tempeh
Cultural layer
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Tempeh, a chapter from the unpublished manuscript History of Soybeans and Soyfoods, 1100 B.C. to the 1980s (Soyfoods Center, 2004; SoyInfo Center)
Ana Mardiyaningsih, Tempe Semangit: Penyedap Rasa Etnis Sumber Probiotik (Kanal Pengetahuan Farmasi, Universitas Gadjah Mada, 2024)
Cicin Yulianti, Resmi! Kemenbud Ajukan Tempe Jadi Warisan Budaya Tak Benda ke UNESCO (detikEdu, 19 December 2025)
Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (Sri Owen, 1994)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Rite
Tempeh is wrapped in banana leaf and left in a warm room, and the mould that binds it into a cake was propagated from batch to batch in Javanese households long before anyone isolated the organism. It fed Javanese families through the Dutch colonial period and through the internment camps of the Second World War, where it kept prisoners alive. A ferment made in a kitchen is now studied in laboratories that arrived centuries late.
Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (Sri Owen, 1994)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
12 bonds · 11 sourcedTempe bacem: the Central Javanese sweet braise.
Nasi rames: stir-fried tofu and tempeh with a hot relish such as sambal bajak.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 172, nasi rames: stir-fried tofu and tempeh with a hot relish such as sambal bajak. The book has no sambal goreng tempe.
Kecap manis and asin.
Botok tempe: garlic in the paste the tempeh simmers in.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, Botok tempe, pages 168 and 169, garlic in the paste. The book has no tempe bacem.
Botok tempe: tempeh with fresh galingale, steamed in banana leaf.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, Botok tempe, pages 168 and 169, a piece of fresh galingale among the ingredients. The book has no tempe bacem.
Botok tempe: tempeh cooked in very thick coconut milk and steamed in banana leaf.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, Botok tempe, pages 168 and 169, tempeh with very thick coconut milk and grated coconut, which Owen calls one of the taste combinations she misses most.
Score unexamined
Botok tempe, served as an accompaniment to rice.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, Botok tempe, pages 168 and 169, served hot, warm or cold as an accompaniment to rice.
Botok tempe: ginger in the paste the tempeh simmers in before it is steamed in banana leaf.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, Botok tempe, pages 168 and 169, the Central Javanese spiced tempeh: ginger, shallots, garlic, turmeric and chillies in the paste. The book has no tempe bacem.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "tempeh", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/tempeh
/archive/tempeh
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.