The basics of today's meals already purchased, Ibu Rani heads for the spice stalls. Mounds of purplish shallots, pearl-white garlic and chillies ranging from long red tabia lombok to the popular short, chunky red and yellow tabia Bali, fiery little red and green bird's eye chillies, compete with piles of innocuous-looking roots hiding their rich fragrances. There's familiar ginger; its relative, galangal or greater galangal; camphor-scented kencur (Known to the Balinese as cekuh), with its white, crunchy and flavoursome flesh, and finally vivid yellow turmeric, the most pungent of all.
Fragrant screwpine or pandanus leaf, the faintly flavoured salam leaf, the small but headily scented kaffir lime and its double leaf, spears of lemongrass and sprigs of lemon-scented basil, all promise magic in the kitchen. Like the emphatic tones of a large gong, the odour of dried shrimp paste from a nearby stall assails the senses.
Ibu Rani (right) with Mbok Made (left) and Kadek Astri Anggreni (centre) weaving a jejaitan from palm leaves in their Ubud family compound. The jejaitan is the base mat upon which temple offerings are placed.
Grating coconut and grinding spices can be lime-consuming unless such tasks are shared.
Ibu Rani pauses for her daily glass of jamu, a herbal brew which she says keeps her body "clean inside," then buys breakfast for herself and her husband: a few small moist rice cakes or jaja, sprinkled with fresh coconut and splashed with palm sugar syrup. Hoisting her basket onto her head, Rani then walks home.
Within the compound, sounds of grinding can already be heard from the other two kitchens. Pulling out the morning's purchases, Rani gets to work, peeling and chopping seasonings for the leaf-wrapped food tum. "I make tum almost every day," she explains. "Sometimes it's with eels, with a little meat or perhaps some chicken. Today, I'm going to use pork."
An earthy smell permeates the kitchen as she finely chops shallots, ginger, garlic, chillies, fresh turmeric, kencur roots and salam leaves. Next, she removes scraps of gristle from the piece of pork and throws them out for the chickens. The pork is then deftly minced into paste with a cleaver, and mixed with chopped seasoning, a big pinch of salt, a splash of oil and the pig's blood.
Large spoonfuls of this mixture are spread onto a square of banana leaf, carefully folded, then secured with a slender bamboo skewer. By this time, the rice-which had slivers of sweet potato added halfway through cooking-is turned out into a colander. The leaf-wrapped bundles of pork are set in the same steamer used for the rice and put over boiling water to cook.
Pulling out her saucer-shaped stone mortar, Rani gets ready to grind the spices for seasoning the tempeh. "Don't bother to peel the garlic," she cautions, "there's no need, the skins will fall off when it's cooking." Like most Balinese cooks, she sees no need for fussy refinements.
The ground turmeric root, garlic, salt and white peppercorns are mixed with a little water and massaged into the protein-rich tempeh, which is left to stand for about half an hour before frying. Rani fries the peanuts in her wok, reserving some as a crunchy garnish and then grinds the remainder with toasted shrimp paste and chillies to make a tangy sauce to be mixed with the blanched green vegetable (kangkung). The eels are drained, salted and cleaned before also being fried in hot oil. Their crunchiness and flavour is later improved by tossing them in the wok with chilli paste.
Finally, everything is cooked and ready. The colander of rice is covered and left on the bench, and the remaining dishes set in a cupboard for family members to help themselves to throughout the day.
Lavish Gifts for the Gods
Festival foods serve as offerings,
works of art and meals for mortals
Food in Bali is literally deemed fit for the gods. Every day of the year, the spirits whose shrines occupy the forecourt of every Balinese family compound are presented with offerings of flowers, food, holy water and incense. The offerings serve to honour the spirits and ensure that they safeguard the health and prosperity of the family. Even malicious spirits are pacified with small leaf trays of rice and salt, which are put on the ground. These simple offerings are, with out fail, presented before the whole family eats their first meal of the day.
At more elaborate temple festivals, brilliantly dressed women form processions as they bear towering offerings of fruits, flowers and food upon their heads. These elaborate temple offerings are virtually works of art, but have a deep symbolic significance that goes far beyond mere decoration.
A seemingly endless round of religious and private family celebrations ensures that the women-whose task it is to prepare such offerings-always spend some part of the day folding intricate baskets or trays, or preparing some of the more than sixty types of jaja or rice cakes essential for festivals. Young girls sit beside their elders who pass on the intricate art of cutting and folding young coconut-palm leaves, moulding fresh rice-dough into figures, colouring rice cakes and assembling the appropriate offerings for each occasion. Women working outside the home may purchase their offerings from a specialist tukang banten in a market, but they never fail to observe their ritual obligations.
Temple festivals and private celebrations, such as weddings or tooth filing ceremonies, don't just provide food for the gods-the mortals also get their share. Offerings brought to a temple are first purified by the priest, who sprinkles them with holy water while chanting prayers. Once the "essence" has been consumed by the gods, the edible portions are enjoyed by the families who brought them. Any stale leftovers, less-tasty morsels and stray grains of rice are eagerly consumed by the dogs, chickens, wild birds or even ants. Nothing goes to waste.
Food art for the gods. A festival offering made from rice dough.
Everyone works together to prepare festival food.
Apart from temple offerings prepared for the gods, special ritual foods are cooked solely for human consumption on important occasions. These foods are generally complex and require an enormous amount of cooperative effort to prepare. The Balinese, who normally eat very little protein food with their daily rice, consume comparatively large amounts of meat (generally pork or, in the south of the island, turtle) during festivals. Such feasts are a time for eating communally, generally seated on a mat on the ground of the temple, or within the family compound.
For a small family celebration, the food is prepared by the family involved. Larger feasts involve the whole banjar, or local community, the work being supervised by a ritual cooking specialist, who is invariably a man. There is a strict division of labour, with men being responsible for butchering the pig or turtle, grating mountains of coconuts and grinding huge amounts of spices: all tasks which require considerable physical effort. The women perform the fiddly task of peeling and chopping the fresh seasonings, cooking the rice and preparing the vegetables.
The most famous festive dish is Lawar (recipe on page 98). This is basically the firm-textured parts of a pig or turtle cut into slivers, mixed with pounded raw meat and fresh blood, and combined with a range of vegetables, seasonings and sauces. To Western tastes, the number of fiery hot chillies that goes into the lawar makes it positively incendiary!
A day before the lawar is prepared, the mammoth task of peeling hundreds of shallots and cloves of garlic, and scraping turmeric, galangal and kencur roots has already begun, so that before dawn on the day of the festival, the preparation of the lawar can begin. A whole pig (generally raised at the back of the family compound) or a turtle is slaughtered, and some of the choicest meat is kept aside for chopping into a fine paste. The blood is also kept, mixed with lime juice to prevent it from coagulating. Another essential ingredient is a tough portion-if it is a turtle, it will be slivers of boiled cartilage, while in the case of a pig, the boiled ears-which is very finely shredded.
Unless the lawar is being prepared