Author tells of a life in Bali, with recipes

Author tells of a life in Bali, with recipes

Bruce Emond, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Amid the flurry of preparations for the opening of Janet De Neefe
and her husband Ketut's first restaurant, Lilies, in Ubud, Bali,
in 1987, an employee stepped forward with a sheet of paper in his
hand.

It was a local government edict about what should be served up
to foreign tourists -- potatoes, boiled food -- and what should
not ("the tourist does not like chili").

"Bland" was written in big letters across the top.

Today a resident of Bali for almost 20 years, the proprietor
of two successful restaurants, Indus, and Casa Luna, and an
instructor in Balinese cookery classes, Australian-born De Neefe
begs to differ when it comes to holding back on the spice shaker
in deference to supposedly more delicate Western palates.

"You can just knock out some of the smaller chilies if you
really have to. Just leave out the bird's-eye chilies, but don't
do anything to the ginger and fragrant spices," she said from her
home in Bali.

"Look at Thailand, they just cook it the way they like it."

De Neefe put down in writing her experiences in mastering
Balinese cuisine and as an expatriate adapting to life in a
different culture in 2003's Fragrant Rice
(Flamingo/HarperCollins).

There is the initial fear that it might be yet another of the
mortifying self-absorbed "stranger in a strange land" treatises,
an incredulous examination of the lack of mod cons in the
mythical land of gently swaying tropical palms and smiling but
inscrutable natives.

Thankfully, it is not the above but more along the lines of
the engaging works by expatriate artists and others from the
1930s: From her opening description of her arrival in Indonesia
as a teenager on a family holiday in 1974, De Neefe reveals a
natural, graceful writing style and an obvious love for her
adopted homeland (the book is subtitled "my continuing love
affair with Bali -- a taste of passion, marriage and food").

She wittily recounts her personal learning curve with cultural
blunders after she married Ketut in the early 1980s, but she also
provides eloquent descriptions of the culture of Bali and, of
course, her love for food. A respectful work, it never treat its
subject with an untoward, fawning reverence.

"I was always one of those kids who was in the kitchen, baking
Pavlovas," said De Neefe, whose mother was of Maltese descent. "I
think you grow up with a passion for food, it's in your blood.
Those were the days, when you went to your granny's house and the
food was wonderful, done from the heart, not from a packet."

Fragrant Rice is about a love of food, for sure, and includes
many recipes, but it could hardly be categorized as a basic how-
to cookbook.

"It's a bit of this, a bit of that," acknowledged De Neefe,
who is also one of the organizers of the Ubud Writers and Readers
Festival. "The thing was that I originally wanted to do a
cookbook. In 1985, I started to record recipes, and along the way
I started to realize that I was also delving into the culture. It
was like unraveling a mystery, and I realized in the process that
you can't write a cookbook without delving into the culture."

Teaching about cooking helped her mentally file her
experiences over the years.

"In cooking classes I would recount a story, and people would
say, 'You have to put that in the book as well'. Not just food,
but in making herbal poultices and medicine. So it grew into my
life in Bali, with recipes. It had a life of its own."

With careful use of spices such as garlic, ginger, chilies,
turmeric and coriander, but without as much coconut milk as in
other regional cuisines, Balinese food is a full-on experience
for culinary adventurers up to the task.

"It's slightly sharper, more pungent: It's like a kecak dance,
it's really got guts. There's no dilly-dallying, but it's vital,
like a shot of energy. But there are also the more subtle
dishes."

De Neefe said home was where the heart of Balinese cuisine was
really found.

"You should try it in a home, preferably in my home! And you
would have to get a granny to go out there," she said about
setting up Balinese restaurants in foreign countries.

She said her own palate had been fine tuned to the subtleties
of flavors over the years -- "I'm a bit of a pain to go out to
restaurants with now" -- and she remains captivated by the
venerated place of food in society, especially in sharing it with
others and the care that still goes into cooking in the home.

But she is not a stodgy purist, refusing to change with the
times. She believes Lilies was the first restaurant in Bali to
fuse local with Western cuisine and she encourages people to
experiment, but the process has to be handled with care.

"The danger is confusion. Some things just don't go together
classically, or some flavors, like fish and kencur (resurrection
lily). You can play around with ingredients as long as it is
delicate, but some things are best left alone. If I see a menu
with four or five different things in it, I think that it just
can't work."

She is heartened by the development in warung (sidewalk food
stalls) in Bali -- "it's still a warung, but a bit brighter and
cleaner" -- and that Indonesians are starting to appreciate their
food more.

"It's becoming more exciting all the time, and I think locals
are catering more for locals. It's growing as the locals come to
realize that they have a cuisine that is delicious. They're
realizing it's great food."

www.casalunabali.com