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
an 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 festivals. 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 labour, with men being responsible
for butchering the pig or turtle, grating mountains of coconuts
and grinding huge amounts of spices: all tasks which require considerable
physical effort. The women perform the fiddly task of peeling and
chopping the fresh seasonings, cooking the rice and preparing the
vegetables.
The most famous festive dish is
lawar. This is basically the firm textured parts 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 chillies
that goes into the lawar makes it positively incendiary!
A
day before the lawar is prepared, the mammoth task
of peeling hundreds of shallots and cloves of garlic, and scraping
turmeric, laos and kencur roots has
already begun, so that before dawn on the day of the festival, the
preparation of the lawar can begin. A whole pig (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
and pounded and mixed with grated coconut and spice paste to make
satays. Scrappy bits of pork are chopped finely, seasoned and packed
into the reserved intestines and fried to make spicy sausages.
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