Balinese Food — Vivienne Kruger

Vivienne Kruger's Balinese Food is the book of this list given wholly to a single island, and it takes its place in the chapter of authorities as the work on which the Balinese pages of this library rest. Bali is a Hindu island in a largely Muslim archipelago, and its table, built around the temple, the household compound and the ceremonial feast, is recorded here through a book that treats it as a subject in its own right rather than as a corner of Indonesian cooking at large.

Balinese Food is a long work on the island's cooking, and its subject is the whole of the Balinese table: the daily rice meal of the household, the food of the market and the warung, the offerings made for the gods and the dishes prepared for festivals and rites of passage. Its value to a reference library lies in that breadth. Where most general books on Indonesian cooking give Bali a handful of recipes, this one treats the island's cooking as a system with its own logic of occasion, season and community. The book is the natural authority for the ceremonial dishes that this library describes under Bali. The roast pig, babi guling, the minced seafood or meat on a skewer, sate lilit, and the raw shallot and lemongrass relish, sambal matah, belong to a table in which the preparation of food is a shared labour. The spice paste, the base genep, stands behind much of this cooking, and a reader turning to the Balinese entries of this book will find the paste, its parts and its uses set in the context of the feast rather than in the abstract. Kruger writes as an outside observer who has given long attention to the island, and the book should be read in that light: it is a study by an author of the work, not a compendium of household recipes handed down within a family. For the cook it offers an account of how a dish is understood in Bali, who prepares it, for what occasion and in what company. For the historian of the table it offers a reference against which the island's cooking can be compared with that of Java, Lombok and the eastern islands. Within the chapter of authorities, the book stands beside the regional and national works of Sri Owen, William Wongso, Eleanor Ford and Lara Lee. Those books range across the archipelago, and Balinese Food gives the depth that a survey cannot. Used together, they allow a Balinese dish to be read both as an island's own and as part of the wider Indonesian table, and this library draws on it in that way wherever the island's cooking is concerned.

The Balinese table that the book describes is built on fresh aromatics: shallot, garlic, ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemongrass, makrut lime and bird's-eye chilli, pounded into pastes and sambals and served with rice. The raw sambal matah, the grilled sate lilit and the roast pig of the feast show the island's taste for sharp, herbal and fragrant seasoning, and the book places each of these in the setting of the meal or ceremony at which it is eaten.