EVERYDAY LIFE IN BALI

BALINESE COOKING

The indicated manners of preparing the turtle are the aforementioned four styles:

Lawar : skin and flesh chopped fine and mixed with spices and raw blood;
Getjok : chopped meat with grated coconut and spices; urab gadang: same as above, but cooked in tamarind leaves (asam) ;
Kiman : chopped meat and grated coconut cooked in coconut cream.

Coconut (nyuh) is an essential element for fine Balinese cooking. Grated coconut meat is mixed with everything, frying is done exclusively in coconut oil, coconut water is the standard drink to fresh one's guests, and a good deal of the food is cooked in rich coconut cream, santen, made by squeezing the grated coconut over and over into a little water until a heavy milk is obtained. Food containing coconut does not keep and must be eaten the same day.

Santen enters also into the composition of the other delicacy essential to banquets, the sate lembat or leklat. This is a delicious paste of turtle meat and spices, kneaded in coconut cream, with which the end of a thick bamboo stick is covered and which is then roasted over charcoals. The sate lembat is presented with an equal number of ordinary sate, little pieces of meat the size of dice strung on bamboo sticks " en brochette " and roasted over the coals, eaten dry or with a sauce. Rose was always poking around where cooking was going on, and to her I owe the following recipe for preparing the sate lembat given to her by the Belaluan cooks, who warned her, however, that it was a most difficult dish to prepare.

Take a piece of ripe coconut with the hard brown skin between the shell and the meat and roast it over the coals. The toasted skin is then peeled off and ground in a mortar. Next prepare the sauce: red pepper, garlic, and red onions browned in a frying-pan and then mixed with black pepper, ginger, tumeric, nutmeg, cloves, sra (pungent fermented fish paste) , isen and tick-6h (aromatic roots resembling ginger) , ketumbah, ginten, and so forth, adding a little salt, all mashed together with the toasted coconut skin, and fry the mixture until half done.

Take red turtle meat without fat, chop very fine, and add to the sauce in a bowl, two and a half times as much meat as sauce. Add one whole grated coconut and mix well with enough santen to obtain a consistency that will adhere to the sticks, not too dry or too wet. Knead for an hour and a half as if making bread. Meantime sticks of bamboo of about ten inches long by a half-inch thick should be made ready and rounded at one end. Take a ball of the paste in the fingers and cover the end of the stick with it, beginning at the top and working down gradually, turning it all the time to give it the proper shape, then roast over the coals until done.

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