On a plane trip from Bali to Darwin, I was also fortunate to meet Balinese ecologist I Wayan Mudita, who teaches at the Faculty of Agriculture at Nusa Cendana University in Kupang, West Timor. He was kind enough to spend a great deal of time and effort helping me track down some of the most beautiful edible leaves in Bali: daluman, bulan baon and salam.
Additional thanks go to Ni Wayan Murni and Jonathan Copeland in Ubud, who blessed me with many original recipes; Urip Sudiasa and wonderful chef I Wayan Sudirna at the Tanis Villas in Nusa Lembongan; the Puri Lumbung Cottages in Munduk; Cok Oka Derana, a Balinese prince from Guwang, and my little sister Miss Era and her real sister Sri in Seririt, who gave me food, family recipes, cooking demonstrations and insight into the ancient, divine cooking on the spectacular island where the gods live.
Introduction
This book on the traditional cuisine of Bali bears witness to Bali’s time-honored village cuisine. The legendary beauty of Bali is mirrored in both its creative culinary arts and its food culture. Three million Balinese share the same small green jewel of an island and the same culinary worldview. Together, they embrace a deeply ingrained cultural and spiritual understanding of ancient, divinely ordained foods, food preparation methods, cooking skills and motivations. They also live in complete culinary and philosophical harmony with nature—with the island’s lava-enriched soil and with the flora and fauna, mysterious sea life and rare spice gifts that govern their exotic equatorial cuisine. The preparation of Balinese food is steeped in divine rituals and religious perfectionism. We, as curious Westerners, can only gape in awe as we struggle to learn how to eat and make food offerings on the island of the gods. Balinese Food breaks new ground in its study of Balinese culture and the extraordinary people of Bali, approached through the unique vehicle of their traditional cooking rites. Curious cooks elsewhere now have an unprecedented opportunity to absorb the anthropological, agricultural and practical village context in which traditional Balinese food is so painstakingly created.
The many faces and pleasures of Balinese food and drink spring to life in Balinese Food as it explores the social, cultural, ceremonial and religious implications of taking nourishment eight degrees south of the equator. As a paean to Balinese cooking culture and customs and its contribution to world food, we appreciate each dish in a unique spiritual context and on a grand historical scale. Balinese Food is divided into twenty-one chapters, each enriched by two or three easy-to-follow popular Balinese recipes. These step-by-step guides enable readers to recreate the unique food culture of Bali in the comfort of their own home. Two sections of color photographs enhance each chapter’s food themes, recipes and artistically prepared dishes.
Balinese Food celebrates the island’s culinary bounty set in the shadow of lava-packed volcanoes. Written from the perspective and worldview of the people of Bali, the book casts first light on the previously unexplored secrets of Bali’s virtually unknown cuisine, kitchen layout and apparatus and culinary mindset. Except for the ancient and sacred lontar texts, the Balinese have an oral rather than a written tradition of information preservation and transmission. It is therefore left to Westerners to record and archive Bali’s food heritage. Authentic traditional Balinese food is hard to find outside the villages because the secrets of the island’s cuisine, along with the preparation of the food itself, is steeped in religious ritual and devout Bali-Hindu belief. Three million peasants by day, three million artists by night, the Balinese carve and etch and paint their food into the rich spiritual shapes and divine colors of fragrant holy temples and imposing royal palaces. They build and they labor and they cook only to please and honor their gods.
CHAPTER ONE
Sacred Ceremonial Cuisine: Food of the Gods
Bali, the green jewel in the fiery heart of the Indonesian archipelago, is graced with fertile rice fields, rich volcanic soil, flourishing fruit trees, edible wild greens, plentiful fish and a natural supply of fragrant herbs and spices. Born and bred in equatorial abundance, Balinese food has evolved into a cuisine full of exotic ingredients, aromas, flavors and textures. It also plays a pivotal role in Balinese religion, ritual and society. The Balinese cook in order to eat as well as to honor, please and serve their gods. They incorporate their traditional values into their food. To understand Bali’s cuisine, one must appreciate the tripartite role of food as vital human sustenance, sacrificial offering to both respect the gods and appease the demons, and essential ritual component of Bali-Hindu religious ceremonies. As with everything else on Bali, food is inextricably intertwined with faith. Behind high family compound walls and on bale banjar (neighborhood meeting halls), entire communities make ceremonial quantities of colored rice, sweet rice cakes, meat-filled banana leaf offerings and regulation rows of skewered chicken satay offerings for the gods, who will absorb the sari or essence of this decorative consecrated feast held on sacred festival grounds. In the Bali-Hindu religion, the making of ceremonial food and offerings is, in itself, an act of worshipping and honoring the gods. Traditionally, the Balinese gain karma by preparing food and offerings for a large ceremony, such as a mass cremation, which normally took one month in the past and carried with it a one-month gain of good karma.
Balinese food is distinctive among the leading cuisines of the world. Dedicated to the gods, this time-consuming, almost completely manual culinary art is inextricably bound to the island’s Bali-Hindu religion, culture and community life. Rituals and ceremonies always escalate into large-scale ceremonial feasts. Bali’s most visual, color and taste sensations only appear at major celebrations as the ingredients are costly and an inordinate amount of preparation time is required. Exquisitely embellished ritual foods are prepared for life cycle rituals (ground-touching ceremonies, weddings, tooth filings and cremations), temple anniversaries and important religious holidays like Galungan-Kuningan. The family or community involved contributes materials and labor, and the dishes are cooperatively fabricated in the temple kitchen. Some dishes are prepared as religious offerings while others are to be shared and eaten communally afterwards by co-workers, friends, family and banjar (village association or hamlet) members who have helped with the hard labor. Special mini- rijistaafel platters with small portions of several foods, crowned with decorative woven bamboo basket covers or tutup, are prepared and served to VIP cokorda (Balinese royalty) in attendance. In accordance with local custom, meals for the other castes are presented on a round platter. Each tray artfully displays such treasures as nasi kuning (yellow rice with turmeric, peanut and spiced grated coconut) and vegetarian lawar (the traditional preparation of such vegetables as ferns or paku, egg and green beans mixed with coconut and spices).
Mass tooth filings may entail two months of preparation and the women of the compound have to prepare daily meals to sustain the armies of workers. Grand ceremonies turn the family kitchen into an ongoing neighborhood food production factory. Banana leaf-wrapped packets of food are also hand-delivered to distant family and friends following any major village ceremony, even in modern, bustling work-aday Kuta.
When the Mexican painter, traveler and amateur anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias’s seminal work, Island of Bali, was published in 1937, it ignited the world’s love affair with Bali. Covarrubias’s vivid impressions of a pre-modern, pre-tourist Bali included the first Western descriptions of traditional Balinese food and food culture. In his classic text, he described local feasts or banjar banquets and ceremonies in Bali in the 1930s: “When the food is ready and the guests are assembled, sitting in long rows, they are served by the leading members of the banjar and their assistants. They circulate among them carrying trays with pyramids of rice and little square palm leaf or banana leaf dishes pinned together with bits of bamboo. These holders contain chopped lawar mixtures, saté lembat, babi guling, bebek betutu, and little side dishes of fried winged beans (botor), bean sprouts with crushed peanuts, parched grated coconuts dyed yellow with kunyit (turmeric), and preserved salted eggs—always accompanied by tuak, arak, and brem.”
There is a strict gender division of ritual labor in Bali. The preparation of dishes that require sacrificial meats, from the slaughtering of the animals