Going from salted duck egg to telor asin

But the four-year-old girl should be, while attending together with her mother a joyously noisy wedding party of a beautiful “princess” from Palembang in southern Sumatra.

The bride is the daughter of Ferry Yahia, former Indonesian economic and trade representative in Taipei. Mrs. Yahia is a daughter of the Palembang datuk, an Indonesian counterpart of a great British lord of yore.

Her daughter's traditional wedding ceremony, which took place at a rebuilt regal Sumatran palace in the Pendopo Agung Sasono Utomo cultural theme park in the heart of Jakarta, started with a parade, led by a martial-art dancing duet. The performance appears like an ancient bride-robbing ritual.

Under a noble canopy, the couple to be married, in full princely and princessly regalia, followed with a long cortege of ladies in waiting. They proceeded to the throne-like seats between those of the parents of the bride and the groom.

Siti should be fascinated to watch the wedding parade in the palace along with hundreds of relatives, friends and dignitaries. She wasn't, for she had to wait in vain until after all of them had extended congratulations to the newly-weds and their parents in law for a chance to get the only thing she wanted, telor asin.

That's one of the salted duck eggs, attached to short plumed bamboo sticks like Easter eggs. They were inserted into a straw-wrapped pole decorated like a Christmas tree. Siti coveted telor asin, which would be given away to guests as a souvenir for their lucky attendance, though she doesn't know how salted duck eggs, a common and not expensive Chinese delicacy, have come to be part of Indonesian culinary culture.

Chinese emigrants to the former Dutch East Indies left their southern Fujian home a little earlier than those who migrated to Taiwan in the seventeenth century. Salted duck eggs were one of the least expensive sources of protein on their diet.

Indigenous peoples on Taiwan did not take to the salted eggs, but their cousins in the Dutch Indies did. Well, some of Taiwan's tribespeople still keep away the eggs which they regard as taboo.

Over the years the Austronesian people in Indonesia have come to consider telor asin a coveted part of their diet, like bihun, rice vermicelli that is Taiwan's most popular “pasta.”

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