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Introduction

This book on the traditional cuisine of Bali bears witness to Bali’s time-honored village cuisine. The legendary beauty of Bali is mirrored in both its creative culinary arts and its food culture. Three million Balinese share the same small green jewel of an island and the same culinary worldview. Together, they embrace a deeply ingrained cultural and spiritual understanding of ancient, divinely ordained foods, food preparation methods, cooking skills and motivations. They also live in complete culinary and philosophical harmony with nature—with the island’s lava-enriched soil and with the flora and fauna, mysterious sea life and rare spice gifts that govern their exotic equatorial cuisine. The preparation of Balinese food is steeped in divine rituals and religious perfectionism. We, as curious Westerners, can only gape in awe as we struggle to learn how to eat and make food offerings on the island of the gods. Balinese Food breaks new ground in its study of Balinese culture and the extraordinary people of Bali, approached through the unique vehicle of their traditional cooking rites. Curious cooks elsewhere now have an unprecedented opportunity to absorb the anthropological, agricultural and practical village context in which traditional Balinese food is so painstakingly created.

The many faces and pleasures of Balinese food and drink spring to life in Balinese Food as it explores the social, cultural, ceremonial and religious implications of taking nourishment eight degrees south of the equator. As a paean to Balinese cooking culture and customs and its contribution to world food, we appreciate each dish in a unique spiritual context and on a grand historical scale. Balinese Food is divided into twenty-one chapters, each enriched by two or three easy-to-follow popular Balinese recipes. These step-by-step guides enable readers to recreate the unique food culture of Bali in the comfort of their own home. Two sections of color photographs enhance each chapter’s food themes, recipes and artistically prepared dishes.

Balinese Food celebrates the island’s culinary bounty set in the shadow of lava-packed volcanoes. Written from the perspective and worldview of the people of Bali, the book casts first light on the previously unexplored secrets of Bali’s virtually unknown cuisine, kitchen layout and apparatus and culinary mindset. Except for the ancient and sacred lontar texts, the Balinese have an oral rather than a written tradition of information preservation and transmission. It is therefore left to Westerners to record and archive Bali’s food heritage. Authentic traditional Balinese food is hard to find outside the villages because the secrets of the island’s cuisine, along with the preparation of the food itself, is steeped in religious ritual and devout Bali-Hindu belief. Three million peasants by day, three million artists by night, the Balinese carve and etch and paint their food into the rich spiritual shapes and divine colors of fragrant holy temples and imposing royal palaces. They build and they labor and they cook only to please and honor their gods.