I’m spending most of the surf season (April through October) at Rote Island, in East Indonesia. I’ve been coming here every year for twenty years. The place has long been an underground surf spot, and has waxed and waned in favor, and seems to be waxing again. The main wave is soft, and is popular with beginning surfers, or snowboards who want to surf, and the like. There has been lots of human flotsam in the water – in other words, at times it’s been about the most crowded I’ve seen it. Still, it’s a beautiful place, much like Kuta was in the late sixties and early seventies when the first hippies and surfers started coming.
The main village here on Rote has a shack selling cold beer – the proprietors are thinking of expanding into a simple menu. This got me thinking about the first expat foods of Bali, served in the warungs, or local food stalls, to stoned hippies and starving surfers, intermingled with starving hippies and stoned surfers.
After the famous black rice pudding (a Balinese dish that surfers scarfed up for breakfast, and which these days can be hard to find), there was first the jaffle iron and the jaffle. (A jaffle is basically a toasted sandwich, with the bread slices pressed together in an iron). Very simple, and simply cooked over the flame of a stove, and in those days often served with a faint but piquant taste of kerosene. In addition to its culinary simplicity, there was available a wide variety of fillings, from egg and cheese*, to vegemite** and peanut butter. I do believe the best jaffles were to be had at Jenik’s warung at the end of the dusty lane to the beach, where now stands some night club with billboards of half-naked sexy dancers. (Jenik went on with her Australian husband to found Poppies Restaurant.)
However, the bread available was nothing ,pre than square slabs of inferior grade packaging material. Then brown bread appeared on the scene, supposedly more organic and all that, although I remember the first brown bread as being inferior grade packaging material with coloring.
Shortly after jaffles, yoghurt made its debut, served with fruit salad or hand-blended into smoothies. The only milk product that the Balinese enjoy is sweetened condensed milk – to a glassful of which they will add a dash of coffee – so I don’t know exactly how yoghurt was introduced. Probably by some wandering hippy, who may have had the necessary fermentation culture growing upon his body. Yoghurt was not really a warung food, but was mostly served in the first bamboo-hut style restaurants, such as Aleang’s.
Then a few Westerners, each one of whom had either married the village maiden or run off with her, simultaneously introduced the pizza oven (such as the one at Kedin’s on Gang Poppies I).*** Pizzas were a huge hit, for as everyone knows, pizza is the ultimate beer food, and beer is the ultimate surfer’s drink, and Bali by that time was the ultimate surfer’s paradise. Of course, the original cheese topping was still Kraft processed cheese, but the success of the pizza enterprise soon had shopkeepers importing real parmesan and mozzarella cheese (which actually melted instead of just…sitting…there…rather like an atomic-bomb proof foodstuff).
After a beer and a pizza and a beer, or possibly a beer and a bong and a beer, the surfer could stumble down to Rum Jungle, and a few other of the finer establishments, for apple pie and ice cream. The apple pie was, quite frankly, merely pie-ish and apple-ish, but it did have sugar in it, which complemented well the sugar in the ice cream (of a packaged variety).
And so on and so forth. Today on Bali, in various toney restaurants and fine food delis, one can find caviar, truffles, and, as my young son says, fooey grass.
*Kraft processed cheese in cans dominated. The stuff was chewable rubber, with cheese flavor added.
** Vegemite being putrid vegetable matter, the eating of which is akin to partaking of decomposed leaves gathered from the top of a ripening grave – I have heard tales of shipwrecked sailors dying of hunger after boiling up their leather belts, with unopened bottles of vegemite standing beside the leftover brass buckles — although I myself can take it in little doses at a time.
*** Remember this is a highly selective and quite unhistorical history.
