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 to the expert grinding of the spices, from the winding of the satays to the mincing of the turtle and pork dishes, is strictly a male responsibility because it is physically strenuous work. Ritual food is traditionally prepared at night as it has to be ready in the morning for ceremonies which often begin at dawn. Scores of men from each household gather at the bale banjar armed with large cleaver-like Balinese knives (belaka) and cutting boards to perform a sacred procedure known as mebat or ngeracik basa, the chopping of all the ceremonial ingredients. The spices are presented to them in woven coconut leaf baskets. The teams of men sit crosslegged on the ground on coconut leaf mats in two long rows facing each other, their chopping boards in between. Clad in traditional sarongs and sashes and wearing large antique silver or gold rings embedded with magical stones and potent protective powers, they mix and grind piles of pre-chopped spices. The men energetically smash shallots and garlic cloves, crush spices, scrape galangal and turmeric roots and hand-grate and shred dozens of freshly roasted coconuts for three hours on the evening before a ceremony. The tektek-tek sound of their knives on the cutting boards can be heard far away. This sound is an inescapable part of Balinese village life. When the spices are prepared and ready, the men go home for a few hours of sleep and return at 1 a.m. to butcher and prepare the animal meat—a whole sea turtle (penyu) in southern Bali, ducks or pigs in other parts of the island. The men boil organ meats to be skewered and grilled and prepare blood soup and pork tartare from 3 to 5 a.m. A jug of arak is often passed around to enliven the proceedings. Women are only allowed to wash salad ingredients, fry onions and assist with other basic preparation chores. They also cook the rice, prepare vegetables, make coffee, tea and rice cake refreshments for guests and helpers, and plait hundreds of coconut leaf offerings.
The megibung ritual (megibung means having a meal together), a cultural feast of epic proportions, is still carried out in Bali, as largely unchanged customary practices continue to take precedence over modernity. The traditional megibung food feast originated in the eighteenth century during the time of the Karangasem kingdom in East Bali and is still widely observed in the villages. Beside being a tool of religious ritual and a communal gathering, the purpose of the megibung was also to ascertain how many troops were in the kingdom’s army at that time. This traditional event is now held in order to build togetherness and reinforce friendship and brotherhood within the community. At the gathering, all participants are considered equal—none is rich or poor and none is educated or uneducated. The megibung is carried out at meal times during the laborious group process of organizing and implementing temple ceremonies and during life cycle rituals such as weddings. The early morning (3–6 a.m.) mebat procedure is the entrance ticket for the subsequent male only megibung feast, which takes place at the banjar before every large temple festivity, around 6 a.m. Holy cooking responsibilities are taken very seriously. The mebat men conscientiously chop ingredients pre-dawn for all the ceremonial food, special community portions for family members and ritual banjar chefs, and the upcoming megibung participants.
The distinguishing feature of the megibung is that the men eat together from the same big plate (sela) and share the same dishes using their hands as utensils. They must consume all the food that is served. This normally consists of an array of traditional Balinese festival dishes (satay, vegetables, lawar, rice, etc.) placed in bamboo or banana leaf containers in the center of a group of five to eight (up to a maximum of ten) men seated on the ground on a communal bamboo mat. (One unit of gibungan typically consists of eight people sitting around the food.) If a hundred men attend the megibung, there will usually be twenty groups. Ancient protocols govern conduct during the megibung gathering. No one may try to start ahead of another and each participant takes his portion from in front of where he sits. The oldest participant is appointed the group coordinator. On the agreement of the participants, the coordinator invites the members to start and then determines when the gathering will be completed, usually when all the members have been satisfied. The coordinator also selects the next side dish to be added to the food tray. Generally, the first side dish served, equivalent to the first course, is selected from less tasty foods such as star fruit leaf, lawar and komoh, a thick soup made from chopped pork, fresh chicken or pig blood, and a little bit of water. Komoh only can be found in some areas in western and northern Bali when people celebrate Penampahan Galungan, one of Hindu Bali’s most auspicious days. When the side dishes run short or the participants get bored with them, it is time to serve more mouth-watering dishes, such as satay or meat.
The entire village comes together to facilitate Bali’s communal feasts. A grand ceremony may entail days or even weeks of cooking to prepare enough food for 700 or more people, necessitating the slaughter of several small pigs and the purchase of 110 pounds of spices! Each village or area has its own male ritual cooking specialist who directs and inspects the work. There is tremendous local variation and theological competition in the preparation of traditional ritual foods intended for the gods. When men from different regencies, villages or even adjacent banjar prepare ceremonial foods together, methodological differences and debates arise over such minutiae and practices as the correct order in which to add and mix the spices, vegetables, coconut and other lawar ingredients. When it comes to preparing ritual banquet food, the men are the ceremonial chefs and it is the men alone who can prepare the great festival dishes of roast sucking pig and sea turtle, the cooking of which requires the skilled, secret magical arts of famous specialists. Certain prosperous banjar have earned reputations for their superlative cooking, and their “famous cooks” are always in great demand island-wide to officiate at feasts. Locals eagerly anticipate the arrival of well-known ritual cooks to direct the preparation of epicurean masterpieces like saté lembat, babi guling and lawar. Keepers of the knowledge and philosophy of traditional religious cuisine, Bali’s men jealously guard these age-old secrets of sacred ritual cooking, only passing on the techniques and traditions to their own sons when they reach age sixteen.
Lawar (which means thinly sliced) is Bali’s most famous festival masterpiece. This style of cooking
