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EVERYDAY LIFE IN BALI BALINESE COOKING Balinese food is difficult for the palate of a Westerner. Besides being served cold always, food is considered uneatable unless it is violently flavoured with a crushed variety of pungent spices, aromatic roots and leaves, nuts, onions, garlic, fermented fish paste, lemon juice, grated coconut, and burning red peppers. It was so hot that it made even me, a Mexican raised on chilipeppers, cry and break out in beads of perspiration. But after the first shocks, and when we became accustomed to Balinese flavours, we developed into Balinese gourmets and soon started trying out strange new combinations. Siloh Biang understood our appreciation of their delicacies and often brought Rose new dishes to taste. Babies are fed the peppery food as soon as they are weaned and will not touch food without spices and peppers. Most Europeans, used to beef and boiled potatoes, simply cannot eat Balinese food, but on the other hand no Balinese of the average class can be induced even to touch European food, which is nyam-nyam to them - that is, “ flat and tasteless.” A Brahmanic priest we occasionally visited told us that under no circumstances may Balinese eat the following: “ human flesh, tigers, monkeys, dogs, crocodiles, mice, snakes, frogs, certain poisonous fish, leeches, stinging insects, crows, eagles, owls, and in general all birds with moustaches “! We assured him nobody ate such things, but he remarked that it was well to keep it in mind anyway. Being of the highest caste and a priest besides, he could not touch the flesh of cows, bulls, and pork, eat in the streets or in the market, drink alcohol, or even taste the food from offerings from which the essence had been consumed by the gods. Members of the high nobility - Brahmanas and Satrias - are forbidden to eat beef, but many of the lesser Gustis do not mind eating it. Outside of these prohibitions the common people cat everything that walks, swims, flies, or crawls. Chicken, duck, pork, and more rarely beef and buffalo are the meats most commonly eaten, but the people are also fond of stranger foods such as dragon-flies, crickets, flying ants, and the larvae of bees. Dragonflies were caught in a most amusing manner; boys and girls wandered among the ricefields waving long poles, the ends of which were smeared with a sticky sap. The supposedly " rankconscious " dragon-flies must always stand in the highest branches and all the boy had to do was to hold the stick above the place where a fly stood; it flew onto the sticky end of the pole and was caught in the trap. |