As you get away from your hometown, you will miss your authentic food. Food that you only find in your hometown. For me is semanggi. It is mixture vegetables with topping, similar with pecel. Some people call it, pecel semanggi to differ from semanggi as a plant.

We eat it with kerupuk puli (crisp from rice). We usually used crisp as a spoon. And the plate is pinched banana leaf (pincuk).

Sadly, sellers are becoming increasingly rare. The seller usually woman with big basket and carry it on her hips. They wore batik and kebaya fabrics like traditional Javanese woman. They walked around houses selling semanggi. When I was a child, I used to find it at my parents’ house at Sidoarjo. However, I cannot find it anymore these days.

Fortunately, I found the seller in front of my rented house. I have already moved to center of Surabaya. The seller's characteristics are still the same as when I was little.

Pecel semanggi come with steamed semanggi, bean sprouts, kembang turi (turi flower) and sprinkled with thick chili sauce and spices. It made from a mixture of peanuts, brown sugar and petis, added with sweet potato. And of course, kerupuk puli. So happy I can eat it again!

I never find semanggi outside Surabaya. Semanggi is a plant of water spike (Salviniales) from Marsilea genus. It used to grow naturally on rice fields, irrigation banks, ponds and swamps in Indonesia.

However, only at Surabaya, precisely at Kampung Kendung, Sememi, Benowo, West Surabaya, this plant is used for consumption. It nowadays becomes “Kampung Semanggi”, one of culinary destination in Surabaya.

Formerly, this plant was a pest. It thrives in the fields and interfere with plant grow. This weed is quite difficult to eradicate because its roots grow between plants and are quite small. To get around the bad impacts of clover growth, people then try to process this plant as food that can be consumed.

Furthermore, semanggi never perfect without kerupuk puli. In fact, kerupuk puli is also made from leftover rice used for crisp. Therefore, this food is made from local wisdom. It has been famous since 1950s when it became a keroncong song “Semanggi Suroboyo”. And it becomes not only identity culinary for Surabaya, but also Indonesia's Intangible Cultural Heritage at 2022.