Vegetarian recipes from Vanuatu

In Vanuatu, meatless cooking is built on tubers and breadfruit, paired with coconut in every form: water, pressed cream, grated flesh. Yam and taro are grown in garden plots and stored for months, which makes them the standing reserve rather than a seasonal vegetable. Long cooking prevails: earth oven, banana leaves wrapped around the food, hot stones. Nalot sums up the repertoire, a cooked root pounded in a mortar with hot coconut cream until it becomes a smooth paste.

Seasonings are few and used with restraint: salt, lime, spring onion, ginger, sometimes a chilli. Flavour comes first from the cooking method and from how hard the coconut is pressed, which yields a thin liquid or a thick cream depending on how much water is added. Green leaves, taro, cassava and ferns, complete the plate in small amounts and are cooked separately. A meal is not divided into starter and main: people share a mass of starch, a side of leaves, and something sour or raw depending on what was gathered.