonesia (1800-1942) elites warned Dutch settlers not to eat the local spicy foods sold on the streets insisting that they had harmful effects on the liver and would destroy one’s digestive system. Since the end of colonial rule, elitist prejudices against spicy foods abated a bit. But one still sees that haute cuisine remains almost exclusively Eurocentric in most former colonial societies with elites still relatively cold toward spicy foods that street venders sell. President Obama is currently on a tour of South East Asia drumming up business deals and jobs. The president will be visiting Jakarta, Indonesia where he lived with his mother S. Ann Dunham and step father Lolo Soetoro (a native of Jakarta and graduate student at the University of Hawaii) from age six to ten while his mother did field work as part of her doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Hawaii (S. Ann Dunham, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, Duke University Press 2009 a book based on the dissertation). The president speaks the native language and he is very familiar with the delicious spicy hot foods of Jakarta. Thus it only seemed fitting close this series out with a dish from that region of the world. If you like spicy food, you will love the recipes below.