Balinese Food. Vivienne Kruger
cooking in contrast to its ceremonial culinary splendor. There is no written history of Balinese food. None of the complex ancient recipes for daily food or for extraordinary festival cuisine are copied down or recorded in cookbooks, nor are they mentioned in the sacred lontar inscriptions (old manuscripts originally written on lontar leaves from the Borassus, the Asian Palmyra palm). Collecting consistent, reproducible recipes from the Balinese is difficult. Like so many other traditions in Bali, cooking techniques and eating habits are passed down verbally by elders to their children and grandchildren who help in the kitchen. However, Indonesia has an old orally transmitted food culture because the pleasure of storytelling is entwined with the pleasure and effort of cooking and eating. Indonesians generally, including the Balinese, weave food tales into culinary myths and legends as they pass on the communal food ways of the group or village. Nourishment is a family secret and everything is learned from the old folks in the compound, including relatives and neighbors. Before the modern food era, people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. Balinese food culture, and the Balinese food environment, still has a great deal to say about what, how, why, when and how much the people of Bali should cook and eat.
Balinese cooking is labor-intensive. Spice pastes are blended in a stone mortar and pestle, meats are very finely minced, vegetables are cut up and progressively reduced to microscopic bits and fibers. The numerous ingredients are invariably mixed by hand, and most foods are double or even multiprocessed, sequentially boiled or steamed and then fried. Preparing Balinese food is a slow, passionate labor of love. From childhood, Balinese know how to slice, chop, mix and grind out recipes with great skill. They observe, learn and master the fine collaborative art of creating monumental spice pastes and sambal sauces, the twin culinary symbols of traditional Balinese cuisine. The Balinese do not follow set recipes or weigh, measure and gauge level teaspoons of ingredients. The hand is the standard measurement device in the Balinese kitchen. Wizened old grannies and calm, resolute fathers rule the Balinese kitchen, cooking by taste, hereditary custom, instinct and past experience. With accumulated years of culinary, religious and cultural wisdom, they are great everyday cooks. The pungent food is brought to life with gusto, enjoyment, community bonding and reverence for the task at hand.
Women cook the simple, routine daily meals in Bali, making full use of the array of spices, fruits, grains, fish and vegetables that nature has given them to work with. When humans eat, they use all of their senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) to judge how delicious a food is. The Balinese exalt and tease and celebrate every last one of their God-given senses while selecting and cooking their nourishment. Bali’s early morning markets are the dynamic focal point of local community life and the source of food in every Balinese village. The typical ibu (mother) leaves the house at 5 a.m. each morning, just after dawn to go to the market or to a more expensive, more convenient neighborhood warung, to buy fresh provisions for the day’s meals, offerings and ceremonies. The traditional village market, better known as the pasar tenten (tenten means wake up), remains a strong institution even in the midst of ever-encroaching modern supermarkets. The price of articles at village or traditional markets is much cheaper than at supermarkets, contingent, of course, on the good bargaining and social skills of the shopper. Although their stock is less complete, village markets can provide daily consumer goods. The Balinese also rely on local markets for necessities for rituals (selected chickens of a particular color, ducks and piglets) not found at modern markets. Another advantage of the daily village market is that it opens very early in the morning (3–5 a.m.). Its goods, still relatively fresh at 10 a.m., are often repurchased mid-morning by brokers to be sold at larger markets. Typical markets are often situated at the T-road junction of the local village. Buyers and sellers, mostly from local hamlets, congregate in a jumble of kiosks and sheds in a compact area. Most of the goods on sale consist of farming and garden commodities produced by the local community. In the front and middle areas, traders array themselves in a row to offer their wares, while in the rear spaces are reserved for the vendors of ducks, chickens and piglets.
Eager to finish shopping before 7 a.m., Balinese women go early when trading is most brisk (the markets sell out of goods and die down by 10 a.m.) to interact with friends, neighbors and regular sellers as they bargain for the day’s household necessities. A woman’s family will wake up to the comforting, familiar kitchen smells of rice steaming in the dangdang pot, smoke from the wood stove fire and chilies frying in oil. Aromatic fresh spices, roasted first in some village households, must also be ground every morning in a mortar and pestle to make a fresh spice paste. The traditional skill and knowledge of how to wield the batu base (cobek) is carefully passed down from mother to daughter. Indeed, in the past a prospective daughter-in-law’s worth was based on her ability to use the mortar and pestle. The wife cooks and completes the entire day’s food supply of rice and other dishes and leaves them on a table or inside a cupboard, covered with banana leaf squares, for family members to eat cold whenever they get hungry. There are no set meal times.
Banana leaf squares and wrappers are a necessary part of Balinese kitchen equipment. Like all Southeast Asians, the Balinese have developed sophisticated techniques of utilizing leaves to wrap a host of traditional dishes. Different leaves impart different flavors and aromas to food, and specific leaves are specially pre-prepared before they are used. There are many classic techniques of wrapping food with leaves to produce delicious and artistic edible treasures. The daily food may also be placed in a special basket called a kerenjang gantung, which is suspended from the ceiling of the kitchen. A kereneng is a bag or pouch made of pandanus leaves or a charcoal basket made of bamboo wicker-work, and a keranjang is a rough basket. Gantung means to hang or suspend, and antung-antung is a hanging suspended holder for a kris or for kitchen utensils. In modern Denpasar kitchens, food is placed on the kitchen table covered by a pretty pink or red plastic net basket called a tutup makan (food cover).
Young bamboo nodes and tubes as well as empty coconut shells are also used as food molds, storage vessels and food packaging. They also serve as containers for cooking food over fires and grills. The bungbung is a cylindrical tube made from cut bamboo, and is used to cook fish, chicken or pork, in fact any meat-based dish. Only young bamboo is used as old bamboo is too dry and can catch fire. Meat cooked in a bungbung has a unique taste and smell as it absorbs the scent of the bamboo. A complement of spices is added to the meat, put in one end of the tube with a little water so it will boil and the bungbung is closed with a leaf to keep the water inside. The size of the bamboo tube depends on the amount of meat being cooked. Usually, one segment of bamboo, 30 to 45 cm in length, is used. If there is a lot of meat, two segments may be used. A small fire is built and the bamboo tube placed on the ground, leaf-covered end upward, leaning on a slant against the wooden frame placed above the fire. The bungbung cannot be put directly in the fire because it will burn. As the meat cooks, it becomes “melting soft” because the water inside cannot escape. This is ancient pressure-cooking, Balinese village style! The cooking time depends on the fire. If the fire is good, one hour is enough, though typical cooking time using a bungbung is one to two hours. The Balinese will only do this for special occasions like Galungan or Kuningan when they have a lot of meat. The bungbung is not used for daily cooking as people are too busy and the method is complicated.
Nasi (steamed rice) campur (mixture) is the basic thrice daily meal on Bali. The Balinese eat the same food for each meal as the wife only cooks once a day. Food also varies very little from one day to the next. Bali’s ubiquitous plate of steamed white rice is inseparable from its cuisine. Bali’s rice-based culinary culture requires that fresh rice be cooked every single morning. Rice left overnight is deemed to be fit only as animal food. The women cook both ceremonial and ordinary household food with great care, at a low cooking heat, with attention to detail and inner joy. This reflects their essentially reverential culture: they always cook everything as if they are making offerings for the temple and for the gods. Cooking and culture are inseparably bound together on Bali; food preparation is intricately tied to Balinese religious beliefs and traditional village life. Cockfighting, marriage rituals, creation ceremonies and tooth filings are never far from the chef ’s mind in the Balinese kitchen. The spectacular pageantry of edible temple offerings takes birth in even the simplest of rural Balinese kitchens.
The Balinese show their respect and gratitude for this god-given abundance by sharing their food with and honoring the household spirits. After the morning pot of rice is cooked, symbolic portions