When Aldous Huxley was in pre-war Indonesia, he wrote, in a celebrated passage: ‘“Ane Rice Tafel for mich”, you say, combining German and lowland Scotch into what you believe, quite erroneously, to be the language of Holland … you wait ... a waiter appears at your elbow with an enormous cauldron of rice; you heap your plate with it. He moves away. Immediately another takes his place, offering fish soup. You dampen your rice; the soupman goes. A dish of chops at once replaces the tureen. Looking around you see that the chop carrier is standing at the head of a long procession of Javanese waiters, extending in unbroken line from your table right across the dining room to the kitchen door. Each time you help yourself, the procession advances a step, and a new dish is presented. I took the trouble one day to count the number of dishes offered to me. Twenty-six actually appeared before me; but it was a busy day for the waiters, and I do not think I got all the dishes I was entitled to. They included after the chops two other kinds of eat; two kinds of birds; a species of sausage; fish, both fresh and dried; roast bananas; several kinds of vegetables, plain and curried; two varieties of salad; fried nuts; numerous pickles and jam; a queer kind of unleavened bread, and various other things which I cannot at the moment remember.’