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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 server to honor 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, without fail, presented before the whole family eats their first meal of the day.

At more elaborate temple festivals, brilliantly dressed women form precessions 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 ensure that the women - whose task it is to prepare such offerings - always spend some part of the day holding 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, molding fresh rice-dough into figures, coloring rice cakes and assembling the appropriate offerings for each occasion. Women working outside the home may purchase their offerings from a specialist tukang banten in a market, but they never fail to observe their ritual obligations.

Temple festivals and private celebrations, such as weddings or tooth filling ceremonies, don’t just provide food for the gods - the mortals also get their share. Offerings brought to a temple are first purified by the priest, who sprinkles them with holy water while chanting prayers. Once the "essence" has been consumed by the gods, the edible portions are enjoyed by the families who fraught them. Any stale leftovers, less-tasty morsels and stray grains of rice are eagerly consumed by the dogs, chickens, wild birds or even ants. Nothing goes to waste.

Apart from temple offerings prepared for the gods, special ritual foods are cooked solely for human consumption on important occasions. These foods are generally complex and require and enormous amount of cooperative effort to prepare. The Balinese, who normally eat very little protein food with their daily rice, consume comparatively large amounts of meat (generally pork or, in the south of the island, turtle) during festival. Such feasts are a time for eating communally, generally seated on a mat on the ground of the temple, or within the family compound.

For a small family celebration, the food is prepared by the family involved. Larger feasts involve the whole banjar, or local community, the work being supervised by a ritual cooking specialist, who is invariably a man. There is a strict division of labor, with men being responsible for butchering the pig or turtle, grating mountains of coconuts and grinding huge amounts of spices: all task which require considerable physical effort. The women perform the fiddly task of peeling and chopping the fresh seasonings, cooking the rice and preparing the vebetables.

The most famous festive dish is lawar. This is basically the firm-textured part of a pig or turtle cut into slivers, mixed with pounded raw meat and fresh blood, and combined with a range of vegetables, seasonings and sauces. To Western tastes, the number of fiery hot chilies that goes into the lawar makes it positively incendiary!

A day before the lawar is prepared for the gods, special ritual foods are cooked solely for human consumption on important occasions. These foods are generally complex and require an prepare. The Balinese, who normally eat very little protein food with their daily rice, consume comparatively large amounts of meat (generally raised at the back of the family compound) or a turtle is slaughtered, and some of the choicest meat is kept aside for chopping into a fine paste. The blood is also kept, mixed with lime juice to prevent it from coagulating. Another essential ingredient is a tough portion - if it is a turtle, it will be slivers of boiled cartilage, while in the case of a pig, the boiled ears - which is very finely shredded.

Unless the lawar is being prepared for a huge number of people, there will be plenty of leftover meat, which is prepared in a number of different ways: cooked with sweet soy sauce, simmered in a spicy coconut milk gravy an pounded and mixed with grated coconut and spice paste to make satays. Scrappy bits of pork are chopped finely, seasoned and pocked into the reserved intestines and fried to make spicy sausages.

Various vegetables, such as green beans, leaves from the starfruit tree of young fern tips, young jackfruit and green papaya, are steamed and finely diced or grated. These are sot out in readiness for the mixing of the lawar, together with a seasoned coconut milk, sauce, bowls of finely chopped roots and chilies, roughly ground spices, slivers of palm sugar, wedges of fragrant kaffir lime, several types of chili-based sambal, a bowl of salt, piles of crisp fried shallots, a bowl of fresh blood and the shredded cartilage. This is joined by the coarsely shaved flesh of a coconut which has been roasted in the coals of the kitchen stove.

The task of mixing all these ingredients together to create the lawar is considered so specialized that either a ritual food specialist of the most senior male in the family compound is called in for the task. First into a huge enameled bowl goes a handful of the shaved coconut, then a splash of blood is worked in by hand, turning the coconut bright red, the color of Brahma (who is, along with Vishnu and Shiva, one of the three manifestations of the Hindu supreme being). One by one, other seasonings and ingredients are added and kneaded, creating four different types of lawar, each based on one of the four steamed vegetables.

The lawar is generally served on pieces of banana leaf (the original disposable plate), and if there is any left over after a small family celebration, it is wrapped in banana leaf and steamed so that, in the absence of refrigeration, it will keep fresh until the evening or following day.

Another restive favorite that is also available on market days is the famous spit-roasted pig, be guling celeng, better known by its Indonesia name, babi guling. This can be made with a very young suckling pig, but normally in Bali a moderately sized pig is stuffed with a mixture of chilies, fragrant roots, herbs and spices, its skin liberally anointed with crushed turmeric dissolved in water. The pig is lowly roasted over a fire until the skin turns crisp and golden, and the flesh becomes meltingly tender and delicately flavored by the stuffing. Babi guling is so delicious that it's not surprising that Balinese do not reserve it solely for festivals.

Copyright by The Food of Bali, Authentic Recipes from the Island of the Gods

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