Schooling in the Art of Jamu

They ride on bicycles with straw baskets strapped to their back. Behind them tall and short bottles filled with various shades of amber-colored liquid peak out of the top. Stop them and buy a glass of jamu, a traditional, medicinal drink containing a mix of spices including turmeric, tamarind, and palm sugar. Jamu gendong, or a woman selling jamu around the village, will have an assortment of jamu in tote. With the varieties of jamu comes a host of health benefits, many of which are intended for women. Jamu can increase circulation, cure a cough, or keep you looking young.

I buy jamu from a dear friend who makes it and sells it to her network of friends. Yesterday she let me watch her make jamu just in case I can’t kick the addiction when I get back to the U.S.

Ingredients are best purchased at traditional markets in the morning hours. A kilo of turmeric (about 40 cents), a bag of palm sugar cubes (about $1), and a bag of tamarind (about 50 cents). Anti begins by peeling the turmeric the root you see in one of the photos below. She then slices it into pieces and puts it in a strainer. She runs water over it into a large bowl. The sediment which forms is more sticky than glue and apparently is not good to ingest. That’s why she lets it settle overnight. The paste also stains skin and clothes.

The next day when I watched she poured the turmeric mixture into a larger stainless steel pot for boiling. She droped in eight or 10 cubes of palm sugar and wads of tamarind and added two pitchers of water. We waited for a half an hour for the jamu to boil. Meanwhile, she finished drying the soaked and cleaned bottles to fill her orders. She added a few more palm sugar cubes.

When the jamu had boiled long enough she removed the tamarind clumps and then poured it over a strainer again. She let it cool for an hour or two before bottling it. While jamu is mass-produced and even comes in the form of a pill, nothing replaces the earthy taste of Anti's jamu.