capung is only prepared and eaten for ceremonies. It is not an everyday village food. It is normally cooked for family ceremonies, not for temple ceremonies, such as a six-month baby ceremony for a son. In Nusa Lembongan, the dragonflies are caught with a net resembling a tennis racket. In Bali, the capung are caught in the sawah (lush rice fields), but in more arid Nusa Lembongan they are found in the cassava or corn fields. The weather varies in different parts of Bali. Nusa Lembongan is dry and hot and the only source of water is rain; there are no rivers, mountains or wet, irrigated rice fields as in Bali. Because there are different conditions, the food is different. The people of Nusa Lembongan only eat capung when the rainy season (musim hujan) is coming or in the rainy season itself when they can get the capung. The men catch them in the morning rather than at night.
Recipe courtesy of I Wayan Sudirna (Ceningan Island), a local Balinese chef at the Tanis Villas Resort, Nusa Lembongan. The village chief in Nusa Ceningan depends on Wayan to prepare the lawar for Balinese wedding parties. Two hundred men will come to a typical Nusa Lembongan wedding with many traveling back from Bali for the event. Wayan makes the food for the men while the women make the offerings for the gods. There is a different menu at wedding parties for single young men and for old married men. The young men will eat chicken curry, chicken nuggets, saté ayam, lamb (kambing) and suckling pig. The old men will eat pork or fish lawar, saté lilit (pork only) and ares. Members of the banjar will cook from 4 a.m. until 9 a.m. The men do the chopping (only the chopping, no grinding) until the ingredients smell and taste very good. The foods are cooked from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. or until ready. Dinner is usually held from 7 to 10 p.m. The local banjar also asks Wayan to make the required number of satay sticks for ceremonies. Cooking is still very traditional in Nusa Lembongan. In order to cook, the satay sticks rest on two stones suspended over a fire dug in a traditional sandpit. www.tanisvillas.com, December 2011.
1 tsp fresh turmeric
1 tsp fresh ginger
1 tsp fresh galangal
4 oz (120 g) shallots
2½ oz (60 g) garlic
2½ oz (60 g) small red chilies
¼ tsp black pepper
1¼ lb (600 g) dragonflies
¾ lb (350 g) young coconut
½ lb (250 g) jackfruit
4 kaffir lime leaves, sliced
Masoko chicken powder
brown sugar
Clean and wash the turmeric, ginger, galangal, shallots, garlic and small red chilies and chop until small. Fry the spices in coconut oil for 5 minutes.
Clean and cut the heads off the dragonflies and grill the bodies until brown.
Grill the whole young coconut on the fire, then hand-grate for 10 minutes.
Boil the jackfruit for 10 minutes, then chop until small. Put the jackfruit, grilled dragonflies and grated coconut into a bowl.
Fry the shallots until crispy along with the sliced kaffir lime leaf, Masoko chicken powder and brown sugar. Add to the bowl of jackfruit, dragonflies and grated coconut. Mix well.
Thread the dragonflies onto a satay stick, ten to a stick.
Serve the lawar with yellow rice.
CHAPTER TWO
The Balinese Kitchen: Hearth and Home
Traditional Balinese cuisine is home-based village 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
