History & Culture
How a Sundanese method for wrapping fish in banana leaf became one of West Java's everyday dishes, and why the Indonesian cuisine it belongs to has travelled so much further into the Netherlands than into Britain.
The word pepes describes a technique before it describes a dish. It comes from the Sundanese term papais, the plural of pais, meaning food bound in banana leaf and cooked slowly over heat. In West Java, wrapping ingredients this way long predates any written record of it, and the method is often said to trace back to the ceremonial cooking of the Sunda Kingdom, which held sway over the region from roughly the 7th century until the 16th. The evidence for that specific lineage is thin, resting more on oral tradition than surviving texts, but the underlying logic holds regardless of exactly when it started: without refrigeration, sealing fish or vegetables inside a leaf and cooking them through kept food edible for longer, while the leaf itself perfumed whatever sat inside it.
The chilli that gives pepes ikan its heat is a newer arrival than the technique itself. Chillies reached the Indonesian archipelago only after Portuguese traders introduced them from the Americas in the early 1500s, part of the same spice-trade contact that drew European ships to the islands in the first place. Everything else in the paste, shallot, garlic, candlenut, turmeric, is older, grown and ground in West Java long before that.
Pepes sits at the everyday end of Sundanese cooking, not the special-occasion end. It shows up on family tables, at roadside warungs, and in the plain, fresh style of eating that defines the region: raw vegetables known as lalapan, a bowl of sambal, and dishes built around the clarity of individual flavours rather than the heavier, coconut-milk-based richness found further east in Java and in Bali. That plainness is deliberate. Sundanese cooks have long prized food that tastes distinctly of what it actually contains.
Indonesia's declaration of independence in 1945 gave dishes like this a second life as symbols of national identity, as a young country began treating its regional cuisines as shared cultural property rather than purely local habit. Pepes, wrapped and steamed the same way in Sundanese kitchens for generations, became one of the dishes held up as distinctly Indonesian, alongside rendang and satay from other islands. It remains something cooked at home far more often than ordered in a restaurant, a mark of a cook's patience with a spice paste rather than a showpiece dish.
The engine of pepes ikan is the bumbu, a wet paste of shallot, garlic, candlenut, ginger and chilli pounded together, traditionally on a stone mortar called a cobek. Candlenut, or kemiri, does the quiet work here: its high oil content gives the paste body and a faint richness, closer to a thickener than a spice in the way it behaves. Turmeric brings colour and a mineral, slightly bitter edge that balances the chilli's heat, while fresh ginger adds warmth without dominating the rest of the paste.
Lemongrass and kaffir lime leaf, added whole rather than ground into the paste, do a different job. Bruised and left in large pieces, they infuse the dish with a sharp citrus note as it cooks, then get set aside on the plate rather than eaten.
Traditionally, the whole assembly is wrapped in banana leaf and steamed, sometimes finished briefly over charcoal so the leaf blackens and adds a faint smokiness. Banana leaf isn't a realistic weekly-shop item in most British kitchens, so this version pan-sears the fish in the spice paste first, then finishes it inside sweetcorn husks in the oven. It's a practical swap rather than a traditional one, but it borrows the same idea: wrap the fish, trap the aromatics close against it, and let them work on the flesh from every side.
Wrapping food in leaf and cooking it through is common right across the Indonesian archipelago, and nearly every region has its own word for it. Sundanese cooks call it pais, Javanese cooks call it brengkesan, in Palembang it's brengkes, among the Osing people of East Java it's pelasan, in Minangkabau cooking it's palai, and in Aceh it's payeh. The fish inside varies by region too. Sundanese versions traditionally favour freshwater carp (ikan mas) or gourami, while coastal areas use whatever saltwater fish is landed that day, mackerel and snapper among the most common.
Indonesian food's route out of the country runs mainly through the Netherlands rather than Britain, a consequence of which European power colonised the archipelago. The Dutch East India Company established itself there from 1602, and Dutch rule over the islands, formalised after the company's dissolution in 1799, lasted until Indonesian independence was internationally recognised in 1949. That long relationship, and the wave of Dutch-Indonesian families who resettled in the Netherlands between 1945 and the late 1960s, is why Indonesian food is genuinely embedded in Dutch culture in a way it still isn't in Britain. Indonesian cuisine is often described as having made its first real appearance in London only around the mid-20th century, and it remains a comparatively small presence in the UK even now, better known through nasi goreng and satay than through home-style dishes like pepes.
Pepes comes from the Sundanese word papais, meaning food wrapped and cooked in banana leaf. It describes a cooking method rather than one specific dish, and different regions of Indonesia use their own names for the same basic technique.
No. Banana leaf is the traditional wrapper. Sweetcorn husks are a practical substitute for kitchens without easy access to fresh banana leaf, chosen because they hold their shape and let the fish steam gently, not because they appear in the original Sundanese method.
Yes, in its classic form. The dish gets its flavour from fresh aromatics, ground spices and chilli rather than from soy sauce or wheat-based thickeners, so a traditional pepes ikan is naturally gluten free.
Firm, meaty fish that holds together under heat, such as snapper, mackerel or monkfish. Soft, flaky fish like cod or haddock tends to fall apart before the spice paste has had time to cook through it.