Although the daily meal was frugal, the Balinese seemed exceptionally
well fed, and people were always nibbling at some thing. They
were continually eating at odd hours, buying strange-looking
foods at public eating booths, in the market, at the crossroads,
and particularly at festivals when the food vendors did a rushing
business in chopped mixtures, peanuts, and bright pink drinks.
Every day a young vendor came into the compound and invariably
found many customers. For a few thousands rupiahs she served
a large piece of delicious roast chicken with a strong sauce,
accompanied by a package of rice that sold for an extra hundred.
Even small children, accustomed to look out for themselves,
bought their snacks from the street vendors, waiting silently
for their orders to be mashed and wrapped in neat little packages
of banana leaf.
Balinese food is difficult for the palate of a Westerner. Besides
being served cold always, food is considered uneatable unless
it is violently flavored 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 a Mexican raised on the chili
peppers, cry and break out in beads of perspiration. But after
the first shocks, and when people became accustomed to Balinese
flavors, (likely after a lengthy stay in Bali) westerners would
developed into Balinese gourmets and soon started trying out
strange new combinations. 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."
Under no circumstances however 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
"! A Priest though, being of the highest caste 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 do not mind eating it.
Outside of these prohibitions the common people eat 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 rice fields waving long poles, the ends of which were smeared
with a sticky sap.
