Broodje Bami

Loose fried noodles will not sit still in a roll, and the Dutch counter has solved that twice. A toko or lunchroom packs bami in by the spoonful, pressing the tangle flat so the ketjap-slicked strands grip each other and the bread. A snackbar binds the same noodles, presses them into a disc, crumbs and fries them: the bamischijf, slid into a soft roll beside its neighbours the kroket and the frikandel. Menus split the names, broodje bami for the packed roll and broodje bamischijf for the fried one, but underneath sits a single dish, bami goreng, the Indo-Dutch noodle fry, moved into bread. Either way the order is carbohydrate wrapped around carbohydrate, and nobody involved has ever apologised for it.

Bami goreng stands beside nasi goreng in the Indisch kitchen, the same fry worked on wheat noodles instead of rice. The noodles want to be yesterday's. Fresh from the pot they steam and clump; dried out overnight they take the heat, catch at the edges, and wear the ketjap as a glaze instead of soaking in it. Into the wok with them go garlic and onion, white cabbage and leek, shreds of pork or chicken, white pepper, and ketjap manis, the thick sweet Indonesian soy that turns almost black where it meets hot metal. The fry should taste finished before any bread is involved, sweet on top, salt underneath, a faint bitter edge of caramel from the pan. Bland bami makes a bland sandwich, and no roll can fix that.

The packed version is counter work. The bami waits in a warmed tray; the roll is split deep, and the spoonful goes in pressed hard enough to mat the strands together, because a loose fill sheds noodles into the bag at the first bite. Most counters offer a lift on top, a smear of sambal worked into the crumb or a ribbon of extra ketjap for those who want it sweeter still. It sells warm when the tray is fresh and at room temperature without complaint, which tells you its history as made-ahead food. Under-seasoned noodles read as plain starch in plain bread. An oily batch greases the crumb until the roll slicks apart in the hand.

The schijf is fryer work, and it is industrial. Factory lines chop the noodles short, set them in a binding thick enough that the disc cuts clean, then crumb it and freeze it; the snackbar fries it straight from frozen. Done right it comes up the colour of dark beer, the crust crunching while the inside steams back into noodles. Pulled too early, the centre stays a cold knot. Left too long, the rim leaks and the noodles inside dry toward wire. In the roll it eats in stages, crunch first, then the soft give, with sambal doing the work the wok's heat no longer can. This is the form most of the country meets first, sitting on the fry list between the kroket and the kaassoufflé.

You smell a toko before you reach its counter: garlic, the burnt-sugar edge of ketjap hitting hot fat, steam off the rice cookers behind. Ordering is fast, the scoop, the press, the bag, the coins, all done before the decision quite was. The first bite is soft on soft, crumb giving way to the slip and chew of the noodles, one strand escaping down the chin, the sweetness arriving just ahead of the salt. Then the sambal lands, late and warm, and builds on the lips over the next two bites. Fingers go tacky at the corners of the roll. By the end the crumb along the seam is stained the colour of the noodles, and the empty bag holds the proof in fingerprints.

The counter grammar is short and additive. A fried egg on top turns it into lunch; a slice of frikandel pushed into the noodles is a snackbar dare; a spoonful of atjar, the sweet-sour pickled vegetables, cuts the ketjap exactly where it needs cutting. The broodje nasi is the same idea run on fried rice, one tray over. The broodje loempia is a neighbour, not a sibling: a spring roll arrives with its own wrapper, and bread around it is transport rather than structure.

The noodles also reached Dutch bread by more than one boat. The toko version came with families from the former Dutch East Indies after the Second World War. The Hague's Javanese-Surinamese warungs sell a second lineage, carried by people whose great-grandparents left Java for Suriname as contract labourers from 1890 and whose families crossed again to the Netherlands around Surinamese independence in 1975. Same noodle, two colonies' worth of detours, one soft white roll waiting at the end.

From Bakmi to Bamischijf

The word is the first piece of the record. Bami is the Dutch spelling of bakmi, from a Hokkien word for meat noodles, the dish that southern-Chinese migrants carried into the Indonesian archipelago along with the wheat noodle itself. On Java the fry took on kecap manis and local chilli and became everyday food in Chinese-Indonesian and Indo-European households alike. The Indisch kitchen, the creole cooking of colonial households in the Dutch East Indies, treated the noodle fry as routine, and routine is what survives a migration.

The migration came with the end of empire. Indonesia declared independence in 1945 and the Netherlands formally transferred sovereignty at the close of 1949; between 1945 and the early 1960s roughly 300,000 repatriates, Indo-Europeans, and Moluccans arrived in a country many of them had never seen. The sharpest wave followed December 1957, when Sukarno's government ordered Dutch nationals out and seized Dutch businesses, a date the repatriate community still calls Zwarte Sinterklaas. The cooking settled in faster than its cooks were settled. Toko counters multiplied around The Hague and Amsterdam selling bami by the weighed portion, Chinese-Indonesian restaurants put it on takeaway menus in every provincial town, and the snack factories that supply the country's fryers translated it into the bamischijf, nobody's invention on paper and everybody's Friday-night order in practice.

Among the arrivals was a writer born in Nijmegen and raised in Java, Jan Boon, who published as Tjalie Robinson and spent the rest of his life insisting that Indo culture was a culture, not a waiting room for assimilation. In 1958 he took over the community paper Onze Brug and turned it into the magazine Tong Tong; in 1959 he and his circle staged the first Pasar Malam Besar in The Hague, a fair where the food of the Indies was not a sideline but the draw. The fair never stopped. It runs in The Hague to this day as the Tong Tong Fair, billed as the largest Eurasian festival in the world, and bami goreng is all over it, in pans, on plates, and pressed into soft white rolls.