Balinese
Cooking
Although
the daily meal was frugal, the Balinese seemed exceptionally well
fed, and people were always nibbling at some thing. They. were continually
eating at odd hours, buying strange-looking foods at public eating
booths, in the market, at the crossroads., and particularly at festivals
when the foodvendors did a rushing business in chopped mixtures,
peanuts., and bright pink drinks.
Every
day a young vendor came into the compound and invariably found many
customers. For five cents she served a large piece of delicious
roast chicken with a strong sauce, accompanied by a package of rice
that sold for an extra penny. Even small children, accustomed to
look out for themselves, bought their snacks from the street vendors,
waiting silently for their orders to be mashed and wrapped in neat
little packages of banana leaf, paying for them with the kepengs
they kept tied in their sashes.
Balinese
food is difficult for the palate of a Westerner. Besides being served
cold always, food is considered uneatable unless it is violently
flavoured with a crushed variety of pungent spices, aromatic roots
and leaves, nuts, onions, garlic, fermented fish paste, lemon juice,
grated coconut, and burning red peppers. It was so hot that it made
even me, a Mexican raised on chilipeppers, cry and break out in
beads of perspiration. But after the first shocks, and when we became
accustomed to Balinese flavours, we d.eveloped into Balinese gourmets
and soon started trying out strange new combinations. Silob Biang
understood our appreciation of their delicacies and often brought
Rose new dishes to taste. Babies are fed the peppery food as soon
as they are weaned and will not touch food without spices and peppers.
Most Europeans, used to beef and boiled potatoes, simply cannot
eat Balinese food, but on the other hand no Balinese of the average
class can be induced even to touch European food, which is nyam-nyam
to them - that is, " flat and tasteless."
A
Brahmanic priest we occasionally visited told us that under no circumstances
may Balinese eat the following: " human flesh, tigers, monkeys,
dogs, crocodiles, mice, snakes, frogs, certain poisonous fish, leeches,
stinging insects, crows, eagles, owls, and in general all birds
with moustaches "! We assured him nobody ate such things, but
he remarked that it was well to keep it in mind in anyway. Being
of the highest caste and a priest besides, he could not touch the
flesh of cows, bulls, and pork, eat in the streets or in the market,
drink alcohol, or even taste the, food from offerings from which
the essence had been consumed by the gods. Members of the high nobility
Brahmanas and Satrias are forbidden to eat beef, but many of the
lesser Gustis do not mind eating it.
Outside
of these prohibitions the common people eat everything that walks..
swims, flies, or crawls. Chicken, duck, pork~ and more rarely beef
and buffalo are the meats most commony eaten, but the people are
also fond of stranger foods such as dragon-flies, crickets, flying
ants, and the larvae of bees. Dragonflies were caught in a most
amusing manner; boys and girls wandered among the ricefields waving
long poles, the ends of which were smeared with a sticky sap. The
supposedly " rank conscious " dragon-flies must always
stand in the highest branches and all the boy had to do was to hold
the stick above the place where a fly stood; it flew onto the sticky
trid of the pole and was caught in the trap. Great numbers were
obtained in this curious manner, their wings taken off, and the
bodies fried crisp in coconut oil with spices and vegetables. Great
delicacies are also the scaled ant-eater (klesih), the flying fox
(a great fruit bat) , porcupines (landak) , large lizards (alu")
, wild boar, squids, rice, birds, from the glatek to the minute
petingan, which was eaten.bones and all, and all sorts of crayfish.
In every food-stand we saw small fried eels from the ricefields,
looking suspiciously like shrivelled baby snakes. Although dogs
are included in the klist of what not to eat, they aretaten in some
of the remote villages in Klungkung and. Gianyar, but the rest of
the Balinese will have, nothing to do with people of such disgusting
habits.
With
meat eaten only occasionally, the diet of the Balinese consists,
besides rice, corn, and sweet potato, of vegetables and fruits,
of which they have a great variety. Besides eggplant, papaya, coconut,
bananas, pineapples, mangoes; oranges, melons, peanuts, and so forth,
there are others unknown among us, such as the delicious breadfruit
(timbul), jackfruit (n2ngka), acacia leaves (twi) , greens (kangkung)
, edible ferns (pah) , and extraordinary fruits such as salak, a
pear-shaped fruit that grows on a palm,. tastes like pineapple,
and is covered by the most perfect imitation snakeskin; the- delicate
diambu", fragrant wani" the rambutan (a large sort of
grape inside of a hairy transparent pink skin), the famous mangosteen
(manggis). (for which a prize was offered by Queen Victoria to anyone
who found the. way to bring the fruit in good condition to England)
, and the stinking durian (duren in Bali) - A good deal has been
written both in favour of and against this spiky sort of custard
apple, whose putrid smell has been compared with every decaying
or, evil-smelling thing from goats to rancid. butter. The meat of
the idurien is a creamy custard, the indefinable. flavors, and texture
of which develops into a passion among those used to eating it.Most
Europeans, however, object to its offensive smell to such a degree
that they forbid their servants to bring durien within, a Aistance,
of their house. The fruits are eaten raw and the vegetables 4re',boiled
or fried after being, washed carefully in a special bowl. The Balinese
peel vegetables away and not towards them selves, as is done in
the West. Although the Balinese are not, fond of sweets, they make
a delicious dessert of coconut cream with cinnamon, bananas, or
breadfruit steamed in packages) of banana leaf.
We have seen that the women are reduced to the routine of cooking
the everyday meal, but when it com es to "preparing banquet
food, it is the men., is is universally the case, who are the great
chefs and who alone can prepare the festival dishes of roast. suckling
pig ( "be guling) and sea turtle ("penyu") , the
cooking of which requires the art of famous specialists. Few bandjar
enjoyed as great a reputation for fine cooking as Belaluan; there
the great banquet dishes were . prepared most often because the
bandjar was prosperous, and there lived famous cooks who were always
in great demand to officiateat feasts. People spoke with anticipation
when Pan Regog or Made directed the preparation of epicurean dishes
such as " turtle in four ways, " or the delicious sate
lembat.
On
the road coming from the seaport of Benua we often met men from
Belaluan staggering under the weight of a giant turtle flapping
its paddles helplessly in space, and then we knew they were preparing
for a feast. or days before the banquet of the bandjar four or five
stupefied turtles crawled under the platforms of the ba16 bandiar
awaiting the fateful moment when, in the middle of the night, the
kulkid would sound to call the men to the gruesome task of sacrificing
them. A sea-turtle possesses a strange reluctance to die and for
man~ hours after the shell is removed -and the flaps and head are
severed from the body, the viscera, continue to pulsate hysterically,
the bloody members twitch weirdly on the ground, and the head snaps
furiously. The blood of the turtle is carefully collected and thinned
with lime juice to prevent coagulation. By dawn the many cooks and
assistants are chopping the skin and meat with heavy chopping axes
(blakas) on sections of tree-trunks (talanan), are grating coconuts,
fanning fires, boiling or steaming great quantities of rice, or
mashing spices in clay dishes (tiobek) with wooden pestles (pengulakan)
.
The
indicated manners of preparing the turtle are the aforementioned
four styles:
lawar:
skin and flesh chopped fine and mixed with spices and raw blood;
getiok:
chopped meat with grated coconut and spices;
urab
gadang: same as above, but cooked in tamarind leaves (asam) ;
kirnan:
chopped meat and grated coconut cooked in coconut cream.
Coconut
(nyuh) is an essential element for fine Balinese cooking. Grated
coconut meat is mixed with everything, frying is done exclusively
in coconut oil, coconut water is the standard drink to refresh one's
guests, and a good deal of the food is cooked in rich coconut cream,
sant6n, made by squeezing the grated coconut over and over into
a little water until a heavy milk is obtained. Food containing coconut
does not keep and must be eaten the same day.
Santen
enters also into the composition of the other delicacy essential
to banquets, the sate lembat or leklat. This is a delicious paste
of turtle meat and spices, kneaded in coconut.cream, with which
the end of a thick bamboo stick is covered and which is then roasted
over charcoals. The sate lembat is presented with an equal number
of ordinary. sate, little pieces of meat the- size of dice strung
on bamboo sticks " en brochette " and roasted over the
coals, eaten dry or with a sauce. Rose was always poking around
where cooking was. going on, and to her I owe the following recipe
for preparing the sate lembat given to her by the Belaluan cooks,
who warned her, however, that it was a most difficult dish to prepare:
Take
a piece of ripe coconut with the hard brown skin between the shell
and the meat and roast it over the coals. The toasted skin is then
peeled off and ground in a mortar. Next prepare the sauce: red pepper,
garlic, and red onions browned in a frying-pan and then mixed with
black pepper, ginger, turmeric, nutmeg, cloves, sre (pungent fermented
fish paste) , isen, cekuh (aromatic roots resembling ginger), ketumbah,
ginten, and so forth, adding a little salt, all mashed together
with the toasted coconut skin, and fry the mixture until half done.
Take red turtle meat without fat, chop very fine, and add to the
sauce in a bowl, two and a half times as much meat as sauce. Add
one whole grated coconut and mix well with enough santen to obtain
a consistency that will adhere to the sticks, not too dry or too
wet. Knead for an hour and. a half as if making bread. Meantime
sticks of bamboo of about ten inches long by a half-inch thick should
be made ready and rounded at one end. Take a ball of the paste in
the fingers and cover the end of the stick with it, beginning at
the top and working down gradually, turning it all the time to give
it the proper shape, then roast over The sate can be made of pork
or chicken, but turtle remains the favourite of the Balinese of
Denpasar. Turtles are expensive (about twenty dollars for a good-sized
one), and ordinarily pork, chicken, or duck is the dish served at
more modest, feasts.
Theymay
be prepared in the form described above, in sates, lawar, getjok,
or simply split and roasted with a peppery sauce. Duck is stuffed
and steamed (bebek betutu) . Although the expression: " He
has to eat banana leaves " is used to give emphasis to someone
s extreme poverty, a delicious dish and a great delicacy is the
kekalan, made of tender shoots of banana leaves cooked in turtle
blood and lime juice. Balinese cooking attains its apoltheosis in
the preparation of the famous be guling, stuffed suckling pig roasted
on a spit, the recipe for which was also given to Rose by the Belaluan
cooks:
After
the pig has been killed, pour boiling water over it and scrape the
skin thoroughly with a sharp piece of coconut shell. Open the mouth
and scrape the tongue also. Cut a four-inch incision to insert the
hand and remove the viscera. Wash the inside of the pig carefully
with, cold water. Run a pointed stick through the mouth and tail
and stuff the pig with a mixture of: red cbili-pepper (lombok) bogaron,
tinke (nuts resembling ginger) garlic, cekuh (an aromatic root of
the ginger family) red onions tumeric (kunyit) ginger (jahe), salt
bogaron, tinke (nuts resembling ginger) cekuh (an aromatic root
of the ginger family) black pepper (meritia) srg (concentrated fish
paste) aromatic leaves (saladam or ulam) and ketumbah, a variety
of peppercorn.
Chop
all these ingredients fine, mixing them with coconut oil. Stuff
the pig with the mixture, placing inside a piece of coconut bark,
and then sew up the cut. To give the skin the proper rich brown
colour, bathe the pig,,before roasting, in tumeric crushed in water,
and rinse off the excen root. Make a big wood fire and place the
pig not directly over it, but towards one side. Forked branches
should support the -end of the -stick that serves as a spit, one
end of which is crooked to, be used as a crank by a manwho turns
the pig onstantly (guling means to turn) , while another man fans
the fire to direct the flame and smoke ' away from the pig. The
heat should be concentrated on the head and tail and not in the
middle so as not to crack the skin of the stomach.
After
a few hours of slow roasting the juiciest and most tender pork -is
obtained, flavoured by the fragrant spices, inside of a deliciously
brittle skin covered with a golden-brown glaze. Few dishes in the
world can be compared with a well-made be guling.
When
the food is ready and the guests are assem, bled, sitting in long
rows, they are served by the leading members of the bandjar and
their assistants, who circulate among them carrying trays with pyramids
of rice and little square dishes of palm leaf pinned together with
bits of bamboo, containing chopped mixtures, sat6, and - little
side dishes of fried beans (botor), bean sprouts with crushed peanuts,
parched grated coconuts dyed yellow with kunyit, and preserved salted
eggs., Others pour drinks; tuak (palm beer), brom a sweet sherry
made from fermented black rice, or more rarely arak, 'distilled
rice brandy. More frequently water alone is served- it is only old
men who are fond of alcoholic drinks, drinking, however, with moderation
and never becoming drunk. During our-,entire stay in Bali we never
saw a man really drunk, perhaps because the Balinese dread the sensation
of dizziness and confusion, of losing control over themselves.
|