Too little meat on the bone

When Ubud resident Janet de Neefe’s cookbook landed with a great thud on my desk, I thought I was in for a feast.

Weighing in at more than 2 kilograms, Bali — the food of my island home is a 230 page cookbook built from De Neefe’s 30-year love affair with the cuisine of Bali and other islands across the Indonesian archipelago, according to the jacket flap.

The cover, with its intaglio silver title standing alongside a delicious looking Kintamani Fish Soup, had me salivating from the get go. It’s an impressive looking book.

However, my excitement began to wane as my hunger increased. There were 29 pages of photos and introductions to wade through before I hit the first recipe, “The Complete Spice Mix”, or Base genep that De Neefe writes is found in many Balinese dishes.

Another two pages of full-page photos and I found a couple of more spice bases. Nine more page turnings and I was into the various sambal, and so the book continues.

I was beginning to feel more like I was snacking as strolling along Bali’s backstreets and markets than actually feasting on this book. I also wondered just how I could use this as a cookbook in the kitchen.

Given there are so many pages to turn between recipes, after just a couple of recipe try outs, the photographs that dominate this book would be sticky with spices and sambal.

The choice of a matte finish paper throughout the book adds to this issue — while the matte looks elegant, it is difficult to wipe clean.

A quick read of the publisher, Plum from Pan Macmillan’s book blurb credits Mark Roper with the photographs.

Out of 230 pages, Roper’s full-page images of predominantly Balinese life take up a whopping 159, leaving just 71 pages for introductions to chapters and recipes.

Of his images, just 33 are of dishes presented in the recipes. Plum’s blurb credits food styling to Deborah Kaloper and food preparation to Kaloper and Toula Ploumidis.

De Neefe offers charming lead-ins to each recipe that are nice snippets of her life in Bali and her memories jogged by the different dishes represented in the book.

But there is just not enough meat on this bone. Is it a coffee table book, as Roper’s dominating images suggest,
or is it a cookbook?

Searching out recipes, I felt lost between the kitchen and the lounge — should I be at the kitchen bench flicking through recipes for dinner or sitting in an easy chair and exploring Bali’s farms and markets through the photographs?

The structure of the book adds to this schizophrenia; at the outset I thought perhaps the layout of ever-decreasing images and increasing recipes was a metaphor for the great feast promised by the book’s cover — the conversations over canapés leading into appetizers and more swiftly to entrées and mains.

But the rhythm of images to text does not follow this progression; it feels haphazard, a meal thrown together at the end of a busy day, rather than a considered exercise in gastronomy.

This said, de Neefe’s recipes are practical, well-written, clearly richly researched and easy to follow.

Her anecdotes and personal writing style in her introductions and recipe lead-ins are delightful. Well-written and informative also is the book’s glossary.

So it is a shame that the book itself is, as a cookbook, impractical, but perhaps better as a coffee table journey through Balinese foods.

Bali - The Food of My Island Home
Author: Janet de Neefe
Published by Pan Macmillan, Australia
230 pages