when youths reach puberty.)
Culinary skills are passed on from mother to daughter down the generations. Girls frequently undertake the daily task of peeling shallots and garlic, slicing and chopping seasonings, and grinding spice pastes with a mortar and pestle. They are also entrusted with cutting banana leaves and trimming them into shape so that they can be filled with food, folded and secured with a sliver of bamboo.
The complex ingredients for Balinese food and ritual offerings are all committed to memory. No Balinese woman ever needs to consult a cookbook for a Balinese recipe, although a modern woman might follow a recipe for dishes from other Indonesian regions.
Many families now have television sets, and most bale banjar, or community centres, also have a set where anyone can gather to watch programs in Indonesian, English or Balinese. Early evenings are also the time when the various cooperative organisations meet for discussions and planning, and there are also informal "drinking clubs," where the men meet over a glass of tuak (palm brew).
By about 9 pm, doors of the enclosure are closed against any malign spirits that may be wandering in the night, and the only lights to be seen in the village are those of twinkling fireflies.
At Home with Ibu Rani
A day in the life of a Balinese cook
Mangku Gerjar, an elderly priest from the village of Ubud in central Bali, lives with his extended family in a typical compound. The compound houses a total of thirteen people: he and his wife, Ibu Kawi, their three married sons, and their wives and children. Mangku Gerjar's youngest son, Nyoman Bahula, and his wife, Rani, are modern Balinese, having only two children, Rudi and Lies.
In the morning, once the children have gone to school, Ibu Rani sets off to market. (Ibu, a polite Indonesian term of address for a married woman, is not actually used among the Balinese, who have a very complex system of names.) By 7 am the market is already crowded. Rani bypasses mounds of brilliant flowers and coconut-leaf offering trays to select a few pounds of purple-skinned sweet potatoes. From piles of vivid leafy green vegetables, she picks out a couple of bundles of water spinach or kang kung Next into the shopping basket goes a paper twist of raw peanuts and a leaf-wrapped slab of fermented soybean cake (tempeh).
Rani pauses by some enamel basins full of fish in brine, changes her mind and settles for a bag of tiny, frantically wriggling eels caught in the rice fields, then goes to the meat stall and buys a piece of pork and a small plastic bag of fresh pig's blood.
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
