Food of Bali. Wendy Hutton

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      Everyone works together to prepare festival food.

      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 (recipe on page 98). 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, galangal 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 (kecap manis), 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 crispy fried to make spicy sausages.