Balinese Food. Vivienne Kruger
presented to the pantheon of gods, the deified ancestors, and both the good and evil spirits before being consumed by the family. A few grains of rice and salt and tiny pieces of food are placed on a small banana leaf square called a joten or saiban, and are offered daily to the invisible forces of the cosmos before people are allowed to eat. The saiban are put at the portal entry in front.
My great friend in Bali, Kasena, told me that “joten (Balinese) is an offering made to the ancestors’ spirits. After you cook the day’s food, you then offer what you cook—you share to the ancestors before you eat it. Joten (a banten, or gift to the gods) are put in many places, like the water jar. After you make these offerings, only then you can eat what you cook.” Called nitya (daily) yajna (holy sacrifice), this personal path of worship is always carried out at home. The preparation of saiban offerings and regular worship keep the Balinese god-conscious and their home holy. Saiban, or naivaidya, is performed every day without exception after cooking in the morning. It represents the daily gratitude of the Balinese for the given endowment, and is presented to the Creator before any food is consumed.
Depending on the size of the household, Balinese women prepare a tray full of 30–70 modest daily offerings called banten (or yadnya) saiban, banten nasi or banten sesajen. Two basic types of folded banten banana leaf offering baskets are used in this god-fearing, god-pleasing interval between cooking the food and eating it. Tangkih is a one-inch-wide, two-inch-long strip of banana leaf (daun pisang) folded over in the center to resemble a bow or a military medal, held together with a semat, a tiny, sharp, bamboo stick toothpick. The other similarly sized banana leaf model, celemik, appears as a round, three-sided, triangular mini-basket. There are also tiny, flat, one-inch-square banana leaf pieces containing a few freshly steamed grains of rice alone, or rice partnered with flowers, a tiny amount of the recently cooked food, and perhaps coffee. The Balinese also weave small, square, green coconut or banana leaf offering trays (ngedjot) holding a few grains of rice, a flower, salt and chili pepper, which they set on the ground to placate the evil spirits and negative forces that live there and haunt the house. If the Balinese drink tea, coffee or rice wine, they will also spill a little on the ground as an offering. These offerings (called sajeng or sajen) are set out to appease the bad spirits (sajeng comes from the word ajengan, which means food or rice). Sajeng offerings are prepared and arak or brem is also spilled on the ground.
The Balinese distribute these diverse, duality-driven domestic offerings to various supernaturally charged household shrines along with a prayer directed heavenwards. They place the offerings at particular locations determined by the priest: on the ground by the entrance gate, in the altar in the middle of the courtyard, in front of all the buildings in the compound, at the family temple, on the family shrines, in the backyard garden, in the sleeping quarters, at the source of water, and in the kitchen on both cooking ranges, the firewood rack, the mortar and pestle, the pan or bowl where the rice is kept (dedicated to the rice goddess Dewi Sri, who has blessed the food with prosperity), the pump, the well, the cover of the water jar, the cleaning broom, and in the special devotional kitchen areas.
The kitchen always has two small shrines or alters called sanggah. The one hanging on the wall is called a sanggah paon (kitchen) for Lord Brahma, the god of creation and the fire used to cook the rice, represented in the fireplace and oven. The shrine by the well is called a sang-gah sukan (holy water or spring water) for Lord Wisnu, the god of preservation and the water resident in a large water jar placed beside the oven. Food and rice are transformed into edible forms by fire and water (the five basic elements are air, fire, water, earth and ether) through the cooking process. The gods must be thanked. Only after this daily round of religious activities ends is the family allowed to savor breakfast and rejoice in the gift of food.
In the 1930s, Miguel Covarrubias described the traditional Balinese kitchen as “a simple roof of coarse thatch supported by four posts, with a bamboo platform at one end—the kitchen table—and a primitive mud-clay stove at the other.” The kitchen or paon (meaning “ashes”) is still a small, spare, utilitarian room with not much more than the basic wood-fired stove and a chopping bench. Most village kitchens continue to be built outdoors as a freestanding compound building out of traditional mud and red brick with a basic tiled or grass roof. They are also usually dark, blackened and dirty: the ceilings are covered with soot from years of burning traditional cooking fuels such as local wood, bamboo, kerosene and smoky coconut oil. Ritually considered to be one of the least pure areas of the family compound, the kitchen, along with the bathroom, pigsty, compost heap and rubbish dump, is always constructed in the least auspicious, southwest, kelod -facing corner of the property closest to the sea. Direction in Bali is reckoned on a kaja–kelod axis: kaja is mountainward and upward, in the direction of the magic mountain, Gunung Agung, and the gods, while kelod is downward and seaward, in the direction of the negative spirits and forces. The rustic Balinese kitchen is not a place in which to relax, entertain, socialize or feed guests. It is a functional production site to cook and prepare food offerings. More modern indoor kitchens within the dwelling or in a room or building within the compound are always characterized by plain, institutional-looking gray concrete walls and angular tiled counters and workspaces.
Basic cooking equipment and installations include a simple open wood-fired, mud-brick stove, and perhaps, in more modern homes, a second two-burner stove called a kompor, or a gas cooker to boil water and fry. The kompor (Dutch for stove) is powered by minyak tanah (motorbike oil), kerosene or petroleum. The kompor is also known as a kompor panci after the Dutch panci, an ordinary metal cooking pot with two handles which sits atop the kompor. The panci is used to steam rice or make soup. There will also be a large clay container or water basin for water (gebah), and a long, low, rectangular tiled chopping bench against the back wall. Over 90 percent of people living in the villages still have antiquated wood-fired stoves, evidenced in the piles of wooden logs in local kitchens. This traditional Balinese oven (tempat memasak) has three holes in the top—the Balinese believe that evil fortune will befall anyone who builds a stove with only two holes—and an opening underneath to burn the firewood. Rice is always cooked over the most powerful middle hole, with other dishes cooked on the side.
Producing steamed white rice (nasi kukus) is a laborious multi-step process in Bali where rice perfection is de rigueur. It employs an ingenious three-tiered rice steamer known as a dangdang, kukusan or kekeban. This is an hourglass-shaped gray sheet iron or aluminum pot designed by the Balinese to reflect the symbolic shape of the beloved rice goddess, Dewi Sri. The dangdang is filled up to the waist with water and placed on top of an iron brazier (kran). A large, loosely plaited, cone-shaped bamboo steamer called a kukusan or pengukusan fits like a funnel down into the mouth of the dangdang. To make steamed rice, fresh drinking water, which, as recently as the 1990s had to be carried home daily in an earthenware pot, bucket or empty plastic jug from a nearby spring, is brought to the boil in the dangdang. Thoroughly washed rice grains (beras) are then placed in the naturally vented cone-shaped bamboo kukusan. A special heavy clay bowl with a handle (kekeban or kekeb) is placed on top of the inverted “Southeast Asian rice farmer coolie hat” to cap the rising heat and steam. The rice is steamed for thirty minutes, transferred into a clay container to soak up a little hot water for twenty minutes, and then returned to the steamer for another thirty minutes. The traditional woven bamboo steaming basket adds a distinctive flavor and aroma to the finished rice. More modern households now use huge blackened pots or have substituted an electric rice cooker. The dangdang and kukusan, along with various large pots are frequently hung outside on a compound wall or from tree branches in the garden area above the family’s assorted collection of battered and burnt thin aluminium pots and pans. There will also be an inevitable plastic rack of brightly colored plastic tubs and mismatched plastic, woven bamboo and metal baskets, bowls and crockery.
Every traditional Balinese cook brandishes large, weighty, hand-crafted axe-like Balinese cleavers (belaka) for chopping and special knives for ceremonial food preparation. Used solely to process ritual ingredients, these have carved handles with powerful Hindu symbols etched on the blades. A thick round tree trunk cutting board (talenan), a bamboo rice basket (sok asi) used to store fresh steamed rice, a clay pot to steam small banana leaf-wrapped bundles of food and perhaps a coffee roasting pan are other essential Balinese utensils. Banana leaf squares or rectangles used for enclosing, rolling and folding food parcels and offerings to be steamed or grilled, are also a part of the kitchen, as are their substitutes,