Atjar

Varieties of this sweet-and-sour pickle appear in many guises across Asia. It’s called achat in Thai cuisine, acar in Malaysia and Indonesia, and we call it atjar in Holland. Indonesian food is a huge part of Dutch cuisine, since the Netherlands and Indonesia shared colonial links. There are Indonesian restaurants everywhere and the food was very much a part of my growing up. My first job in a restaurant was as a waitress in a small Indonesian place in Maastricht. The way of eating lots of small, colourful dishes – some spicy, some not – served with white rice, pickles and different sambals (chilli sauces) was something I loved and felt really exciting and exotic.